In an email to potential donors (below) first discussed by The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman, Fiorina's campaign manager touts a video (above) of her opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer talking to a general during congressional testimony. The brief conversation seems to have offended no one who was actually involved in it, but Fiorina's campaign calls the video "shocking" and said Boxer "disrespectfully demanded" to be called "senator." Her exact words:

Do me a favor, could you say 'senator' instead of 'm'aam?' It's just a thing. (Laughter.) I worked so hard to get that title. Thank you.

This "shocking" moment of terrible rudeness is obviously the most important issue in California right now. It's a good thing voters have a tough businesswoman like Fiorina to help them identify women who espouse feminist ideals only when it advances their own ego and political interests.

In Fiorina's official candidacy announcement, published in an op-ed in the Orange County Register, the Republican hopeful lays out some of her political positions, which include safeguarding gargantuan CEO paychecks from the government; unshackling agribusiness from environmental protections; and denying national health care to people who get cancer like Fiorina but who, unlike her, aren't rich or well insured (Fiorina does think these people should be able to go to twee "community clinics," though).

Fiorina also boldy writes, "Let's put every government budget and every government bill on the Internet for every citizen to see." Great idea, Carly! If this were 1996. The government already puts federal and proposed budgets online here and here, and the bills can be found here, among many other places. At home in California, the budget is here and the bills are here and here. Maybe you should ask your good friend John McCain to teach you a thing or two about the internet.

The bare-bones fundraising site has already attracted its own attack video (see below), a rant by the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins ("the most insufferable thing she's ever done in her life"), disbelief from political blogger Atrios, and on and on. At one point in the splash graphic, Fiorina appears to compare herself to a dog: "It's day & night... It's dogs & cats... It's good & bad... It's Carly vs [Democratic rival Barbara] Boxer."

It could be a trick: Get people talking about the terrible website, and you can sweep aside concerns over Fiorina's voting record (or lack thereof), clumsy campaign resumé fudging, Iranian trade connections and track record of offshoring jobs en masse. But recent history would seem to indicate she and her team are not that clever.

As the CEO of a publicly-traded company, tech stalwart Hewlett Packard, Fiorinia had a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for her shareholders. It takes immense hubris to think that can be reconciled with a future in public service. But then Silicon Valley is a famously arrogant place; that's why this election cycle has two political novices, Fiorina and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, trying to leverage corporate experience into elected office.

Fiorina's having a rough time of it. Her latest problem: defending herself against charges that HP made loads of money during her tenure by selling its products in Iran despite a U.S. trade embargo. "To her knowledge, during her tenure, HP never did business in Iran," Fiorina's campaign told the San Jose Mercury News.

Really? Fiorina had no idea? That's odd, since...

• Fiorina in 2003 noted Middle East sales were defying global trends, and, as the Merc notes, HP's partner there issued a press release saying sales topped $100 million and that "the seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market - Iran."
  
• Three of the three HP partners in the Middle East contacted by Christopher Stewart for a story in Portfolio magazine's August 2008 issue readily agreed to ship printers to Iran. Portfolio notified HP of the incidents, but the company didn't condemn them, instead refusing comment. Fiorina was gone as CEO at this point, but Portfolio noted that diversion of American products to Iran trough Dubai had been going strong for many years.
• HP had an office in the Dubai free-trade zones notorious for funneling American goods to Iran, Portfolio reported — so it had ample means to be aware of how its products were being shipped.
  
• After the SEC noticed the prevalance of HP products in Iran, it asked the company about the matter, and got back a letter from the company saying its Dutch subsidiary sold $120 million to Iran in 2008.
• Finally, in January 2009, HP severed ties with Redington Gulf, the distributor that had publicly bragged about its Iran trade six years earlier.
  
  
  

If Fiorina appears to have turned a blind eye to shipments of her products into Iran, that's what she was supposed to do, as CEO; as both the Merc and Portfolio note, the company most likely stayed on the legal — and profitable — side of a gray zone, a loophole in U.S. trade sanctions. But it will be tough to look patriotic while explaining that to voters. Fiorina had better hope her fellow Republicans continue to be more interested by the supposed dangers of universal health care and illegal immigration than by the War on Terror launched by their party's last president.

Fiorina is the deposed CEO of Hewlett Packard and has no real political experience; she raised some money for John McCain last year but prior to that rarely managed to even vote.

As a would-be Republican senate nominee, Fiorina needed to polish her resume, and did, via the entities "Fiorina Enterprises," of which she is CEO, and the "Fiorina Foundation," of which she claimed to be chairwoman. Fiorina's campaign website said Fiorina Enterprises was "focused on global economic development" and that Fiorina Foundation "enables corporations, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists alike to address some of the world's most challenging issues."

Except, as the San Francisco Chronicle found out, these large global behemoth world-changing organizations are not registered as corporations or charities. Whoops! Time to admit they don't really exist, except in Fiorina's imagination!

"Global" focused Fiorina Enterprises is actually a "small business" run by a "sole proprietor," according to a Fiorina campaign statement, while Fiorina Foundation is really called the Fiorina Family Foundation, and Fiorina's the only donor (says NBC Bay Area), so apparently this big important charity doesn't quite tie together "corporations" and "philanthropists alike," as implied.

By coming clean, Fiorina refutes charges she dodged tax laws. Explaining why the former sales chief felt the need to puff up her qualifications will be harder, and raise uncomfortable questions about what she's really accomplished since leaving HP. Other amateur politicians, take note.

