It’s About Making Babies!

Amazing – how ethics, fundraising, and theft of personal contact information is business-as-usual for this Senator’s re-election campaign.

I might have signed up at the Kay County, OK Republican party. I did email Senator Inhofe‘s office in his capacity of Senator for Oklahoma. But his campaign swiped my email address. The emails include a ‘unsubscribe’ function, which I followed. Weeks ago. And I still get emails –

I need your help now more than ever. We’re close to our important September goal of 1,000 contributions. Will you please donate $10, $25, or $50 today to help make sure our campaign has the resources it needs to be successful?

Now, my own philosophy includes The First Rule of Parenting:

“Don’t Reward Bad Behavior”

See, my problem with Senator Inhofe is that: 1) he disregarded my unsubscribe request; 2) He grabbed my email from an official email regarding legitimate exercise of the office of US Senator for personal use – his re-election campaign; 3) Not only does he not honor my unsubscribe request, he failed to get my permission to email me about his re-election.

I don’t really believe in fund raising. Gathering funds takes money from lots of people to do something you think is good. Governments do that to assure national security, and promote the welfare of the nation. Churches grab and solicit donations to push their agenda, um, spread their word, to those that lived their lives according to other rules – that is, they conquer, change people ‘for their own good’.

Senator Inhofe wants to do this. He wants to be elected to the US Senate. The purpose of business is to stay in business. The business of government is to persist and defend itself, maybe defend it’s citizens. The purpose of politicians is to remain in office – or strive for higher office.

Congress implemented a national ‘no call’ list. Only they exempted their re-election campaigns. You may not want to get the ‘survey’ calls and solicitations, and tapes of your governor telling you that you should vote for candidate ‘X’ – but you can’t get off the lists for these Unsolicited Political Emails and calls. You may have determined how you will vote, you may have determined that one candidate in each race and one alternative in each proposal best meets your needs. But you can’t avoid the rabid, degenerate, conscienceless politicking. And fund raising. It may violate responsible behavior, polite manners, respect of people as citizens and neighbors. But the desire of candidates to attack your beliefs, twist and distort current events and history, lie, deceive and manipulate manages to step around what is right and responsible.

Marketing works. That is, simply spending advertising dollars changes how people vote. Not the honor or respect of the candidate, not the quality of preparation or experience, or quality of the individual. Simple spending of advertising money. Advertise enough, and anyone can get elected. Thus the shameful, exploitive fund raising.

Asking friends for money is one thing. But contributions are often tax write-offs, and I resent candidates X, Y, and Z, or congregation AA diverting money away from the general Tax fund. Congress is supposed to determine how tax money is to be spent; the executive branch of the government is supposed to spend tax money wisely and account for how it is spent. Instead, a significant portion of money that is extracted from the economy – limiting economic growth – is spent according to givers and fund raisers.

I would like to close out campaign and non-profit exemptions for the national no-call list. And I would *dearly* love to rescind tax relief for political contributions, and for non-profits, too. Let people go on with their fund-raising, but not at the expense of diverting tax revenues.

And punish, please, the scummy spammers that don’t limit their email list to those that request inclusion, and haven’t requested being left off.

Spammers like Mr. “Sent money to reelect me” Senator Inhofe.