May 9, 2012

Checking in With Michele Bachmann…

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) signs a supporter's head.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/teambachmann/6545315509/sizes/z/in/photostream/">TeamBachmann</a>/Flickr

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On Tuesday morning, newly christened Swiss citizen Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) blasted out the frantic email to her national supporter network, asking for money:

I’m reaching out to you today because I need your support to continue fighting in the U.S. House of Representatives against President Obama’s big government agenda.

A major development has just occurred in my race for the U.S. House of Representatives and I’m asking for your immediate help…

…You see, in retaliation for repeatedly standing up to President Obama on the national stage, liberal judges have redrawn the lines of my Minnesota Congressional District to try and wipe me off of the political map once and for all.

Their bias was so obvious they even gerrymandered my home—where my wonderful husband Marcus and I live—entirely out of my District and placed it into one held by a six-term Democrat incumbent!

Yikes. Also: totally false. The so-called major development that “just occured” actually happened in February, and in the interim period, Bachmann has sent no fewer than four fundraising emails calling attention to said major development. The “liberal judges” tasked with drawing up Minnesota’s new congressional districts were selected by the state’s chief justice, Lorie Gildea, who was appointed to the bench by former Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. (Just two of the judges on the five-judge redistricting panel were Democratic appointees.)

Although Bachmann sounds deeply hurt that she and Marcus will no longer live in her district, the move actually makes her district more Republican. The redistricting panel swapped Bachmann’s Washington County, a more moderate county that includes suburbs of St. Paul, with a more conservative rural county. (If it makes her feel better, the district still includes Anoka, where she attended high school.) Democrat Jim Graves, the Minneapolis hotel magnate who’s challenging Bachmann this fall, has his hands full.

This isn’t out of the ordinary for Bachmann. As I reported last summer, Bachmann has for years falsely claimed that she was targeted for redistricting by Democrats when she served in the Minnesota state senate. (Then, as now, the redistricting was controlled by a Republican judge, and Bachmann was placed in a conservative-leaning district).

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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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