Fiorina voted in just 5 of the 18 elections since 2000, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. That's even worse than former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, the Republican gubernatorial hopeful who, you'll recall, voted in 6 of 13 elections over five years (46 percent turnout versus 28 percent for Fiorina).

That's the trouble with dallying in politics: Your past apathy comes back to haunt you. Except maybe in open-minded California, where movie star Arnold Shwarzenegger failed to vote in five of 11 elections but still won election as governor a landslide. The question for Fiorina and Whitman is whether Californians have learned their lesson (probably not).

Fiorina's name has come up in politics even before she left HP. She was a fundraiser for McCain in last year's campaign, and a visible spokeswoman until she committed one gaffe too many. Now she seems to be plowing ahead with a campaign, despite a recent brush with breast cancer.

Polls show her faring poorly against incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer. And the newfound populist mood will prove hard for her to exploit, given her own pay record. (Her lukewarm proposal to put executive pay up to an annual shareholder vote seems unlikely to score points.) A Boxer fundraiser is already jumping on the news, sending the following email to supporters:

I just wanted to pass along some late-breaking news: According to a post this afternoon on the San Jose Mercury News website, during a
trip to Washington, DC on Tuesday, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina said she is "seriously considering" challenging Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010.

Fiorina reportedly received more than $150 million during her time at HP — including $21 million in severance pay after she left under fire — while laying off more than 25,000 employees as CEO, none of whom received the kind of golden parachute she did. Now she has millions of her own dollars to pour into a possible campaign against Barbara Boxer.

Another weak point for Fiorina: Her championing of visas for skilled workers at a think tank she just joined. America needs immigrant talent — but that's a tough issue to sell to voters.

Technically, Whitman and Fiorina's speeches tonight will focus on "prosperity" and McCain's economic plans for the country. But really, each is auditioning for her next job. Fiorina is said to be eying a cabinet post. Whitman may want to run for California governor in 2010. The Mercury News reports Whitman has already hired Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign strategist and a former adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger,. (Photo by AP/Dharapak)

Forget Googling. If we were campaign strategists, we'd be doing plenty of old-school dumpster diving and pretexting to make sure potential candidates hadn't, say, undergone shock therapy, developed a taste for hookers and blow, or conducted adulterous affairs with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Certainly explains why former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is a Republican Party adviser and possible McCain running mate, doesn't it? (Photo by AP/Charles Dharapak)

When I joined the board, the company was spending $5 billion a year on R&D and the board was oblivious. So we established this committee. It met the day before the board meetings and got into the strategic aspect of HP. Made it possible for Carly [Fiorina] and Mark [Hurd] to take risks. HP had had a very liberal technology licensing policy, actually paying out $100 million a year in royalties. At the first meeting of the technology committee we changed that. I insisted that every single license had to be signed by Fiorina. The second thing we did was get serious against Dell Direct. But the most important thing was we encouraged the company to redirect a lot of purchases of microprocessors to AMD from Intel.

• Man, this is not the New York Times's best weekend. Their latest gaffe: calling Peter Hirshberg, chairman of blog search company Technorati, the CEO. Poor tech blogger Om Malik was afraid CEO Dave Sifry had been ousted. But Sifry replied on Om's blog that he's still in charge. He tells me the mix-up was probably an innocent mistake by the Times; no one interviewed Sifry for the article. [GigaOM]
• The campaign blog to free imprisoned medical marijuana dispenser Sparky Rose says that his prosecutors claim he had "no previous work history prior to the pot club." Rose was a high-rolling dot-com founder — same thing? [Free Sparky]
• CNET launches a new title called Crave, because the world needs yet another gadget blog. [Crave]
• Who wins the battle of YouTube vs. MySpace, now that the latter is aggressively moving into online video and breaking YouTube vids embedded on MySpace? Google wins, of course. [BusinessWeek]
• NY Times columnist Joe Nocera says Carly Fiorina's memoir of her time heading Hewlett-Packard is a revisionist history — she lies about earnings, he says, and her book should be called "It's All About Me." [NY Times Select]
• Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner will pay all his journalists to run their own blogs — presumably so no one else leaves like B2 writer Om Malik to start their own media empire. [I Want Media]

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and recent author Carly Fiorina was lightly psychoanalyzed in front of a room of around 125 at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y Sunday night.

The interviewer/analyst, psychotherapist Dr. Gail Saltz, started at the beginning of Fiorina's life, making observations on her childhood before getting around to questions.

Fiorina remained graceful and composed throughout, even when subjected to questions like "Do you feel the peak of your life has occurred?" (This was quickly revised to a more accessible "What do you see coming?") She touched on interests in public interest, leadership, and business, but made no mention of her latest possible move, entering the political realm.

The audience questions showed more interest in inspiration than intrigue. There were no questions about pretexting, spying, or HP ex-chairwoman Patricia Dunn. She got a daytime-talk-show clapping round when she said, in reference to Fortune's "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" list, "I don't think, frankly, it helps women at all to be numbered one to fifty and never get to play with the guys."

Other noteworthy lines:

Dr. Saltz, following up Fiorina's discussion of the strip club incident [in which Fiorina, frustrated that her male co-workers went to a strip club, joined them]: "In academic medicine, a group of doctors don't meet at a strip club. I could be wrong, but I think it's less likely a group of lawyers meet at a strip club. So, what does that say about the business world?"

Fiorina, explaining why she didn't sue HP for wrongful dismissal: "Probably not my style...you know, in truth, I walked away with a lot of money."