June 26, 2009

Friday Cat Blogging – 26 June 2009

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I’m subbing for Kevin until Tuesday. He’s probably not leaving his room, so he can watch all the Michael Jackson coverage.

Okay, I don’t like cats. I’m allergic to cats. They make me sneeze. Once, a tabby clawed me and my arm swelled up. I looked like The Hulk. Or, part of The Hulk. Two years back, I did rescue a cat, and now it lives in the house across the street and visits our yard regularly. I named it Miles. Why? Just seemed to fit. But that was an exception. Whatcha gonna do when a living creature gets caught in brush behind a fence? Just listen it to it yelp while you’re lying in a hammock swatting mosquitos? Nah, you gotta do something, right? So I did. But don’t get the wrong impression. I don’t like cats. Dogs are jake with me–but some make me wheeze. Which is why my kids want a Portuguese Water Dog. Hypo-allergenic, they say. Yeah, right. It sure doesn’t hurt that Sasha and Malia got one–which, I’m betting, raised the price of a PWD pup by a factor of twelve. Can’t wait to go shopping for one of those.

But I’m off-topic. Cats. Cat blogging. Just. Don’t. Get. It. But tradition–that I understand. Keeping customers satisfied–that I really understand. Don’t want to lose no eyeballs. So if the cables can go wacko over Jacko, I can go bats over cats. That is, with the help of longtime Kevin Drum reader BH, who foreseeing my dilemma emailed me pics of his kitties. At least, he says they’re his cats. On the Internet, who knows? Names: Walter and Milo. And I don’t know nothing else about them. So here’s your cat blog.

Milo sitting in an IKEA chair. I hope he didn’t have to assemble it.

Walter and Milo after a fight. If only Angelina and Megan could make up so easily

 

 

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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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