Who’s the Real Barack Obama?

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WHO’S THE REAL BARACK OBAMA?….Here’s a little Friday morning game for everyone to play. Below are half a dozen desperate right wing luminaries calling Barack Obama half a dozen preposterous names:

McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb: “Barack Obama has a long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American rhetoric.”

Former Republican House leader Tom DeLay: “I tagged him as a Marxist months ago.”

Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann: “I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views. That’s what the American people are concerned about.”

Republican presidential candidate John McCain: “I think his plans are redistribution of the wealth. He said it himself: ‘We need to spread the wealth around’….That’s one of the tenets of socialism.”

National Review contributing editor Stanley Kurtz: “The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.”

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin: “Our opponent though, is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

So Obama is anti-Semitic, Marxist, anti-American, a socialist, an extremist Afrocentrist, and a terrorist sympathizer. And that’s just off the top of my head.

So here’s the game: what else has the McCain campaign and its surrogates called Obama? The only rule is that the name caller has to be someone with credentials: a campaign aide, a national politician, a major league pundit, etc. No obscure bloggers or commenters from Free Republic. What have you got for me?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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