Replies

Oh the delicious irony!
Clinton's self-glorifying book isn't even written and already it's obsolete.

Without criticism, without malicious intent, strictly by comparison, President Bush is defining the Clinton presidency.
Clinton's book might well be titled, "My Shriveling Legacy"

11 posted on 11/13/2002 10:31 AM EST by YaYa123

Q ERTY8 bump!
Given the clintons' obsolescence, do you think the Simon & Schuster gang will demand the return the $20-plus million???

Is hillary clinton's $8M "book advance" a Peter-Principle artifact?

For anyone who has wondered why Simon & Schuster would award an $8M "Book Advance" for the memoirs of someone whose prevarication and/or amnesia are exceeded only by her banality, I offer the following analysis:

Proposition: hillary clinton's interregnal $8M "book advance" is a Peter-Principle artifact.

Given:

Knowledge is Power.

Time is Money.

Work/Time = Power

Proof:

Knowledge = Power -->
Knowledge = Work/Time -->
Knowledge = Work/Money -->
lim (Knowledge) as Money approaches infinity = 0 -->

The less you know, the more you make. -->

Conclusion:
hillary clinton's interregnal $8M "book advance" is a Peter-Principle artifact.

Q.E.D

ex libris

by Mia T
The teeth-gnashing on Monday when the news was out about Clinton's advance was mostly by people who
a) didn't think Clinton should monetize the kind of thing that made him infamous, and
b) felt it was yet one more affront on the public that the price was probably right.
That last isn't a learned exploration of the economics of publishing, it's just a hunch. Publishing economics -- unlike what it is that brings the public to buy a book -- is not inscrutable. The author's royalty is 15 percent.

If Clinton's book sells for $30, he makes $4.50 from every sale. Times
a thousand, that's $4,500. Times 100,000, that's $450,000. Say a
half-million, to round things up a bit. So he'd have to sell 24 x
100,000 to earn the advance. Well, that's not going to happen, but
great chunks can be got from foreign sales, magazines, book clubs,
paperback editions.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is stretching it, but they're rich, rich Germans
own it, and a sister publisher already paid $8 million for Hillary -- why
not a little competition at the bookstore?

The extra-economic resentment has to do with a wobbly extension of the federal rule that you are not allowed to profit from a crime.

Wrong Way Corrigan Rides Again:

Adding up the Clinton book deal

William F. Buckley

National Review

COMMENT:
So why did the Simon & Schuster gang shell out $20-plus million to two crooks whose prevarication and/or amnesia are exceeded only by their banality?

These "book advances" can be no less than payoffs, retroactive in one case, preemptive in the other. (As for the Gingrich precedent: That hillary clinton was 16 days short of taking office when the deal was consummated is quite irrelevant. Simon & Schuster is to CBS as Murdoch is to FOX.)

Because the deals give each clinton the largest advance ever for an elected official, because they are very large payments from a corporate favor-seeker--indeed, the SAME corporate favor-seeker, because the clintons demanded the $20-plus million up front, because the deal was negotiated by a First -- uh -- Lady in the White House, because in both cases it is the selling of the corrupting of the presidency, the clinton "book deals" fail the smell test not to mention the "usual and customary" test, a key phrase in Rule 36 of the Senate Ethics Manual that refers to publishing profits. The clinton "book deals" are sui generis; they are not "usual and customary."

SUGGESTIONS:

1- A less wobbly extension of the federal rule that you are not allowed to profit from a crime: the clintons' profits belong to the clintons' victims -- us. Invoke that extension of the federal rule.

2- Boycott anything connected to the clintons or the Simon & Schuster group.

3- Remain alert to instances of future conflicts of interest that signal a quid pro quo. hillary clinton, for example, must recuse herself whenever a Simon & Schuster et al. matter comes before the Senate.

NYTimes

February 17, 2001

Senator Clinton's Book Deal

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is understandably pleased by the approval

she received on Wednesday from the Senate Ethics Committee for her $8

million deal to sell her memoirs. In finding that the transaction

passes muster under the Senate's rules governing book deals, the

committee essentially supported Mrs. Clinton's contention that both her

auction of the book to the highest bidder and the terms governing her

advance payments conformed to "usual and customary" publishing practice,

the Senate's standard for assessing members' book agreements.

According to a statement issued by her lawyer, Robert Barnett, Mrs.

