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Ezra Klein spots a trend:

My colleague Binyamin Appelbaum noticed something interesting yesterday: Robin Hood movies are tied to recessions. We’re talking here about the adult Robin Hood movies. So set aside “Men in Tights” and the Disney cartoon. Instead, look at first major Robin Hood film, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”. Release date? 1938. Similarly, “Prince of Thieves” came out in 1991, another recessionary year. And I ran a quick Google search: Sure enough, there’s another Robin Hood movie slated for May of 2010.

1938 marked the first major Robin Hood film?  Please.  I claim a point of personal privilege.  My father’s name was Dale Douglas Drum.  His first name was based on the character Allan-a-Dale and his middle name was taken from the actor Douglas Fairbanks.  Why?  Because shortly before he was born my grandparents had seen the 1922 version of Robin Hood starring Fairbanks and the names were fresh in their heads.  It was quite famous in its day.  But was there a recession in 1922?

Decide for yourself.  NBER says there was an 18-month recession from January 1920 to July 1921 and a 14-month recession from May 1923 to July 1924.  So it was a generally contractionary period.  But 1922 itself?  Recession free!  I claim a foul.

In related news, my father was born in 1926, which just goes to show how long it took movies to make their way into smaller cities back then.  The good citizens of Portland get better treatment from Hollywood these days.

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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.

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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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