Have You Gotten Your Invitation Yet?

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HAVE YOU GOTTEN YOUR INVITATION YET?….According to the New York Times, the printing company that won the bid to produce a million inaugural invitations for Barack Obama is located in the unlikely sounding town of Dumbo. But no. It’s not Dumbo. It’s DUMBO, which trusty Mr. Google informs me is a Brooklyn acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” Jeebus. Do New Yorkers have acronyms for everything? If we did this here in Irvine, my neighborhood would be called something like JAFEC — “Just Above the Freeway East of Culver” — which, come to think of it, might be an improvement. Probably wouldn’t pass muster with the local association, though.

Elsewhere in the Times piece we learn why this particular company was chosen:

According to Mr. Donnelly, Precise Continental was selected over rival printers because it is a union company, it uses recycled paper and it is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which promotes responsible forest management.

Of course! But I wonder what the equivalent kind of thing would be for a Republican inauguration? A print shop whose health plan doesn’t cover Plan B and encourages its employees to come to work packing? Or just a straight-up reward for whatever printing mogul bundled the largest number of maxed-out contributions to the campaign?

There’s even a tangential personal connection in the story in this sentence: “The first order arrived by truck on Monday, from Neenah Paper, a Wisconsin company.” An old high school friend of mine works for Neenah Paper, so I’m glad to hear they got the order. I haven’t actually heard from this friend since, um, high school, but still — good work, guys.

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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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