Clinton has already received one-third of the $8 million advance. Under

the terms of the contract, the remaining payments will be spread out

over the next several years, presumably timed to coincide with various

milestones toward the manuscript's completion. Regrettably, Mrs.

Clinton still declines to reveal the full details of her contract or to

release her submission to the committee.

The positive finding by the Ethics Committee amounts to an assessment

that Mrs. Clinton's contract deal with Simon & Schuster, a publishing

company owned by the media giant Viacom, conforms to Senate rules. It

does not solve the underlying problem with the deal -- that it is utterly

inappropriate for a senator to enter into a multimillion-dollar business

transaction with a conglomerate that has a slew of issues coming before

Congress. If Mrs. Clinton were a member of the House her deal would be

prohibited. We continue to hope that the Senate will adopt the House

policy of restricting members' payments to royalties on books actually

sold.

12-22-00

The Times Reaps What It Sowed

December 22, 2000
The New York Times

Mrs. Clinton's Book Deal

rs. Clinton's Book Deal
We are sorry to see Hillary Rodham Clinton start her Senate career by selling a memoir of her years as first lady to Simon & Schuster for a near- record advance of about $8 million. The deal may conceivably conform to the lax Senate rules on book sales, though even that is uncertain. But it would unquestionably violate the tougher, and better, House rules, and it is an affront to common sense. No lawmaker should accept a large, unearned sum from a publisher whose parent company, Viacom, is vitally interested in government policy on issues likely to come before Congress ó for example, copyright or broadcasting legislation.
Mrs. Clinton's staggering advance falls just below the $8.5 million received by Pope John Paul II in 1994. We wish as a matter of judgment that she had not sought an advance but had voluntarily limited her payments to royalties on actual book sales, as the House now requires of its members. That way there would be no worry that she had been given special treatment in an effort to curry political favor.
The Senate will judge Mrs. Clinton's deal in the context of outmoded rules that, regrettably, still permit members to accept advance payments for their books provided they fall within "usual and customary" industry patterns. Mrs. Clinton held an open auction for her book, so the $8 million advance emerged from a process that presumably represented the industry's consensus about what the book would be worth. But Mrs. Clinton has a duty to reveal the entire contents of her contract so that the public and members of the Senate Ethics Committee can judge for themselves whether its terms fulfill her pledge to comply with existing Senate rules, inadequate though they are.
As it is, Mrs. Clinton will enter the Senate as a business associate of a major company that has dealings before many regulatory agencies and interests in Congress. It would have been far better if she had avoided this entanglement. As she above all others should know, not every deal that is legally permissible is smart for a politician who wants and needs to inspire public trust.
Only a few years ago Newt Gingrich, at that time the House speaker, accepted an ethically dubious $4.5 million book deal with a publishing house owned by Rupert Murdoch, an aggressively political publisher seeking help with his problems with federal regulators. This was the issue that ultimately forced Mr. Gingrich to abandon his advance, and led the House to ban all advance payments for members' books.
That is the right approach, and it would be nice if Republican critics of Mrs. Clinton's deal now devoted real energy to persuading the Senate to adopt the House rules for the future. Both bodies need maximum protection against entangling alliances between lawmakers and government favor- seekers now that nearly all major publishing houses are owned by large corporations with a lot of business before Congress.
RE: Newt Gingrich's $4.5 million book deal:

JAMES CARVILLE: This is the first guy who tried to cash in before he was
sworn in.

BILL CLINTON: [I don't] even know how to think in these terms.

REP DAVID BONIER: This is an arrogant act for a man who's about to
assume one of the most powerful positions and offices in our land.
Before he gets to the public business, he's taking care of his own
private profits.

REP CARRIE MEEK: Exactly who does this speaker really work for? Is it
the American people or his New York publishing house?

REP CHARLES RANGEL: Why doesn't Newt end this by giving the $4.5 million
to Boys Town?

HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE: The committee strongly questions the
appropriateness of what some would describe as an attempt by you to
capitalize on your office.)

posted by Alex Mulkern

12-18-00
Corporate Favor-Seeker, Simon & Schuster awards $8M "Book Advance" to Failed "Author"/Senator-elect hillary clinton
11-22-99
Book Trouble
Newsweek, November 22, 1999
Hillary Clinton's latest book, on entertaining at the White House, is receiving withering scrutiny before it makes it to press. First the manuscript went into rewrite after aides judged it too airy for a senatorial candidate. "You don't want to look like Martha Stewart," says a publishing source. Now White House lawyers may derail a book tour, since it could be construed as campaigning. (Her tour for a picture book about First Pets Socks and Buddy was scotched by the Monica mess, and the book flopped.) Her next tome: a mini-memoir that'll serve as a campaign bio.

