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STIMULUS PILLS?….Conservatives are pretty good at picking tiny pieces out of big bills and making hay with them (remember midnight basketball?), and it was in that spirit that John Boehner spent the weekend complaining that the $800 billion stimulus bill includes $200 million in spending on contraceptives. Today Steve Benen provides the details of what’s really in the bill, and concludes:

It’s likely that Boehner, Drudge, and others hope that they can simply say, “Democrats want to spend $200 million of your money on contraceptives” and the howls will be so loud, the money will be stripped from the spending bill. As is too often the case, they’re assuming the public won’t hear, or care about, the details.

True, but I suspect this is mostly just a base play. Most of the public probably won’t ever hear about this, but you can bet that every religious right newsletter in the country will get the news out to their readers. And they’ll know that John Boehner is working to keep family values safe.

Whatever. But here’s the funny thing: culture war issues aside, this is probably pretty good stimulus. If you eliminate the requirement for states to get Medicaid waivers in order to fund family planning, lots of low-income women will take advantage of it, and they’ll probably take advantage of it pretty quickly. That’s a boon for the contraceptive industry and all the fine people who work in it. Just be sure to buy American!

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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.

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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.

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