October 16, 2009

Today’s Mystery Guest Cat: Shinobi

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It’s Laura, dropping off Kevin and David’s Friday Week-in-Review podcast, the latest mystery guest cat pic, and a public service announcement on marriage from MoJo blogger Kate Sheppard.

First, the podcast: Where is the GOP hiding all the other Olympia Snowes? What made Kevin decide (thus far) not to get a flu shot this year? And why does David think Glenn Beck still has his work cut out for him in Laura’s home state of Tennessee? Listen to the latest Week-In-Review here.

PSA: If you’re planning a wedding in Louisiana, here a few things to remember about the state marriage laws: Marriage at age 16? Ok! Interracial marriage to first cousin once removed? Maybe!

And congrats to Guest Cat #3, appearing balloon boy-free in Kevin’s Drum Beat newsletter today and below. [For Kevin’s newsletter-exclusive weekly bonus post and mystery cat news, sign up here.]

Reader MNPundit: Meet Shinobi, 6, and a total moron. He loves to run up to people and rub them or play fetch with bottle caps and hair ties. He also is addicted to licking plastic bags until he throws up, then running back to lick them again until we have to hide them. I did win the chess match against him though.

Laura McClure hosts weekly podcasts and is a writer, editor, and sometime geek for Mother Jones. Read her recent investigative feature on lifehacking gurus here.

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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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