So she made it official.  Carly Fiorina has decided that she wants to run against Barbara Boxer for the Senate.

Let me be clear here.  I am not really a fan of Barbara Boxer.  I think she's a showboat instead of a workhorse, and I prefer people who shut up, do their jobs, and let the recognition come instead of trying to push their way into the spotlight.

And that may be why I can't stand Fiorina.

Let's start with the company where she first emerged as a big name, Lucent.  Remember them?  They were the part of AT&T where Bell Labs went after the company was broken up.  Yes, that Bell Labs, where things like fiber optics, the transitor, and cellular technology was invented.  That Bell Labs, which even the company which is shutting it down, Alcatel Lucent, says "made seminal scientific discoveries, created powerful new technologies, and built the world's most advanced and reliable networks."

Fiorina was an executive at Lucent during the dot com bubble.  Think back to those days, where we were seeing about two million jobs created every year, and companies were reporting record earnings and sales.  Lucent, not surprisingly, as a big player in the tech sector, reported strong earnings and sales.

Well, it turns out that some of those gains in sales and earnings were not legitimate.  The SEC filed a lawsuit against Lucent, in which it said "Lucent fraudulently and improperly recognized approximately $1.148 billion dollars of revenue and $470 million in pre-tax income in violation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (“GAAP”) during its fiscal year 2000 (October 1, 1999 to September 30, 2000). As a result, Lucent improperly overstated its pre-tax income for its fiscal year 2000 by 16 percent. $511 million of revenue and $91 million in pre-tax income were recognized prematurely in quarterly results during Lucent’s fiscal year 2000. The remaining $637 million in revenue and $379 million in pre-tax income should not have been recognized at all during Lucent’s fiscal year 2000. Lucent subsequently adjusted its results by $679 million in revenue prior to the filing of its Form 10-K for fiscal 2000."

It should be pointed out that Fiorina had left Lucent for HP during the time where the SEC said the improper revenue recognition took place.  However, the people who were there had answered to her before she left.  So we have an exec whose subordinates engaged in cooking the books Enron style.  Yes, she was gone by then.  But those were her people.

Lucent, by the way, is no more.  It merged with Alcatel and the new company, Alcatel Lucent, is not doing well.  That company also has decided to shut down the former Bell Labs basic research and focus only on research on things that can be readily turned into commercial products.  If that was the attitude throughout Bell Labs history, who knows what innovations we'd never have seen.

Fiorina, however, didn't suffer the fate of the company where she was an exec.  She left Lucent and went to HP.  And her signature move there was to merge HP with Compaq, which is considered one of the worst business decisions ever.  We're talking Edsel type decision making here. We're talking Wally Pipp taking himself out of a baseball game because he had a headache, letting some young guy named Gehrig take his spot bad.

When Fiorina moved into the CEO spot at HP, its share price was $52 a share.  When she was forced out after her disasterous move to acquire Compaq, it was trading at $21 a share, a drop of 60 percent.  As a reward for the destruction of billions in shareholder value, Fiorina was shown the door with a $42 million payout.

For her disasterous time at the helm of HP, Fiorina was named one of the 20 worst CEOs ever by Portfolio magazine.

I won't even get into her turn as the economic adviser for the McCain campaign last year.  Suffice it to say that you've got to question the judgement of anyone who would let her candidate say something as stupid as "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" at a time where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized, Lehman filed for chapter 11, and AIG had to take a government bailout.

That's the kind of record Fiorina has.  And she wants to be a Senator?

Since she's got a background in sales and marketing, I've got one thing to say to her.

No sale.