Return to Sender: the Grifter-in-Chief's Stimulus Letter

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Saturday May 02, 2020 · 8:12 AM PDT

2020/05/02 · 08:12

I received the letter from the US Treasury about a week ago, announcing my “Economic Impact Payment” with the letterhead of the White House signed with the Trumpian scrawl. After some thought, I mailed the letter back to the White House, along with my own letter:

Dear Mr. Trump:

I am returning your letter about the recent stimulus payment. I don’t want this letter with your signature in our home. It is as unwelcome as the COVID-19 virus.

We did receive the stimulus deposit. We sent much of it to a family member in New York, who is now unable to work, and living in a hot sport under siege from the pandemic. This is the pandemic that you neglected, and continue to neglect, by ignoring public health and national security exports, and by minimizing its threat.

We are using some of that stimulus payment in hopes of making 2021 a better year than 2020.

We are contributing some of it to Joe Biden, so that next year you’ll be an ex-president, and to Democratic Sentorial candidates, so that Mitch McConnel will be Senate minority leader, or better yet, an ex-senator. We’re also sending contributions to the ACLU to help them fight your authoritarian and anti-immigrant policies, and to environmental groups to mitigate some of the effects of climate change that you continue to deny, and defend environmental safeguards that you continue to weaken.

Here’s your letter. I don’t need a memento of the least qualified, least competent and most corrupt president in U.S. history.

I dropped it into the mailbox with a recent John F. Kennedy commemorative stamp on the envelope—just a reminder of what a real President looks like.

I’d like to think that some years from now, a scholar sifting through the papers of the infamous Trump Administration will use this letter as another small data point of citizen correspondence to the White House.

I’ll also recast this as a letter to the editor of our daily newspaper, will post it on my Facebook page, and now offer this up you reading this on Daily Kos.

My LTE on Toomey's shameful budget, published

Phillyfreedom

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Sunday December 11, 2011 · 12:53 PM PST

2011/12/11 · 12:53

Last Sunday one of the Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial staff members published a column saying that Obama should have embraced Sen. Pat Toomey's budget plan in the Supercommittee. This particular writer is pretty conservative, as you might guess, and Toomey, to our continuing misfortune, is one of our two senators.

So I fired off a letter to the editor that afternoon, which the paper printed on Dec. 8 under the heading "No balance in Toomey plan." The Inquirer cut my letter, but not by much.

Kevin Ferris calls the budget plan by Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) a compromise and a balanced approach. Recall that this was the plan that slashed taxes for the highest tax bracket, while limiting deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, and offsets for state and local taxes. In other words, raising revenue by imposing a higher tax burden on the middle class and working class, while offering another bonus to the wealthiest among us.
Ferris assures us that the plan is "pro-growth," which apparently is code for further privileging multimillionaires and sticking it to the rest of us. Never mind that there is little evidence that reducing taxes on the wealthy creates jobs.

Ferris calls Toomey's plan a balanced approach. I call it being a water boy for the 1 percent.

Refuting the "Liberal Elitist" meme--my LTE published

Phillyfreedom

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Sunday September 19, 2010 · 3:20 PM PDT

2010/09/19 · 15:20

The excellent Aug. 28 diary by poliwrangler calling for a Letter to the Editor campaign gave me a bit of inspiration. http://www.dailykos.com/...So when, soon afterward, I read a conservative LTE in my hometown daily, the Philadelphia Inquirer, complaining about an editorial cartoon that portrayed the Republican Party as serial abusers, I wrote my own LTE in response.

It was longer than was optimal, but I sent it anyway. Yesterday, less than a week later, they printed it.

They only printed the first half of it, of course. I have to remember the caveats that newspapers edit heavily and prefer letters to focus on just one central point. But, hey, they printed it. Maybe it helped that I was sort of defending the paper against the perennial accusation of "liberal bias,"--not that Tony Auth especially needs to be defended after all these years.

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