DeLay Will Plead Guilty 1144

ON AN ASIAN TOUR, Hillary Clinton told New Zealand television that she had been named after Sir Edmund Hillary. Pretty good trick, since Hillary was an unknown beekeeper the year of Mrs. Clinton's birth.

AFTER BECOMING involved in politics, Wellesley graduate Hillary Rodham orders her senior thesis sealed from public view.

HILLARY CLINTON said that she had done legal work for Madison Guaranty but that it was not related to the S&L's dealing with state regulators. "For goodness sake," she said. "You can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks." You may remember that Hillary Clinton also thrilled all right-thinking Americans during the campaign by saying, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was pursue my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life." Forgotten, however, is what inspired this homily: accusations that Ms. Clinton had represented Whitewater business partner Jim McDougal's S&L before her husband's government.

1996 - HILLARY CLINTON produces a book-like substance that she claimed to have written in long-hand in six months. It would turn out that she had a ghost writer hired for $120,000

TWO MONTHS after commencing the Whitewater scam, Hillary Clinton invests $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she has a $5,000 profit. Before bailing out she earns nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists will calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million.

1978 - HILLARY CLINTON makes a $44,000 profit on a $2,000 investment in a cellular phone franchise deal that involves taking advantage of the FCC's preference for locals, minorities and women. The franchise is almost immediately flipped to the cellular giant, McCaw.

1993 -HILLARY CLINTON and David Watkins move to oust the White House travel office in favor of World Wide Travel, Clinton's source of $1 million in fly-now-pay-later campaign trips that essentially financed the last stages of the campaign without the bother of reporting the de facto contribution. The White House fires seven long-term employees for alleged mismanagement and kickbacks. The director, Billy Dale, charged with embezzlement, will be acquitted in less than two hours by the jury. An FBI agent involved in the case, IC Smith, will write later, "The White House Travel Office matter sent a clear message to the Congress as well as independent counsels that this Whit House would be different. Lying, withholding evidence, and considering - even expecting - underlings to be expendable so the Clintons could avoid accountability for their actins would become the norm."

At one point Hillary Clinton wrote Jim McDougal, "If Reaganomics works at all, Whitewater could become the Western Hemisphere's Mecca." In fact, the 203 acre plot was fifty miles from the nearest grocery store. The Washington Post later reported that some purchasers of lots, many of them retirees, "put up houses or cabins, others slept in vans or tents, hoping to be able to live off the land." More than half of the purchasers lost their plots thanks to the sleazy form of financing used. In short, Whitewater was the sort of resort land scam for which a local TV station would have won an Emmy for exposing.

On the Jim Lehrer Newshour in 1996, HRC was asked if she kept a diary. Her response: "Heavens, no! It could get subpoenaed. I can't write anything." She added that her comments would be used to "go after and persecute every friend of mine, everybody I've ever talked with, everyone I've had a conversation with. ~ It's very sad."

SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994 - During the first months of the Clinton administration, one of the biggest national policy changes of the past fifty years was being forged by a secret committee led by Mrs. Clinton under procedures that periodically defied the courts and the Government Accounting Office and whose public manifestations consisted of highly contrived media opportunities, carefully staged "town meetings," and similar artifices.

Despite the contrary evidence of public opinion polls, the concept of Canadian-style single-payer insurance was dismissed early. Tom Hamburger and Ted Marmor in the Washington Monthly tell of a single-payer proponent being invited to the White House in February 1993. It was, he said, a "pseudo-consultation;" the doctor was quickly informed that "single payer is not politically feasible." When Dr. David Himmelstein of the Harvard Medical School pressed Mrs. Clinton on single payer, she replied, "Tell me something interesting, David."

In other words, write Hamburger and Marmor: "Fewer than six weeks into the Clinton presidency, the White House had made its key policy decision: Before the Health Care Task Force wrote a single page of its 22-volume report to the President, the single payer idea was written off, and 'managed compebreastion' was in."

If there was any popular, grbuttroots demand for "managed compebreastion" it never appeared. Managed compebreastion had not been tested anywhere. Nonetheless, reported Thomas Bodenehimer in Nation:

"Around Hillary Rodham Clinton's health reform table sit the managed-compebreastion winners: big business, hospitals, large (but not small) commercial insurers, the Blues, budget-worried government leaders and the 'Jackson Hole Group,' the chief intellectual honchos of the managed compebreastion movement. . . Adherence to the mantra of managed compebreastion appears to be the price of a ticket of admission to this gathering. "

What was finally proposed involved a mbuttive transfer of the American health industry -- by some accounts now larger than the military-industrial complex -- to a small number of the largest insurance companies and other major corporations. These were companies that had the buttets to play the game being offered -- a medical oligopoly that would dispense health-care under the rules of the Fortune 500 rather than according to those of Hipprocrates.

Clinton's position on health care had bounced around in the early months of the campaign, finally settling on a policy that would leave the big health insurers largely unscathed. It was not particularly surprising. Max Brantley, columnist for the Arkansas Times, noted that "Blue Cross owns Arkansas, and Clinton never did much to fight them."

The stakes would eventually become so high that a number of the biggest insurers -- including CIGNA, Aetna and Metropolitan Life -- would leave the industry-wide Health Insurance buttociation of America. Five of the largest insurance companies formed something called the Alliance for Managed Compebreastion. In this new game one of the first targets of 'managed compebreastion' was the smaller insurance companies that now account for nearly half of the health underwriting business. Said managed compebreastion advocate Lynn Etheridge, "Ninety-nine percent of the insurance companies are going to be wiped out because they're only prepared to be insurance companies." Mrs. Clinton, sounding like a 1980s takeover lawyer, said, "It's going to be a Darwinian struggle. Only the best and fittest of them will survive." Similarly, when asked how small businesses were meant to cope with the added costs of her plan, Mrs. Clinton replied, "I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."

Her interest lay with the largest companies, i.e. the ones with the ability to purchase or create the health maintenance organizations that would become de rigeur under the Clinton scheme. The new HMOs would be major profit-centers for companies, simultaneously subsidized by federal payments for the ailments of the poor, elderly and those without conventional insurance.