I can't take it anymore. Today President Obama signs into law the largest spending package in American History. For what? To rebuild a country after a devastating war? No! More money!
787 Billion dollars. Well I sat down to read the stimulus bill last night. All 1000 pages of it.
I didn't get far before realizing it had hand written changes on it! I think these bozos voted in something they didn't even read!
Well I sat down and wrote a formal protest letter today which just happened to fulfill #232 and #241.
I'll be sending it to the President, Vice President, and every Arkansas Senator and representative.
Not to mention several media outlets.
It's time to speak out America.

February 17, 2009

The President

The White House

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Abraham Lincoln.

The name is iconic as the flag itself. His presidency and his life define what being an American entails. The rise from humble beginnings to the struggle for his, and everyone else’s, way of life could be a template for what it is to be an American. His decisions still affect the way we govern and the way we approach controversy.

His greatness was immediately recognized as future presidents would attempt to emulate him. Teddy Roosevelt even carried around a lock of his hair in a ring on his finger. Even you, sir, have drawn parallels between him and yourself.

In Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, he addresses America’s new birth of freedom with the statement, “and that government of the people, for the people, and by the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

For the people.

The latest “stimulus package” that you have adroitly sped through congress, no doubt paying back some of your more lucrative supporters, is nowhere near “for the people”.

And what exactly was the hurry? On February 9 you told the citizens of Elkhart, Ind., “If we don't act immediately, our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse."

Immediately? Really? Some of the things in this bill are estimated to not even be felt for years. I’m pretty sure your campaign slogan on a few bumper stickers read, “Hope, not fear.” It sure sounds as though we were being ‘scared’ into compliance. So much in fact that either, our congressmen and senators didn’t READ the bill, or they knocked it out at the neck break speed of around 100 pages per day. I’d wager the former.

After the circus that was the “stimulus” bill has now passed and being signed today, you had the gall to call for a “fiscal responsibility summit” when moving on the budget deficit!

Sir, with all due respect, with the passage of the “stimulus” bill, you have amazingly spent well over $34 billion dollars per day since you took the oath of office.

Sir, I know you admire President Lincoln as do most Americans. But might I offer some plebian advice? It is from another famous American that I try to emulate daily.

“Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work; they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's children. To do so we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.”

--- President Theodore Roosevelt

From his first Inaugural address

I state all of these concerns after spending hours reading the “stimulus” bill.

Have you?

Sincerely,

Chris Chamberlain, Pharm.D.

Member of the working class of 2009