8-1-99

by Mia T

Hillary Clinton's equal and inapposite reactions seem to be, at first blush, instances of the immutable First Law of The Betrayed and Humiliated Wife: Outdo the errant hubby's doxy...at all cost.

Thus, Vanity Fair's glamorous Marilyn-Monroe spread of Monica's digitally reduced spread was answered by Vogue's lushly Elizabethan, gauzy-focus, hindquarter-cropped-pleated-and-flounced, Queen-Hillary-for-President cover.

And now we have Hillary Clinton doing a Martha Stewart, who herself, is purported to have been "done" by the aforementioned errant rogue (notwithstanding the plain fact that Martha is more well-known for her tarts than for being one).

Seems Hillary Clinton is now writing a book titled "An Invitation to the White House" in which she will follow the format of the Martha Stewart classic, "Entertaining", claim multifarious Martha-Stewart talents and wrap her indecorous and corrupt, backwoods, backroom style of White House "entertaining" in Martha-Stewart elegance and purity.

"The Clinton White House has been noted for the...innovation of its events," said Carolyn Reidy, president of Simon & Schuster's Trade Division, the book's publisher.

Hillary Clinton's spokeswoman, Marsha Berry, added that the book will focus on how the Clintons have "advanced the availability" of the White House by increasing the number and diversity of people; that it will "highlight the access that the Clintons have given to more people, more types of entertainment..."

It should be emphasized that it was without even a trace of irony or the slightest smirk that both women related the above.

On closer inspection, Hillary Clinton's bizarre behavior is more than simple Ivana Trump-eting. It is vulgar, compulsive, shameless, smarmy, contemptuous, demagogic, megalomaniacal, in-your-face naked clintonism.

It is one thing for the frumpy, chipmunk-cheek, huge-hindquarter fishwife to insinuate her image -- albeit Elizabethan-shrouded and low-res-clouded -- onto the cover of Vogue; but it is quite another for the corrupt harpy to trumpet White House access even as new charges emerge of the clintons' rapes and other predations, the clintons' corrupt quid-pro-quo arrangements with a menacing and motley assortment of drug dealers, gun runners and nuclear weapons makers.

For Hillary Clinton to vaunt White House access just as the clintons' China treason is becoming increasingly, patently manifest to all requires a certain level of contempt for the people and for the country that is uniquely clinton.
Thank heaven for small favors...

Or as the real Martha Stewart would say,

"That is a good thing."

Q ERTY9 BUMP!

Without malicious intent...yes, it certainly seems so. Excellent point.

Your comment about Bush's almost universally perceived lack of malice reminds me of a comment -- one of hundreds of hysterical (literally) rationalizations propounded by a panel of leftist academics hastily assembled last week to explain away the Democrat debacle of '02.

This person actually said that whereas Bush is perceived by the people as trying to change the noxious [i.e., clinton] atmosphere in Washington, there has never been a more poisonous administration than his.

It's not easy to play fair against Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, who, in the words of the authors, "operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests." What's amazing, of course, is that's exactly what Clinton friends and aides have always done, from Susan McDougal to Webster Hubbell to flocks of nameless White House special assistants. Even Jim McDougal died just in time to deprive the independent counsel of a key witness against Mrs. Clinton, thus derailing what the authors report to have been her likely indictment for perjury and obstruction related to the Whitewater investigation.... Reading the tumultuous events of the Lewinsky probe in a comprehensive narrative is unlike attempting to make sense of it in daily doses. Something different comes through the heavy accumulation of detail of, for example, the duplicity of the Justice Department, or the sharklike behavior of the White House. One begins to get a choking sense of the atmosphere of corruption and ruthlessness the Clintons inhabit -- and, worse, have forced the rest of us to inhabit. Taken in one piece, the habitual, even casual abuse of power on display begins to resemble conditions one normally associates with a state of totalitarianism, where such concepts as truth and justice are only paid lip service. In the end, then, it makes you wonder when there will be fresh air again.
Crime-family values

The only way they can win is to convince people that we're space aliens.
--bill clinton




June 9, 1999

Peggy Noonan's excellent piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is really the story of the death of democracy. At its core it is the description of the human double helix gone terribly awry, of a denatured protein grotesquely twisted, of two mutant, tangled strands of DNA, the basest imaginable of base pairs linked permanently, as firmly as guanine to cytosine, bill inexorably to hillary and conversely, doing what they do best, and doing it relentlessly.

