Bill Frist, Humanitarian Extraordinaire

In the past I have made derogatory comments about Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. This was especially true during the Terry Shiavo circus last spring when Frist offered his expert medical opinion based on a videotape of her. Quite frankly, I was wrong to do that. I do not have a medical degree, and thus do not have any expertise to judge whether he was offering an educated diagnosis based on that video, or simply exercising crass political opportunism in an effort to suck up to the Christian right.

I have also made snide remarks regarding Frist's questionable stock sales which seemed to suggest he had illegally obtained inside information.

For all this, I need to publicly apologize. As it turns out, Senator Frist is an extremely generous man of science. In fact, he actually runs an AIDS charity that last year took in $4.4 million in contributions.

Indeed, Frist is such a humanitarian that his charity paid out almost half a million dollars in consulting fees to two companies. The fact that both those firms are run by a longtime fundraiser for Frist is nothing more than a wild coincidence. Oh, and the additional trivial detail that one of the two companies is also jointly run by the wife of a fellow Republican Senator? That's also purely by chance.

Of course, any such charity will also need lawyers, and for that Frist hired the law firm of Jill Holtzman Vogel, who just happens to be married to Alex Vogel, who in turn happens to be Frist's personal attorney.

I guess that whole six degrees of separation thing should really be reduced to, oh, one degree.