Never Trust a Politician Bearing Gifts

This is a funny scam. As a performance poet, I'm familiar with the technique from the hundreds (thousands?) of poetry "contests" that proliferate on the web. You send a poem, they send you a letter (I know people who've actually won money from them, so there is some small chance of getting paid) telling you that your piece is wonderful and will appear in the upcoming anthology they're putting together which you can buy for the low, low price of $75, or buy additional copies to give as gifts for $65 each. That sort of scammy thing.

That the GOP would decide that creating an American Physician of the Year in the same model (when they do such good work nominating physicians for "Nobel Peace Prizes in Medicine" [sic]) says something about the DeLay method of cash acquisition, I think.

That Bush goes along with this kind of scamming says quite a lot about him, too.

Thanks to Shakespeare's Sister for finding that one.