Fetch Me That Calculator

What do you suppose are the odds that Ms. Miller, the New York Times reporter incarcerated since early July for refusing to testify in the investigation of the infamous CIA agent outing, would with one phone call be sprung this week of weeks?

It may be just a coincidence that this phone call, apparently merely reaffirming a Scooter Libby permission/release granted a year ago, is happening now. As one who has been closely tracking Plamegate for over a year though, I would have to recuse myself as mightily conflicted on that question.

It is verrry interesssting that this jailbreak has occurred in such close conjunction to what seem to be some troubling legal difficulties for folks like DeLay, Frist, Abramoff, Safavian, etc., etc. I'm having to fight a serious earworm to the tune of "small world." And I know I am not the first to ponder how many degrees of Abramoff would be needed to ankle-link much of the inner circle here. Hopefully the succeeding months will be as entertaining and morale-boosting as this premier week. It would be terrific to have the surprise hit of the season be on the theme of corruption-busting!

NY Times reporter Judith Miller released from jail

WASHINGTON - Judith Miller, The New York Times reporter jailed since July 6 for refusing to identify a source, was released this afternoon following a telephone conversation with the alleged source - the vice president's chief of staff.

She is expected to testify before a grand jury in Washington, a source said, possibly as early as Friday.

Miller, whose incarceration sparked a national debate about the First Amendment and unnamed sources, spoke from jail two weeks ago with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, according to Libby's lawyer, Joseph Tate.

During that conversation, Libby reaffirmed that he had released Miller from a promise of confidentiality more than a year ago, Tate said. Miller had been concerned that a Libby's blanket waiver releasing any journalist might have been coerced.

"She wanted to hear it directly from Mr. Libby," Tate said. "And he assured her that it was voluntary."

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"Near-sighted Trust," Maybe?

I want to presume this is old and tawdry news for you. I mean as far as the overall concept of the Majority Leader seemingly trading on insider dope to gain a huge windfall from holdings in what he had repeatedly claimed was a blind trust. He made those claims of course because of his routine intimate involvement in law-making related to the very health-care industry that monopolized his portfolio. Some doubtless endangered little ma-and-pa element of what's left of our system of checks and balances apparently kept obnoxiously pressuring him to jettison his holdings in the family health-care business, but for a decade he refused.

Hey, when you have that Magic Touch, allowing diagnosis of Ms. Schiavo's condition via videotape, maybe your ego just gets a little shall we say malignant.

But really, there's lots to this story, and the collapse from six degrees remove from Abramoff to two seems imminent. Clips and links to recent updates below, but in summary, old Bill seems to be in a bit of a pickle here. Mainstream - oops, Corporate - Media are of course ducking and weaving, barely mentioning or not at all. He's one of their's and they've nearly always given him a free pass before - why bring up this unpleasant stuff? But this is the sort of thing that even without corpmedia coverage is bound to leave a stain, the sort that won't wash out by 2008. Actually I'm coming around to thinking that for once the deafening media silence might be a good thing. Bill, or Bob, or whatever we call him, seems the ideal candidate! Brings to mind a movie whose name escapes me, involving constantly propping up a cadaver.

How appropriate. Tag his toe, please.

So, in no particular order:

Frist Received Many Updates From Trustee

Blind trusts are designed to keep an arm's-length distance between federal officials and their investments, to avoid conflicts of interest. But documents show that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist knew quite a bit about his accounts from nearly two dozen letters from the trust administrators.

Frist, R-Tenn., received regular updates of transfers of assets to his blind trusts and sales of assets. He also was able to initiate a stock sale of a hospital chain founded by his family with perfect timing. Shortly after the sale this summer, the stock price dived.

A possible presidential contender in 2008, Frist now faces dual investigations by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission into his stock sales.

Sheldon Cohen, who was the trustee for Democrat Walter Mondale's blind trust when he was vice president, and drafted Democrat Lyndon Johnson's blind trust for Johnson's presidency, said that in the executive branch, "You don't tell them how it's composed." He said Frist, like any federal official, "absolves himself of conflict by not knowing what he owns."

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Documents on file with the Senate show the trustees for Frist and his immediate family wrote the senator nearly two dozen times between 2001 and July 2005.

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Will Frist Survive?

It's one thing to lie in politics. It's another to be caught in a lie. Bill Frist has been caught in a lie.

His political future is over. The immediate question is, can he survive as Majority Leader?

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It does seem that happenstance has been good to Senator Frist and HCA. Not long after he was chosen as Majority Leader, the Department of Justice abruptly ended a 10-year probe into how HCA defrauded the federal government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. The Justice Department, which surely had been pursuing federal criminal charges against HCA executives, (including Frist’s brother, Thomas Jr., HCA’s former chief executive and current board member) agreed to a $631 million settlement. In total, HCA paid $1.7 billion in fines to keep at least one Frist out of jail, making it the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history. [emphasis added]

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Network news broadcasts give scant coverage to Frist stock scandal

Despite having found the time to cover Kate Moss's purported cocaine use and to put one of its correspondents in a wind tunnel to demonstrate the effects of hurricane-force wind, ABC's World News Tonight has yet to mention the brewing scandal over the sale of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's (R-TN) stock in HCA Inc., the hospital chain founded by Frist's father, just two weeks before a bad earnings report caused the stock price to drop sharply. The nightly news broadcasts of CBS and NBC didn't do much more, both giving the story brief mentions on September 23.

Since September 19, when Congressional Quarterly quoted a Frist aide acknowledging that Frist had ordered the trustee of his blind trust to sell all of his, his wife's, and his children's HCA stock, the Associated Press picked up the story September 20, followed by The New York Times (September 21), The Washington Post (September 22), and the Los Angeles Times (September 24).

The AP reported on September 23 that federal prosecutors had served HCA with a subpoena for documents related to the sale of Frist's stock, and officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had contacted HCA to informally request the same documents. The AP also reported that Frist's office had been contacted by both the SEC and federal prosecutors.

Catching Frist in an apparent lie, The New York Times reported September 24 that in a statement to the National Journal two years ago, Frist had denied knowing whether his blind trust still held HCA stock, although Senate ethics rules require the manager of a blind trust to inform the owner if all of an asset is sold. Moreover, the AP reported September 24 that in a January 2003 television interview, Frist also denied knowing whether he owned HCA stock, although his trustee contacted him at least three times in 2002, informing him of transfers of HCA stock into his trust.

As of September 26, ABC's World News Tonight has yet to cover the Frist story, although the program devoted broadcast time on September 21 to reporting on model Kate Moss's purported cocaine use. On September 23, World News Tonight featured a segment in which ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper reported from inside a wind tunnel to demonstrate the effects of hurricane-force winds on the human body.

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