Like anybody, I get a lot of junk mail. Because I’m a registered voter, I get mail from my Assemblywoman, my Representative, and both my Senators. Because I’m a registered Republican, I get mail from the Republican Party.

I got a "party census document" the other day purporting to be asking my views on political issues. Naturally, it was really just a thinly-veiled request for donations. The fill-in-the-bubble form sought contributions in the gradations of $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, and Second Mortgage. I declined to make a donation in any of those amounts, my eye wandering down to the cop-out response of "Gee, I’d like to help, but…"

Interestingly, selecting the cheapskate option pledges me to enclose $11 "to cover the cost of tabulating my survey". Eleven bucks? To run a bubble-form through a reading machine? Who the hell did they hire to tabulate these surveys? Halliburton?