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UNEMPLOYMENT….The unemployment rate jumped to 6.1% last month. The chart on the right is courtesy of Brad DeLong, who says simply, “It’s already as deep in the unemployment metric as the 1980 recession.”

Which, of course, makes it all the more remarkable that the Republican Party just held a 4-day nationally televised convention with dozens of speakers and managed to only barely even mention the economy. John McCain finally got around to it last night, briefly mentioning “tough times” and then devoting a few sentences to the subject, but that was about it. And his heart pretty obviously wasn’t in it even for those few sentences.

If McCain loses in November, that’s going to be one of the biggest reasons why. Sarah Palin aside, he simply doesn’t sound like he understands what’s really going on out in the outside world, and when he’s forced to talk about it he has nothing to say. Republican orthodoxy forbids any serious response — forbids, in fact, even the possibility of an effective response other than yet another round of tax cuts — so it’s best to mutter a few bromides and move on. And that’s what he does.

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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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