Much Ado About Nothing
The Tennessean goes to great pains to make Van Hilleary look bad with this story but the facts are on Hilleary's side. Hilleary didn't ask the SEC to "take no action" on issuing regulations to end the practice of accounting firms also offering consulting services to their corporate clients, as charged by Dave Cooley, a senior aide to Hilleary's opponent, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Bredesen. Hilleary merely asked the SEC to extend the public comment period before approving the new rules. Any one who has ever followed the federal bureaucracy's rules-making process knows that agencies often are asked to allow more time for comment on those rules. The Tennessean knows this is not out of the ordinary, and that Hilleary did nothing wrong.

The actual letter Hilleary wrote, which The Tennessean makes available here in a PDF file, clearly shows that Hilleary's only concern was that a highly complex new rule was being rushed through with insufficient time for public comment. Does The Tennessean really think the best law is made by rushing rules into place without sufficient time for the public to consider them and comment on them? Perhaps not - but against the current backdrop of corporate scandal, the opportunity to smear Hilleary and help the Bredesen campaign was clearly too tempting for the liberal paper to pass up.

A question for readers. Bredesen made mega-millions by selling his first healthcare company, an HMO called Health America. I would be interested to know what happened to HealthAmerica after Bredesen cashed out.