{"id":85,"date":"2008-01-10T13:58:16","date_gmt":"2008-01-10T17:58:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/my-congressional-medal-of-merit\/"},"modified":"2008-01-10T17:04:05","modified_gmt":"2008-01-10T21:04:05","slug":"my-congressional-medal-of-merit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/my-congressional-medal-of-merit\/","title":{"rendered":"My “Congressional Medal of Merit”"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Tom\r\n

My dad called me today all excited that a congressmen left a message that he wanted to give me an award. He played back the message over the phone and it certainly did sound legit with Patty Cleaver working for Congressman Tom Cole of the National Republican Congressional Committee wanting to award a Congressional Order of Merit so call her back at 1 (866) 264-3583.<\/p> \r\n\r\n

Of course my bullcrap detectors were tingling pretty hard at this point. First, they can’t even get my name right (having a hyphenated name sure helps with junk filtering). Second, I’m not really happy with any current party but I certainly don’t see me identifying myself as a Republican any time in the near future. Third, I guess I’m a decent guy but as far as I can recall I haven’t ran into any burning buildings or donated my kidneys to feed starving orphans recently. But then again you never know so I did a quick google (don’t know what I would have done before internet). Luckily there’s a couple blog<\/a> posts<\/a> reporting similar experiences. Once you call in, they apparently hit you up for a $500 donation to some ad campaign.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

So I thought I’d throw this post up to help warn other people since this seems really really dirty<\/em> to me. Tom Cole is either selling awards or defrauding people in order to finance his campaign. I don’t see how anyone could look at this and not consider it completely immoral. Any politician that does this deserves to be voted out of office\/impeached.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Update: Another (excellently titled) report here<\/a> (Thanks Alex).<\/p><\/ins>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My dad called me today all excited that a congressmen left a message that he wanted to give me an award. He played back the message over the phone and it certainly did sound legit with Patty Cleaver working for Congressman Tom Cole of the National Republican Congressional Committee wanting to award a Congressional Order […]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[240,246,244,245,248,242,241,247],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scott.sherrillmix.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}