From: Gary Britt 

Yep,  I've given several earfuls over the past year and no money.  They've
stopped calling, which I regret because I really like telling them off when
they do.  They usually start off the call with we need you to support
President Bush, thinking that is a positive to the grass roots.  Sadly,
that moron for whom I had no choice but to vote twice is not the way to get
money out of me and a large portion of their base.  Immigration was the
last straw to holding our tongues about his incompetence and the
incompetence of the entire republican party leadership.

Gary

Rich Gauszka wrote:
> Looks like Gary did withhold his donations ;-)
>
> "We have not heard anyone in our donor calls who supported the president on
> immigration," said a fired phone solicitor
>
>  http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20070601-122909-8977r.htm
>
> The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion
> over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone
> solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.
>
>     Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions
> and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to
> update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the
> solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective
> immediately, fired staff members told The Times.
>
>     Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining
> contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now
> being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.
>
>     "Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the
> last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1
> issue," said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC
> agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national
> committee.
>
> A spokeswoman for the committee denied any drop-off in fundraising.
>     "Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is
patently false,"
> RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail yesterday in response to
> questions sent by The Times. "We continue to out-raise our Democrat
> counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double)."
>
>     Miss Schmitt said terminating the phone solicitation staff "was not an
> easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the
> phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC
> was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable."
>     She also said that "the changing ways in which people choose to
> contribute" meant that the RNC's in-house phone bank "was
simply no longer
> cost effective, although unfortunate."
>
>     The fired staffers said the equipment was aging and it was probably more
> cost effective to farm out the phone-bank operations to the eight or more
> private firms also handling similar solicitations for donations to the RNC.
> But the ex-employees said the sharp drop-off in donations "probably"
> hastened the end of the in-house operation.
>
>     "Last year, my solicitations totaled $164,000, and this year the way
> they were running for the first four months, they would total $100,000 by
> the end of 2007," said another fired phone-bank employee who
asked not to be
> identified.
>
>     Previous Republican donors have given RNC solicitors an earful about the
> proposed immigration measure.
>
>     "We have not heard anyone in our donor calls who supported
the president
> on immigration," said a fired phone solicitor, who described himself as a
> Republican activist.
>
>

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5