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Matt Yglesias passes along an email from a reader:

One interesting thing about how much Fox news and friends are covering these tea parties is that it’s illustrative how much conservatism has been transformed from a political movement into an entertainment demographic. Political movements, I would think, are defined by a common set of semi-coherent policies and proposals that movement sympathizers hope to see implemented by government. Entertainment demographics are defined by shared tastes or predilections that media companies can target for ratings.

Actually, doesn’t this apply to all politics these days?  Bob Somerby has been on a tear recently against the snark-based lefty shows on MSNBC hosted by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, for example, and although I don’t buy his entire argument, he does have a point.  Unfortunately, this is just the way things are.  An old saying says that politics is  show business for ugly people, but in the past this mainly meant that politicians themselves were showmen at heart.  Today, though, with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Crossfire and CSPAN and Fox News and Drudge and Politico and Jon Stewart and now MSNBC, the entire enterprise is thoroughly infused with the ethos of Hollywood.  Like it or not, liberals had to get with the program or die.

Given the fact that virtually everything in the world has been entertainment-ized these days, it’s hard to see how politics could have avoided this fate.  Finance is entertainment.  Cooking is entertainment.  Science is entertainment.  Real estate is entertainment.  Sports has always been entertainment.  Hell, entertainment itself is having a hard time competing these days.  What are the odds that politics, of all thing, could have bucked this trend?

I guess about zero.  After all, it’s a better way of making money.  Paddy Chayefsky was right all along.

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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.

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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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