Thanks, Ino. Just doing my part to make America a better place.
And thank you, Dooku. Several of my friends will be getting variants of this in lieu of Christmas cards this year.
I too have managed to make it on a Republican mailing list. Are people skirting campaing contribution laws and donating in my name?
Hm, no wonder I never get RNC mailings. I must be on their list as Ino and not lno. This must be rectified.
Courier makes it look like the letter was typed specifically for you. I get fundraising letters from the DNC and other Democratic organizations in Courier all the time.
What baffles me is that they put a blank line between each paragraph – but still indent the first line of each paragraph. Hello, earth to fund raising letter typographers, its one or the other. Not both!
Oops, sorry I fucked up your name, lno. Will I do it again? Hell, no!
When I subscribed to George and Brill’s Content I started getting RNC fundraising letters, too. Might you be involved with anything that is even tangentially related to political issues?
Sofa King - I am dying over here. That was classic.
I also forgot to comment specifically on this line:
“…and how instrumental your support was to our historic victories in 2002.”
You keep using that word. I do not think you mean what you think it means. 
a35362 - no involvement with any political organization whatsoever. I just vote, and never in my life for a Republican. The only organization of which I am a regular contributor is the SPCA - I can’t imagine they would be responsible for this.
Dooku, some of these organizations are identifying likely targets based on buying habits. For example, if you buy hunting equipment online, you’re almost guaranteed to get targeted by the NRA and their relatives. They get the marketing information as a “donation” from the companies that sell it, or sometimes from the credit card companies themselves. Even subscribing to what, to you, seems like a neutral magazine might do it. They might also have pulled your name from voter rolls (which are public or semi-public information in most states).
As far as the letter goes, it looks a lot like the ones I get from the People for the American Way, Amnesty International, and countless other left-wing organizations who got my name from the ACLU or the EFF (organizations of which I am a member).
No, a terrorist! - Ann Coulter
Not only did our fund raising letter use primarily one-sentence paragraphs, but…
…it even split one of them [COLOR=red]into two![/COLOR]
Dooku, why don’t you write back to them and tell them that you feel that the Republican party has abandoned you by not supporting a woman’s right to choose, pursuing a peaceful diplomatic solution in Iraq, sold out to the gun and radical Christian lobby, and done a disservice to the Democratic process by pandering to various wealthy special interests groups like Halliburton? I’d love to see the well crafted response which you’d be sure to receive.
Or maybe it would be a visit from the Secret Police? A personal visit from Karl Rove? Any way you look at it, sure to be loads of Christmas fun.
Sofa King, I think I love you. 
Wow, never voted for a single GOP candidate? Party loyalty like that is pretty rare these days.
I was raised GOP, and conditioned to enjoy the notion of spitting on Democrats’ graves, but even I voted for a Dem once, quite recently. (Not that my voting Jean Carnahan for Senate will be a very memorable moment in the long run, but it seems that I always end up on the losing side, even when I vote for the other party’s candidate 
)
When GOP’ers get pissed off at PATRIOT Act (see the rising dissent over this led by Bob Barr’s alliance with the ACLU) or Dems get peeved at some blatant special-interest pandering that deviates from the party’s philosophy, there’s always that cross-over vote waiting to jump ship, to teach the party the lesson that they can’t just throw up any schmoe with the “correct” letter next to his/her name and expect to win X number of votes.
Is it really party loyalty though, or is it that they hate the other guy more? I’ve never voted Republican not out of party loyalty but because I haven’t encountered a GOP candidate I don’t hate so much I want to stab them in the eye. Anyone I’ve had any respect for never seems to make it out of a primary, and even when there’s a Dem I’d love to vote against (like one guy around here who actually killed himself while in office) the GOP either runs a nobody or actually runs nobody against him.
As for the use of Courier, look at the junk mail you get – for magazine subscriptions, charitable organizations, political parties, etc. – and you will find that 95% of those four-page letters (yes, with brief paragraphs and lots of underlining) will be set in Courier. I publish a newsletter and thus have attended several Direct Mail design workshops, and in DM circles it is an absolute article of faith, some insist a proven fact, that letters in Courier outdraw letters in any other font. Why? Nobody really knows, but everyone does it.
The other odd aspects of the physical package – unusual size and shape – are almost certainly intended to attract your attention by standing out from the usual #10 envelope package.
Also, on the national level, so-called “Moderate” Republicans will nonetheless vote for budget-busting tax cuts without explicitly stating what sort of spending they want to cut.
Remember, not one single Republican voted for the Clinton tax increase on high income groups that established the foundation for the prosperity of the 1990s, along with the sound monetary policy performed by Al Greenspan.
As long as true fiscal conservatives like Kaisich, Anderson or Peterson, are banished into the wilderness, a National Republican candidate is unlikely to get my vote.*
For state and local politics I would in practice consider voting Republican, OTOH, although it is rare that I would find reason to.
- I suppose if I moved to AZ, I might conceivably change my mind. In cases of political corruption, I’d probably cast my ballot for a 3rd party candidate.
[quote]
KellyM: …Amnesty International, and countless other left-wing organizations…
What is so “left-wing” about defending people from torture and violence? Thanks for giving us all the credit, but I don’t think that we (liberals) have a monopoly on wanting to promote human dignity. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1977/press.html
(For the presentation speech of the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International)
[/hijack]
What is to keep just anyone from sending out such a fund-raising letter and claiming to be the RNC?
Yikes! What’s to keep someone from sending out Sofa King’s letter???
Yeah, that would be a real… shame, wouldn’t it? Pity.
…
On a totally unrelated note, I’m off to Kinko’s. Anyone need anything?
Argh–this is one of the things I really don’t like about the fundraising biz. Everybody knows that Courier is the best font to use, that people respond best to letters in red ink, blah blah blah. Everybody does it, but nobody knows why. Mustn’t rock the boat. Everybody steals ideas from everybody else.
I swear, the motto of the fundraising business is “But we’ve always done it this way…”
five hundered it is!
Donuts.
But none for Homer.