Senator Frist Clears the Air

Bill Frist, the straight-talking Republican Senate Majority Leader, has spoken out again in an effort to simply clarify the actual facts regarding his sale of a pile of HCA stock out of his blind trust weeks before the company missed its earning target and the stock plunged.

Well, frist, I mean first, we should have said "blind trust" in the first paragraph, because Bill pointed out that "what America thinks is a blind trust, it may be something different . . . " Having cleared that up he went on to the core of the matter.

He said he misspoke in 2003 when he said that because it was held in a ``blind'' trust . . . ``as far as I know, I own no HCA stock.'' He said he should have made it clear he didn't know . . . ``how much stock of any particular entity'' the trust held.

You can easily see how "I don't know how much of any stock I own" differs from "I don't think I own any HCA stock". If only he had said so in the frist, sorry, first place ! I can see the investigators in the Securities and Exchange Commission throwing down their pens and crying "There goes the perjury count !"

Like Bill, we don't know what America thinks a "blind trust" is, but we know what we think. We think it's a place where a serving politician puts his assets so he can't be tempted to use his power to benefit himself. As if, for instance, HCA owned a chain of hospitals and Bill owned several million dollars (actually between five and twenty-five million dollars) worth of its stock and might be tempted to vote on things like, say, medicare reform that might benefit him personally. Oops. Wrong hypothetical. Those are the actual facts. Well, you get the picture.

No, says Bill, he didn't get any "nods or winks" before he sold his stock (that would be the basis for the insider trading charges that are being investigated). The person who might have given such nods and winks would be the fellow running HCA who is, of course, Bill's brother and, of course, Bill's denial doesn't get us far as the person receiving the n and w's would likely be the "blind trustee" whose vision may have been better that the law permits.

Question for class discussion: If you have your assets in a blind trust and your "blind trustee" receives illegal insider information and sells stock making you a bundle and the investigators can't prove you personally received the information, can you still run for President ?

Grading will be on a curve so,

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