This time, Dick Durbin’s come asking for money to help him fight the real evils in this country and create jobs. He writes:

Dear Jeff,

Big Oil profits at the expense of the environment – this week reporting they made billions. Big Banks profit at the expense of Americans – sticking the middle class with unfair fees as corporate bottom lines soar.

The GOP profits by coddling both of them.

Republicans have their priorities. America’s middle class isn’t one of them. They’re all about giving more to those who have the most. Helping the 1 percent at the cost of the 99. Boosting billionaires and big corporations while demanding the rest of America pull harder on their own bootstraps.

The middle class has pulled as hard as it can. It’s time that policies lift all boats, not just yachts.

I need your help. If the GOP gains only four Senate seats, their priorities will become America’s laws. The DSCC has a plan to keep the Senate, but it needs funding – $66,000 in the next 72 hours. If they don’t make it, they can’t fight Karl Rove’s millions and prevent a total GOP takeover.

Can you give $3 or more right now to fight a GOP takeover? We’ve got 72 hours and $66,000 left to raise.

President Obama’s jobs proposals could put millions back to work, but my Republican colleagues won’t support it. Why? Because if the economy gets better, Democrats and the president would get the credit – just in time for the election.

Republicans are too busy being the problem to come up with any solutions. They’re filibustering every bill in sight. Passing laws to suppress the Democratic vote. Their presidential candidates are even suggesting that President Obama isn’t a “real American.” It’s wrong, and fighting back with everything we’ve got is our only option.

But I need you in the fight right now. The time for sitting on the sidelines is over.

Your $3 or more right now will help prevent a GOP takeover – and a full-out assault on our progressive priorities. We’ve only got 72 hours to meet this $66,000 goal!

I have faith in us. With the combined power of more than a million grassroots donors, I know we can meet this $66,000 goal, win in 2012 and shift Washington’s priorities back to the middle class – where they belong. Thank you for joining the fight.

Sincerely,

Dick Durbin

My response was a bit more lengthy this time. I get excited when royalty deigns to drop me a note:

Dear Dick Durbin --

Oil and gas are used to power what was once the most vibrant economy on earth. Banks, already heavily regulated, provide the capital for investment, and offer returns on money that at one time was stuffed in mattresses or hidden in book safes. They, too, drive the economy.

So I am at once stunned and, I must say, not unimpressed, by the degree of chutzpah it must take for a man who has sworn to uphold the Constitution of a free market republic, one built on a foundation of individual rights -- chief among them, private property -- to pen the kind of anti-capitalist nonsense you've penned here, especially in the wake of the Democrats' disastrous attempts at building a command and control economy.

I mean, "Big Oil"? Really? Does Exxon-Mobile have taxpayer-funded corporate Taj Mahals, complete with Disney-whistling robots? I don't believe so -- but if they did, they would at have least paid for those things themselves. "Big Banks"? Again, pardon my disbelief, but wasn't it the Democrats in both Congress and the Presidency who established and then expanded the Community Reinvestment Act -- essentially, a feel-good bit of social engineering built on a fraudulent Boston Fed study -- to compel "Big Banks" to lend money to those with virtually no chance of paying it back? That is, wasn't it Big Government, rather than "Big Banks," who started in motion the disastrous practices that wound up in the bursting of the housing bubble, leaving million underwater on their mortgages, and millions more with no equity in their homes, and no life savings (while a few of them and their cronies got obscenely wealthy in the process)?

And yet you have the colossal balls to write me complaining about "Big Banks" and "Big Oil"? Are you for real?

Our problem in this country is not the free market economy or the private sector. Our problem is a government grown entirely too big, too inefficient, and too goddamn arrogant -- believing as it seems to in the rank stupidity of the people it is supposed to be serving.

The private sector, economic dynamism and growth, opportunity, and the free market are what expands the "middle class," to borrow your Marxist terminology. Government regulations, onerous compliance costs, "partnerships" between government and client corporations -- crony capitalism, or, if you prefer, liberal fascism -- these are what kill the "middle class," destroying farms, fisheries, coal plants, and any number of small business interests that provide jobs to 70% of American workers.

So while you parrot the talking points of a Marxist-Anarchist, anti-Semitic movement astroturfed by the Community Organizer-In-Chief and his ideological foot soldiers -- pitting the 99% (which is more like 10-20%) against the 1% (who by the way, let me remind you, sir, are non-criminal, tax-paying American citizens who, though they already pay 40% of the federal tax burden, you as an elected official have chosen to scapegoat and demonize for their success, and nothing more) -- know this: your divisive, repulsive, anti-capitalist propaganda isn't working on most of us. Some of us know that the money of the so-called 1% is always working, be it through investment, or employment, or mere distribution through the economy by way of everyday commerce; some of us know that nearly 50% of this country no longer pays federal income tax, and that some of those actually receive "tax credits," wealth taken from taxpayers and redistributed to those who don't pay; some of us realize that the market is far more efficient at creating jobs than a bunch of temporary politicians who use the pseudo-populist rhetoric of socialism to demonize capitalism, hoping we won't notice that what they really want is for money that would otherwise act to drive the economic engine of this country to be first funneled through them, so that they can whet their beaks, then disperse that money to their constituencies, before finally "directing" it into embarrassing failures like Solyndra.

Here's what I can tell you about "Big Oil" and "Big Banks," Mr Durbin. Because they can't print their own money or write their own laws -- and because they are answerable to boards and stockholders -- they couldn't conceive of pissing away money the way you and your Washington cabal does.

Washington doesn't "create jobs." And President Obama's "Jobs Bill" was defeated in the Democrat controlled Senate, largely because a number of Democrat Senators fear for their jobs, and so can't and won't vote for what is a giant new tax bill. So this idea that the GOP is preventing anything from happening is a bald-faced lie. The Republican House has passed budgets. The Democrat Senate hasn't done so for 3 years.

If you and your colleagues really wanted to create jobs -- rather than simply use class warfare propaganda to try to increase the size and scope of government to keep yourself rich and entrench your own power -- you'd be working to cut the tax burden for job creators; you'd be working to pare back the regulations that are strangling the private sector; and you'd be more interested in talking to the country as a whole than you would be in writing these kinds of letters whose precise goal is to turn some Americans against other Americans.

You are everything our Founding Fathers worried about when they tried to place limits on federal power. Barack Obama has called us -- the constitutionalists and promoters of the free market, who want less government and more individual freedom -- "enemies."

And in a sense he's right: some of will not stand by while our children and grandchildren are enslaved to future debt they can't possibly ever pay back. We will not stand by while you use the politics of envy to surreptitiously rob of us of our liberties and further expand your reach into every aspect of our lives. Which I suppose makes us the enemies of those who claim to love America, even as they demand it's "fundamental transformation," which includes an escape from the constraints of a "flawed document" like the Constitution.

So no, I won't give you a dime.

You've stolen enough from us already. And just because you have the force of law behind you doesn't mean that what you've done is moral. It just means you've found a way to plunder us while pretending it's for our own good.

With contempt,
Jeff Goldstein

I wish these fuckers would just stop emailing me. I really do.