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In a column about Michael Bloomberg’s slow but steady takeover of New York City politics, Michael Tomasky notes that Bloomberg was aided and abetted by the slow but steady deterioration of the city’s Democratic Party:

I covered its demise as well as Bloomberg’s ascent. The former was far more gruesome to watch. In a city that’s six-to-one Democratic in voter enrolment, there isn’t really a plausible mayor among the dozens of elected Democrats who represent the city or some portion of it at the federal, state and local levels.

This sounds eerily familiar.  Here in the great state of California, there are something like 10 million registered Democrats.  It’s one of the bluest states in the country.  And yet, when it comes time to find someone to run for governor, there’s no one to choose from.  When San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the race a few days ago, my first thought wasn’t about Newsom at all.  My first thought was, “Jerry Brown?  Seriously?”  But yes: Jerry Brown, a 70-year-old guy who’s already been governor twice is now the only Democrat running for governor.  That’s the best we could do.

The GOP isn’t in much better shape, either.  Their leading candidate right now is eBay zillionaire Meg Whitman, who barely seemed to know the Republican Party even existed until a couple of years ago.  But hey — at least they have two other candidates as well, even if they aren’t exactly household names.

Jeez.  Jerry Brown. A guy who almost literally won’t tell you what he thinks about anything or what he’d like to do as governor.  That’s it.  That’s all that California’s Democratic Party can produce for the 2010 election.  Yikes.

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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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