Killing.
Killing insidiously.
Killing as they pose and pander and feel our pain.

My only complaint is with Peggy Noonan's title.
The Mad Boomer, doesn't begin to capture candidate clinton considered separately or even taken as the self-anointed "twofer," permanently conjoined at that cavity conspicuously empty except for ego, that place where brain and soul and guts and heart normally reside.

This is not to say that she -- that they -- are not both quite mad and of that self-indulgent, arrogantly, ignorantly solipsistic age sandwiched flatly between yesterday's innocence and tomorrow's insouciance. Rather, it is that their madness and their boomerism don't even begin to explain their noxious influence: The cloying, internally inconsistent clinton calculus. The unspoken clinton threats. They permeate the atmosphere like a coiling miasma, choking off all freedom.

Even in New York.
Especially in New York.
When she wrote "The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus hardly had in mind this pair of mutant, deadly, twisted aliens.

So forget Arkansas-Illinois carpetbaggery and standard issue muckraking. The clintons are aliens of quite another sort. They are extrinsic, not of this world. They are inhuman. They are dehumanizing.

You may recall that the first act of this story of two degenerates maintained by iterating idiots, farce of farce ad infinitum, was generated quite by accident by iterated AlGoreRhythm, who, it should be noted, is now himself the object of iterated calculation by said degenerates who want iteration 2004 all for themselves.

And thus the odd bit of bloody Gore in Act II: The ugly sight of a corrupt, bottom-heavy hillary self-impaled on the horns of a Treason-Dilemma- masquerading-as-a-Third-Term-Dilemma-masquerading-as-a-Senate-stampede, for example, or bill's recent unsolicited, underwhelming Times interview on the Gore candidacy.

Act I was called "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Ostensibly the tale of the wife of a bloodthirsty crime boss who finds romance with a bland bookseller between courses at her husband's restaurant, it was in fact the Thyestean and moveable -- yet unmoving -- feast of hillary clinton at her husband's sham restitution. (Note the reciprocity. The sham restitution in Act II is all hillary's.)

Food, color coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism were the exotic (if mostly horizontal) fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern memoir which passed as ancient fable about nouveau riche rapacity.
Not for the faint at heart, Purple Hearts or queazy stomachs, this depiction of the gross debasement of America was heavily peppered with irony and dark humor throughout.

Although she baked no cookies, didn't do illicit land or cattle d eals and stood by no man, hillary clinton starred in the triple role of the Cook, the Thief and his Wife. Her lover was played at once vaporously and in workmanlike fashion by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, with Janet Reno, between her stints rendering intermittent injustice for the Husband, as the reliable stand-in. Sidney Blumenthal was the stand-in for the Cook and Craig Livingstone the stand-in for the Thief. The last-minute addition of Christopher Hitchens as the snitch was a stroke of absolute genius notwithstanding its cerebral accident, its predictable-if-perfect pitch and its facile alliteration.

Although Act I had no rating, the new clinton soccer-mom directive will require a photo ID for any viewer without independent proof of illegal alien DNC or DNA sequencing.

In Act II, rabid anti-clinton voters, roughly 33% of the U.S. populace according to as-yet-unpodded pollsters, become increasingly aware that they are disappearing in droves and being replaced by alien pod replicas which have their physical attributes but lack all anti-clinton affect.

If Act I was a thinly veiled allegory about naked clintonism, then Act II is a parable about the plan for world domination by the Establishment, aged hippies in pinstripes all, with their infantile, solipsistic world view amazingly untouched by time.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Clearly someone should notify America's founders that they have erred... men are not deserving of self goverment, because clearly self government is nothing more than the aggregation of all our psychic traumas and libidinal confusions.. and look where that has gotten us...one Clinton leaving the white house and one aiming for the US Senate for the State of New York... perhaps the liberals ARE onto something? But no, study the last two Clinton elections carefully... this most shameless and shameful American President is the product of plurality (less than majority) votes obtained through the gile and intrigue of an elitist cabal of intellectually impaired and ethically corrupt media manipulators aligned in effect with the electoral tampering of one man, H. Ross Perot, who although he occasionally gave a good speech was still intelligent enough to know his only role was to twice deny the conservative majority of American voters a first choice for President.
Gail Wynand, "Be Liberal, Live in Ignorance and Servitude"

LUCINDA FRANKS: I think you're wrong because, after about two years of -- of working on this, you know, on and off, I think the president -- that the teenage culture caused the president's behavior in the way he behaved in -- with the oral sex.

