links for 2009-09-30

I saw this today on Twitter and really could not believe it. A spokesman and a paid one at that for California Republican Assemblyman and U.S. Senate candidate Chuck DeVore, Joshua Trevino, mocking fellow Republican Carly Fiorina for not attending this past weekend’s California GOP Convention in Indian Wells.

James Richardson has the FLAP.

Whoopi Goldberg is facing a fierce backlash after saying that film director Roman Polanski didn't commit "rape-rape" when he had unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.
Goldberg, star of The Color Purple and Sister Act, said: "I know it wasn't rape-rape. I think it was something else, but I don't believe it was rape-rape.

"He pled guilty to having sex with a minor and he went to jail, and when they let him out he said 'You know what, this guy's going to give me 100 years in jail. I'm not staying'. And that's why he left." Polanski was arrested in Zurich, Switzerland on Sunday and faces extradition to the United States. He fled the US in 1978 before being sentenced for the crime and has been pursued around the globe by prosecutors ever since.
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Of course, this is BS. If you do the crime, you have to serve the time.

When she filed with the IRS to open a “testing the waters” committee in August, Carly indicated she would be meeting with a variety of policy makers, local leaders and business owners from around the state. Since then she has met with many people and her visit to Fresno yesterday was a continuation of that effort.

“As you noted in your article last week, Carly is in her final weeks of radiation treatment, which is administered daily. Her schedule needs to accommodate those treatments and make allowances for the cumulative fatigue that occurs towards the end of the course of treatment. For that reason, the decision was made that she not attend the CRP convention this year but, should she run, Carly is looking forward to seeing folks at the February convention. In the meantime, she will continue to take day trips with a limited schedule, like she did in Fresno, in order to meet with people and hear first hand their concerns about our state and our country.

When John Edwards returned to North Carolina in the course of his long quest for the presidency, Andrew Young always met him at the airport in Edwards’s big black Chevy Tahoe. Young drove, and Edwards rode shotgun, silently raising his left hand whenever he wanted a Diet Coke, which Young would wordlessly supply.

When Edwards and his family arrived home, Young had made sure there was fresh milk in the fridge, a neatly trimmed lawn and neatly folded dry cleaning. When he arranged their vacation to Disney World in 2004, he naturally booked himself a ticket. And when Edwards’s mistress became pregnant, Young — at the cost of his reputation, his wife’s and his minister father’s — stepped forward to say the child was his.

Just a day after Attorney General Jerry Brown announced he was forming an exploratory committee for a possible gubernatorial run, declared Democratic candidate Gavin Newsom challenged Brown to 11 debates in every media market in the state.

"Our state is in need of real reform — we have a broken system that must be fixed," Newsom said in the news release. "And now that there are two candidates for governor, we owe the Democratic voters of California an opportunity to compare our visions and platforms side-by-side."

Newsom suggested ground rules in the debate invitation, which his campaign faxed to Brown, the news release said. That included suggesting that 10 of the debates focus on one topic each, with the 11th dealing with a range of topics.

The move would be an about-face for the company, which combined the printer and PC units before in 2005 when then-CEO Carly Fiorina was looking to boost the company's struggling PC business. The company's printer business was so successful that some were calling for the company to spinoff the division.

However, just five months after Hurd took over the HP helm after Fiorina's ouster by the board in 2005, he split them up again and appointed Bradley, former chief executive of PalmOne, as new leader of its personal systems group.

Last month, HP posted a 19 percent drop in profit for the third quarter of 2009, its third straight quarter of falling profit. For the quarter ended July 31, PCs accounted for $386 million in earnings, or 12 percent of HP's profits, while the printer business generated $960 million in earnings, or 30 percent of the company's profits.

Mr. Hurd's move would be a turnabout. H-P melded its printer and PC divisions once before, in 2005, when then-CEO Carly Fiorina was struggling to boost a barely-profitable PC division.
Ms. Fiorina folded the PC unit into the healthy printer business in hopes that Mr. Joshi, who was well-regarded within the company for sustaining growth in printers, could make the PC operations more efficient.

H-P's board fired Ms. Fiorina that same year. After Mr. Hurd took over, he separated the two divisions and hired Mr. Bradley to take over the PC business.

Over the following years, Mr. Bradley slashed costs and made H-P's PC supply chain more efficient, especially in the fast-growing market for consumer notebook PCs. Meanwhile, Mr. Joshi's printer division hasn't kept pace with H-P's growth. While the printer business remains H-P's most profitable division, efforts to boost sales with large-scale commercial printers and consumer photo printers haven't substantially increased the division's reven

Fiorina didn't avoid the Republican convention, and she came to the Fresno area on Monday for one reason: because she could.

"She has daily radiation treatments," Miller said. "She did not go to the convention because she had to be in Palo Alto for treatment every day — Friday, Saturday and Sunday."

But when Fiorina can, Miller said, she has been taking day trips, where she is meeting with donors and policy people, and learning about the issues.

The move by Hurd would mark a turnaround. In early 2005, HP's printer division was so successful that some analysts called on then-CEO Carly Fiorina to spin it off as a separate company. She, however, combined it with HP's struggling PC division. Later in the year, after HP's board ousted Fiorina and hired Hurd as her replacement, the new CEO reversed that decision and split printing and PCs into separate divisions.

Hurd, who completed his fourth year as HP CEO in April, has spent his tenure cutting operating costs in a bid to bolster profit. In September 2008, HP said it would cut about 24,600 jobs, or nearly 7.5% of its total work force, over the next three years as part of a restructuring program the company is going to implement while integrating the business of Electronic Data Systems that it acquired last year.
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Hurd going with Fiorina's plan?