THE EARMARK

California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina has one major selling point for anyone who stays awake throughout her campaign rallies: She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard 5 years ago.

And there’s plenty of proof for that claim.  Just go find a back-issue of Portfolio magazine— specifically the one listing the 20 worst CEOs of all time— and you’ll see Fiorina prominently profiled.

Or you can ask…

• HP shareholders whose share values tanked under Fiorina.
• Compaq employees that got hosed in Fiorina’s failed merger.
• The board of directors that fired Fiorina in the wake of her hefty personal bonuses and middling performance.

They all remember her.

But maybe you should just ask Arianna Packard, granddaughter of the company founder, who can definitely attest that Fiorina worked for HP.  In the sense that she nearly destroyed the entire operation…

“I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded. So, allow me to disillusion you of a few of your stated reasons for supporting her,” Packard wrote.

“Most business commentators consider Fiorina’s tenure at HP to be a disaster,” Packard continued. “The stock price dropped by 50% only to rally 10% on the announcement of her firing. She fired 28,000 people before she herself was fired, departing with the 21 million dollar golden parachute that is financing her campaign.”

So if Fiorina’s tenure at Hewlett-Packard was a disaster and got her unceremoniously fired, why on Earth is she going around touting her time there as her top qualification to be a United States senator?

We’re not sure, but it might have something to do with the fact that her #2 qualification is getting unceremoniously fired by the McCain campaign in 2008.

Disgraced Representative Eric Massa (D-NY) only has a few hours left in his House term, which means he’d better hustle if he hopes to alienate all of Congress by day’s end.

Fortunately, Massa is off to a good start upon explaining that a male aide’s sexual harassment allegation was set up by the Democrats because Massa wanted to oppose the health care bill…

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill, and now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

Massa began the dot-connecting process for us all when he attempted to explain his sexual harassment to a local New York radio station.  His primary points are:

• The main harassment took place when everyone was drunk.
• His wife was there, but only she wasn’t, because she, um, had… the stomach flu.  Yeah…
• First he sexually harassed some women, so remember that before you call him gay.
• The whole thing is actually Steny Hoyer’s fault.
• He’s had cancer, alright?

Roll Call has the full summary of the interview, and if you bother to read the whole thing, let us know.  Particularly if, somewhere in it, Massa starts calling himself “salty” again.

A year ago, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Congressional Country Club) rode back into her native Texas vowing to take the Governor’s office away from her nemesis and fellow Republican, incumbent Rick Perry.  After five terms in the Senate, she had much to prove to voters skeptical that she had gone soft while in Washington.  Well, hundreds of stock shows, chili cook-offs, and hog-slaughterings later, Hutchison’s hard work finally paid off yesterday.

With a massive defeat in the primary.

Having been embarrassed by an opponent whose main campaign tactic was to dispatch Ted Nugent to threaten to kill voters, Hutchison now has no choice but to fade away into retirement.  Because after all, she resigned her Senate seat in order to enter the governor’s race.

Oh wait, she didn’t! Turns out she accidentally forgot to resign back in November, conveniently leaving her with nearly three years left in her term. So she has the option to return to her beloved Washington, exchanging her bolo tie for a power suit and her Old El Paso salsa for an understated Bernaise.  Or she can do the right thing: fulfill her promise, bow out, and allow her successor to be appointed by … Governor Rick Perry.

Did somebody say Senator Nuge?

For those of you who keep letting unwatched CSPAN-2 broadcasts pile up in your DVR, we’ll now fill you in on the past week of Senate proceedings:

• Thursday: Irascible Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) stages a one-man legislative blockade, thus eliminating 400,00 people’s unemployment benefits, choking off COBRA payments, halting hundreds of federal transportation projects, cutting doctors’ Medicare payments by 21%, and furloughing 2,000 federal employees.
• Friday: Bunning tells furloughed workers “tough shit” and then names the true casualty of his blockade: His having to miss a basketball game on TV.
• Monday: Pressed by reporters, Bunning gives them the finger and gets territorial about an elevator.
• Meanwhile, the GOP’s national image takes a hit, and their “party of no” reputation is reinforced.
• Tuesday: Satisfied, Bunning drops his objection.

The way we see it, this was never about jobs.  Rather, Bunning’s main objective all along was to make the GOP squirm.

That’s because the Kentucky reactionary blames Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders for forcing him from his 2010 reelection campaign.  (Although some would say his horrible poll numbers and advanced dementia also contributed.)  And since suing the Republican Party wasn’t viable revenge for Bunning, trashing our fragile economy was the next best option.

Now McConnell and company must absorb notoriety for Bunning’s mess while trying to mount a powerful comeback in the November election.  And that’s just fine by Bunning, who has nothing left to do but relax and count the days until he leaves the Senate for greener pastures…

Specifically Green Pastures Nursing Home.

