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.

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.

If you want to see politicians who are simultaneously a) corrupt and b) really bad at it, look no farther than New York state, where elected Democrats are tarnishing every institution of disciplined corruption that the Gambino family worked for decades to establish.

To illustrate our point, here’s a list of all the corrupt Democrats that New York has had to endure in recent months… plus the corrupt Republicans they could learn from.

Corrupt Democrat	Act of Corruption	Republican Who Did It Better
Eliot Spitzer, ex-governor	Hard to believe this was 2 years ago.  Spitzer rode a wave of self-righteousness all the way to Washington, DC, where he washed up aboard The Mayflower… and then paid several thousand dollars for rough sex.	David Vitter, who one-ups Spitzer’s hypocrisy by trying to criminalize the very prostitution industry he patronized so faithfully.
David Paterson, current governor	Allegedly used state police to intimidate the victim of his wife-beating aide. And he forced the Yankees to give him free World Series tickets.	Rudy Giuliani knows more about exploiting the Yankees.  He also knows how to get way more out of thuggish police officers.
Hiram Monserrate, ex-State Senator	Beat the crap out of his live-in girlfriend.	Ousted Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA) beat the crap out of his live-in mistress.
Charlie Rangel, U.S. Representative	Despite chairing the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, he appears to not have declared a taxable asset since the Carter administration.	Ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who’s paying back taxes on lobbying gifts in the form of hand-made license plates.
Eric Massa, U.S. Representative	Propositioned a male aide in his Capitol Hill offices.	Actually, Massa even beats the Republicans in this category.  Not even Mark Foley was slick enough to use the excuse: “I’m just a salty old sailor.“

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?

And if there’s one thing that angers Ways and Means chairmen, it’s people who don’t report income, receive gifts without paying the proper tariffs, and generally cheat the tax system. That’s why Chairman Rangel cast his gaze over Congress and fired the man who most sullies the reputation of his committee: Charlie Rangel.

Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York announced on Wednesday that he would temporarily step down from his powerful post as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in an attempt to avert a politically bruising fight over permanently stripping the gavel from his hands.

In stripping Chairman Rangel of his duties, Chairman Rangel demonstrated he would have no tolerance for:

• Omitting hundreds of thousands of dollars in overseas vacation property from your tax returns.
• Omitting several million dollars in domestic assets from your tax returns.
• Attending lobbyist-funded junkets in the Caribbean, and neglecting to note them on your tax returns.

All of these are clear violations of federal law, leaving Chairman Rangel with no choice but to relieve Chairman Rangel of his duties.

With tax ethics properly addressed, Rangel can now turn his attention toward weeding out other Congressional impurities… including Congressmen who are overweight, Congressmen who wear their hair like Pat Riley, and Congressmen who talk like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny.

That’s easy enough.  Both men…

• Perform in public using props.
• Have appeared on Comedy Central.
• Must have been beaten mercilessly by their childhood companions.

But that’s not all!  If Cantor has his way, they’ll also have this in common: Neither man will have any of his ideas included in Barack Obama’s health care bill…

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor released a statement today attacking President Obama for including four Republican ideas in his new health care proposal, which will be released tomorrow…

“If the President simply adds a couple of Republican solutions to a trillion dollar health care package that the American people don’t support, it isn’t bipartisanship - it’s political cover.”

The nerve of President Obama!  When Cantor and his fellow Republicans were imploring him to include Republican submissions in a health care resolution, they didn’t actually mean he was supposed to include Republican submissions in a health care resolution!  What about the prop comedy??

See while Cantor the legislator might want conservative ideas included in a new health bill, Cantor the prop comedian will suffer in a bipartisan Washington.  Will he still get to perform that “southern accent” he spends countless hours perfecting in the mirror?  What about a new routine based around his favorite punchline– “the Democrat party”?  And what’s he going to do with that giant stack of paper he likes to mug with for cameras?

And most importantly… how can a struggling comedian afford to buy health care in this climate?

• 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.

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.

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.

We must now turn our sights to natural wonders– those landmarks created by God to set the stage for the Great Communicator’s 93-year visit from heaven from (1911-2004).

Thankfully, a San Francisco Bay-area Christian is on the case– and he’s eradicating Satan in the process!

Arthur Mijares never saw it coming when he filed the federal paperwork to change the name of Contra Costa County’s most famous landmark from Mt. Diablo to Mt. Reagan…

“I just happen to be an ordinary man that worships God,” Mijares said by way of explanation. “He gave me this task in my prayer time. I said, ‘Lord, they’re going to think I’m a loon.’”

But only because they’re in league with Satan, Arthur.  Judging from public comments, naming a San Francisco-area mountain for Reagan would be about as popular as renaming the Daytona Motor Speedway for Nancy Pelosi…

In less than a month, more than 80,000 people have joined a Facebook group called “People AGAINST Re-naming Mt. Diablo to Mt. Reagan!!” The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, which will vote on the name change Tuesday, has been flooded with e-mail; the heated response runs nine to one against the idea.

Although the Board won’t vote until this afternoon, it’s already clear  the Bay Area has cast its lot with the Devil, and the Reagan movement will have to pick a more auspicious locale for their Messiah’s resurrection.  (We suggest Grover Norquist’s jacuzzi.)

If it’s any solace to the pro-Reagan crowd, it may be impossible for Republicans to get public recognition in greater San Francisco.  In a town where George W. Bush can’t even get a sewage plant named after him, the time may have come to cut bait and just embrace Satan after all.