D. Duane Wall ll (“Some protest,” April 16) called tax-day tea-party protesters fools and idiots, calling their actions “teabagging,” a term MSNBC coined to insult the tea-party protesters: an inside joke, I guess, since most of the country had no clue what it meant at first. We just thought they were being their usual difficult selves with silly one-liners.
 
I will tell you why I participated. I am a Democrat who is disappointed in the promise to be transparent, to read the stimulus before signing, and the promise to have no more pork: it was all a lie. I’m not putting this on President Obama as much as I am Congress. President Obama gave a small tax break but the State of California is basically taking it away. The president is giving money to those who have been laid off and are receiving unemployment insurance, which I think is the right thing to do; but not these huge bailouts to private corporations. How about federal loans to small businesses? So far the banks are not giving them, as the first bailout money from President Bush was supposed to help accomplish. President Obama taught us about the power of community activism and we listened. I suggest that Wall should find a better way of getting news than MSNBC, the Looney Tunes news.