October 13, 2008

Freedom vs. Big Government: Palin Can’t Do the Math

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The political news of the day is John McCain’s new stump speech. But there was an interesting Sarah Palin moment, as well.

Introducing McCain at the Virginia Beach rally where he unveiled his I-will-fight-fight-fight-fight speech, Palin, playing to the GOP base, declared that she and McCain believe in the “advancement of freedom,” not the “expansion of government.”

This is conservative cant: big government threatens individual freedoms. Think black helicopters coming to take your guns away. But has Palin not been reading the news about her own campaign? Her ticket supports the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan, which will give the Treasury secretary expanded power. And McCain has called on the federal government to buy up bad mortgages across the country, at a cost of $300 billion or so. The math is kind of simple here: that’s about $1 trillion in government expansion.

The question for Governor Palin is, does that mean $1 trillion less in freedom?

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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.

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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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