BILL O'REILLY: I think you're crazy, Ms. Franks, with all due respect.
Fellating Kids and clinton Degeneracy: The Revisionism Begins

"Be Liberal, Live in Ignorance and Servitude"
by Gail Wynand

Liberals have always had problems figuring out causation. They believe for example that because people who smoke (sometimes) have higher rates of cancer than people who don't that smoking CAUSES cancer, worse, they believe that if people get cancer it is the fault of the "tobacco companies" (i.e., caused by the manufactures of tobacco products). They further believe that the remedy for this fault is that billions of dollars in "damages" should be transferred from the wealth of stockholders in tobacco companies to a handful of plaintiffs lawyers including the First Lady's relatives and others closely associated with the Democratic party. And they believe, apparently, that if young people are now experimenting with sex at early ages and with more profoundly explicit practices than in past years, and that if the President of the United States decides to enroll a young intern in rendition of such services to his middle aged libido resultantly staining both her dress and America's reputation, that a spontaneous wave of teenage sex experimentation, sucked (sorry) the poor middle aged chief executive into its vortex.
Deducing causation in most events takes deliberate, focused, thought, insight, and a disciplined intelligence that doesnt skip foundational indoctrination (aka actually studying in school). Causation of the diseases associated with cancer is highly complex and to a large degree still unknown. That smoking is probably not healthy for you is well known. That a middle aged chief executive, Yale Law School graduate, former professor of Constitutional Law and State Attorney General should be responsible and accountable for his own actions including HIS perjury and obstruction of justice would seem axiomatic to all but a liberal who has the capacity to adopt causationally convenient theories based solely on tangential proximity to the event under examination rather than through any rational analysis of the importance or significance of the asserted cause to the event. Thus, "guns" are used in some murders therefore, to a liberal all "guns" should be either banned or kept in locked safes with trigger locks so as to disarm the law abiding public and eviscerate their legally recognized right to effective self defense.
Quite simply, one has to be pretty stupid or very corrupt or both to be a liberal, at least and for sure to be a Clinton supporter. But it is worse than that, one also has to deny the importance of human consciousness and free will. That is, a Clinton defending liberal apparently believes that childhood psychic trauma, teenage sex trends (remarkably and largely only rampant among the social classes targeted by liberals for social intervention for the past 40 years) and the power of "addiction" which used to be considered merely "habituation" in more stalwart times, are more significant than free will in determining human conduct.

Clearly someone should notify America's founders that they have erred... men are not deserving of self goverment, because clearly self government is nothing more than the aggregation of all our psychic traumas and libidinal confusions.. and look where that has gotten us...one Clinton leaving the white house and one aiming for the US Senate for the State of New York... perhaps the liberals ARE onto something? But no, study the last two Clinton elections carefully... this most shameless and shameful American President is the product of plurality (less than majority) votes obtained through the gile and intrigue of an elitist cabal of intellectually impaired and ethically corrupt media manipulators aligned in effect with the electoral tampering of one man, H. Ross Perot, who although he occasionally gave a good speech was still intelligent enough to know his only role was to twice deny the conservative majority of American voters a first choice for President. And now even as Evita determinedly grasps for the Security Power and Influence of the Senate seat, one sees in her early campaigning the overriding awareness that her only hope is the sowing of confusion and ignorance... the demonization of a long time public servant whose accomplishments are towering, the pandering to the lowest and most depraved and corrupt anti social organizations and figures (no not the mob, the teachers unions and Mr. Sharpton). Arm in arm this body of liberal enthusiasts march forth to assure that America continues to be contaminated and disabled by their control of government into the 21st century... arrogantly and in complete disregard of truth, rationality, or the notion of liberty... they pound at the very gates of freedom, threatening to burn (redefine to mean the opposite of what they say) the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address and replace them with their own Orwellian Banners of "community" "children" "education" "fairness" and all the other focus group tested liberal-illogicisms. But the translation exists and when the alien identifying sunglasses are donned all of their slogans can be seen to read "Be Liberal, Live in Ignorance and Servitude"

Mrs. Clinton's Book Deal