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On Rachel Maddow tonight, former Democratic presidential nominee and always liberal heartthrob Senator Elizabeth Warren gave many hearts reasons to flutter and many other brows reason to wrinkle:

God knows who will be Biden’s VP pick. But will God go on TV and tell us? Probably not. It’s fun to follow all of this in a very distraction-y way—What pandemic?—and in most cases I imagine this would be not worthy of faces contouring in any way, but in Elizabeth Warren’s case it is! And it’s not entertainment. And not a distraction. She is a liberal icon who cut her teeth in wars of not dissimilar substance after the last economic crash. She and Biden went to battle once over bankruptcy, but recently, recognizing her influence, he bowed to her position.

It is fascinating to think of the science of traffic: how do people get where they go? How do they get on one road and not the other? How do they not mistake the highway for…the other highway? That’s life. And, as ever, we’re all haunted by the roads not taken, and they inhibit the choices we make when we approach the next interchange. If I take exit 3, will I regret it?

“Of all the words of mice and men the saddest are what might have been.” That’s true of VP selections too, I guess.

Anyway, i have no better idea who should be VP than you, which makes me think of a thing: who do you think should be the VP? Tell me in the comments!

 

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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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