It takes a big man to read the proverbial writing on the wall, telling him his political career is over.  (It’s particularly impressive when that man is blind.)

That’s why David Paterson should be celebrated, not chastised, for dropping out of New York’s gubernatorial race, and giving his 26% of the vote back to the people.

And no, that isn’t a typo.  The standing governor of New York state was polling at 26% in a hypothetical November match-up.  That’s worse than the hooker-craving blowhard that preceded him.

But now that 26% is freed up for better use.  It could go to likely challenger Andrew Cuomo or to New York’s favorite token Republican, Rick Lazio.  Or it could go to a write-in campaign for the millions of New Yorkers that are more popular than Paterson, such as Ed Koch, Batman or the Times Square Naked Cowboy.

And with the race behind him, Paterson can also take that hefty $3 million he had in his campaign war chest, and re-appropriate it toward something more viable than the governorship.

We suggest a two-bedroom walk-up in Manhattan.

There’s something about the sex lives of Nevada politicians that recalls a traffic accident you just can’t look away from.  And no, we’re not talking about Sen. Harry Reid enjoying a little missionary position with the missus.  (We’ll pause 20 minutes for you to flush that horrible image out of your mind.)

Here at the Earmark, we’re much more interested in Nevada’s philandering set.  And that group is chaired my Sen. John Ensign (R-Christian Group House), and the state’s governor, Cheatin’ Jim Gibbons.

Ensign, who has a taste for his staffers’ wives, will never get in trouble so long as his parents are around to bail him out.  Contrast that with Gibbons, who dates everyone from Playmates to podiatrists’ wives, and mostly just needs someone to let him into his governor’s mansion.

But while Senator Ensign has recently shifted his focus from getting laid to sabotaging healthcare, Governor Gibbons continues to embarrass himself in the field of sex.  Here’s the latest:

• This week, Gibbons lied about bringing a mistress with him on a recent visit to Washington, even though video existed of the two of them together on the trip.
• He also said with a straight face that he hasn’t had sex since 1995, despite conducting public extramarital affairs with at least 3 separate women during that time.

If Gibbons has really been cut off since 1995, he’s the most inept gigolo since Bill O’Reilly.  That’s because there’s a trail of 867 text messages indicating that Gibbons was certainly trying to get laid sometime in the last 14 years.  He also propositioned a cocktail waitress for a night of non-consensual sex in a parking garage, although apparently that was also a failure.

If you find it ironic that the governor of the union’s most brothel-intensive state has been abstinent since the first Clinton administration, we’d argue this sort of thing happens everywhere.  For instance, Vermont has become the most reliably liberal state in the US, but they’re governed by a Republican. And New Jersey is the eggplant capital of the world, but their governor looks like he eats nothing but bacon cheeseburgers.

And also, Gibbons is lying.

They said it couldn’t be done.  “They” were either wrong or didn’t know there was an election last week.

Dean Murray, an organizer for the Tea Party movement and winner of a special election, takes office today in New York’s state assembly.

Now some of you hear “tea party” and think of a bunch of fringe activists hyperventilating into bullhorns on state house lawns, pausing only to force their elected leaders to recite the pledge of allegiance. But starting today, the movement’s members can finally shed that image and let us see them for what they really are:

Republicans.

Today is also a big day for the New York legislature, which is excited about any news that doesn’t involve domestic violence by its members.  And who could forget Murray himself– soon about to experience life on the other side of an unruly mob.

But most importantly, this inauguration cracks the door to every fringe movement that wants a voice in government.  With the Tea Party now ensconced in New York’s 3rd district, who on Earth could deny power to…

• Incompetent corporate executives?
• Plumbers making over $250,000 a year?
• Robots?
• The legally insane?

We say bring them all on board.  It doesn’t matter who they are or how little they know about government.  In fact, the less experience the better!  It’s well worth it to watch novice after novice leapfrog Alan Keyes in the quest to actually win an election.

We here at The Earmark are delighted to see Joe “The Plumber” The Plumber back in the news again.  It seems like years since we were reporting on:

• His B. Dalton-packing book tour.
• His ground-breaking research in the field of Early Republic scholarship.
• His hard-charging journalistic career.
• His narrow escape from Barack Obama’s Death Panel.
• And who could forget … his country music career.

Well, now he’s tossing us some more low-hanging fruit in the form of an angry diatribe against John McCain!  Yes, the same John McCain who plucked him from YouTube obscurity and made him the iconic embodiment of the typical American working man (who apparently makes over $250,000 a year).

Here’s Joe the Plumber on his benefactor:

John McCain is no public servant. … I don’t owe him shit.  He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.

We’re not 100% sure why Joe is so mad at McCain - perhaps at some campaign event, the candidate got upset and threatened to give him a “switchin’.”  But we do know the best way to get revenge: meet McCain on his own turf.

By running for Congress.