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On Friday, in Strasbourg, President Obama said:

I know that there have been honest disagreements over policy, but we also know that there’s something more that has crept into our relationship.

In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America’s shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.

But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what’s bad.

Ali Frick, who, like Obama, has a foreign sounding name and obviously hates America, notes with a sneer that Sean Hannity chose to highlight only the second paragraph of this before declaring that “the liberal tradition of ‘blame America first,’ well, that’s still alive.”  Nice try, Ali.  But Hannity is right: Obama may have blamed Europe second, but he blamed America first, didn’t he?  What’s the problem?

Also worth noting: Mike Huckabee fulsomely agreed with Hannity, and everyone knows that he’s the friendly, cuddly version of right-wing nutcasery.  Since Huckabee didn’t object, that must mean Hannity was being fair and balanced, as usual.

(But seriously: Sean Hannity is still obsessing over Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright?  Jeebus. Can’t he come up with some slightly fresher canard to hurl into the insane-o-sphere five nights a week?  Like maybe Obama is a golem or something?  He’s not going to keep this up for eight years, is he?)

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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.

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