Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard CEO, is thinking of running for a California senate seat. The Republican party is all for it. So it's too bad she hates voting — even worse than other Silicon Valley CEOs.

Carly Fiorina, still draped in the silky folds of the $45 million golden parachute with which she left Hewlett-Packard in 2005, is planning a Senate run. No wonder she's been talking about "executive excess" lately.

We don't know if our tipster was drunk or if the event got relocated after we wrote about it, but Lead21's election-night viewing party, which we had heard was due to be held at the house of Facebook board member Peter Thiel, is now taking place at Jones, a sports bar and steakhouse in San Francisco near Thiel's Marina-district mansion. (The rationale for the locale: Jones has more televisions for watching the results.) Thiel is a major player in Lead21, and has hosted previous election-night parties for San Francisco's Republican minority, we're told, but he may skip this one because of his travel plans. Still, if you want to get a gander of guests of honor Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, the tech CEOs turned McCain advisors, show up at Jones starting at 5 p.m. The bar remains open to the public during the event, so you're not technically crashing. (Photo by AP/Dharapak)

Looks like we might not be hearing from Republican Party apparatchik Carly Fiorina about how awesome the party's presidential ticket is any time soon. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO was asked by a St. Louis radio host if she felt vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had the experience to run a major company like HP, and Fiorina replied "No, I don't. But you know what? That's not what she's running for." When she was later asked about that statement, she replied that presidential nominee John McCain wasn't capable of running a large company, either — but then neither is Democratic nominee Barack Obama or his running mate Joe Biden, in Fiorina's opinion. I, for one, appreciate Fiorina's optimistic assessment, since the current president promised to run the nation like a company back in 2000, and we all know how that turned out.

Okay, GOP. I was there the first time you lambasted the deep-rooted sexism pervading our media and culture to score political points with women. I was there the second and fourth and 59th time too! I didn't think it would work initially. Aren't Democrats the party of abortions and birth control and the Equal Rights Amendment? Yes, the Obama campaign's purported misogyny got Geraldine Ferraro steamed enough to threaten supporting John McCain, but surely that had to be an isolated case of post-menopausal hysteria! (Joke.) But then you unearthed so many disgruntled white Hillary supporters Fox News began to look like a Barnard reunion.* And the Sarah Palin nomination was brilliant! The media is still vomiting up all that bait you set. Yeah okay but, you are done for now. You just invoked the S-charge against the socialist babykilling maggots for the very last time! Because you can level it at pretty much anyone — me included yes! — but not freaking Tina Fey.

While waiting for former HP CEO Carly Fiorina to follow former eBay CEO Meg Whitman's speech with her own, MSNBC's Internet-only live video feed of the Republican National Convention caught this footage of Republican square-staters grooving to 1982's rockabilly hit, "Rock This Town," by The Stray Cats. The clip has a cautionary message for Obama's Facebook-generation supporters: When their candidate says he's "postpartisan," potential voters closing in on AARP membership clearly hear "postboomers."

A consolation prize for raising millions of dollars from their Fortune 500 rolodexes: Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina will speak at the Republican National Convention tonight. Both also made Republican presidential candidate John McCain's list of 20 potential vice presidential candidates, aides told the New York Times. Like McCain's real first choice, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, neither Whitman nor Fiorina would have satisfied the conservative Christian base quite like McCain's eventual choice, the pro-life, pro-guns governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Also, neither looks quite so much like the adorable Liz Lemon, am I right? Fiorina has already gone on TV to attack Obama for attacking Palin, but Whitman kind of sounds less jazzed by the Palin pick. "John McCain made the choice that's right for him,'' Whitman told reporters Tuesday.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)

Even as the New York Times staffs up its technology bureau, the Wall Street Journal is cutting back — at least on some of its higher-priced names. Among the names of layoff victims supplied by a tipster: Jason Fry, online Real Time columnist, and George Anders, author of Perfect Enough, the definitive business biography of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

At a fundraising lunch in Richmond, Virginia yesterday, John McCain joked, "Basically, I did a Google" when researching possible vice presidential candidates. One would hope a campaign with nine-figure funding would be able to hire people more familiar with Internet technology to do it for him, lest TechCrunch reconsider its endorsement. Just imagine the dirty tricks search-engine optimizers could pull!

American corporations that keep profits earned overseas can indefinitely keep that money out of the country in order to avoid paying American taxes. Former HP CEO and current John McCain campaign spokesperson Carly Fiorina says that gives companies an incentive to develop factories and jobs in markets abroad. Rather than close the loophole, Fiorina says it's better to lower the taxes. But then I have to ask, how will we pay for those wars overseas? I mean, besides slashing the social safety net and borrowing more money from China? The clip above is part of a longer interview with This Week with George Stephanopolous that ran yesterday morning. Her comments on McCain's environmental policy mirrored those made by the candidate at a whistle-stop in Oregon today.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who currently holds the title of "victory chair" of the Republican National Committee, sat down for an interview with HispanicBusiness magazine. She pretty much spoke to both sides of the H-1B visa question, saying that the country should welcome "smart, hard working people," but that McCain also believes in "retaining workers and revitalizing their ability to compete." More interestingly, when asked directly if she's interested in the position of vice president, she didn't shoot down the idea. "Ultimately, that will be up to John," she demurred. (Photo by AP/Charles Dharapak)

BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante has another interview outtake with former Hewlett-Packard board member and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Tom Perkins. In it, Perkins explains how he helped turn around HP. Here's the 100-word version of the harrowing tale of board committees, patent policies and microprocessors oh my!

Lucy Hood, Jamba CEO and president of Fox Mobile Entertainment, has quit. Though no future plans have been announced, we suspect she'd fit right in at the Fox Business Network, alongside Hewlett-Packard alum Carly Fiorina. Heck, she could make it an intracompany transfer. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has signed on to be a Fox Business Network contributor. According to the press release, Fiorina achieved the highest rate of innovation in company history. How they measure that metric is a mystery to us; after all, shortly after Fiorina left, the company engaged in some highly innovative leak-detection practices, leading to the resignation of several board members. But never mind that. The only stat that will likely matter to Fox's Joe-Sixpack audience, sadly, is how short her skirt is.

• 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]

By Scott Francis

• An ABC News writer and ex-HP employee says Carly Fiorina (photo from Freaking News) is a lucky bitch who screwed up HP in a quest for personal glory. [ABC News]

HP's former CEO and chairwoman told 60 Minutes last night, "When I get very angry, I get very quiet." And then she writes a book. Carly Fiorina is riding the HP scandal high, knowing she's a golden source, and each interview is secretly a pitch for her new memoir. Fiorina's story: When revealing news articles made it clear that someone on the board was leaking confidential info to the press, she put her foot down, but she didn't stomp through the law in the process.

Hewlett-Packard's former CEO reveals in her new memoir that she authorized the now-infamous investigation of boardroom leaks before Mark Hurd replaced her, according to the New York Times.