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A friend of mine from Virginia forwarded an email to me today from the NRCC.  It started like this:

After the spending spree the Democrats have gone on in 2009, you better believe there will be a backlash in 2010. As all Americans are tightening their belts to weather the Pelosi Recession, her Democrat puppets just voted to extend their credit limit. What they don’t realize is that their bills are past due and next fall, we’ll have the opportunity to collect by sending them home. Etc. etc.

I laughed it off, but he wasn’t having any:

Not to be too presumptuous, but you might want to share the fundraiser (or parts of it) with your readers because Democrats better get off their butts soon and start pushing back and getting a lot more energized or we are going to get our clocks cleaned in 2010.

The main reason Bob McDonnell won in Virginia last month was Democratic exhaustion. After the 2008 election, most Virginia Democrats were emotionally and financially exhausted. We were in such a stupor we foolishly (and quite lazily) allowed Creigh to get the nomination. I can’t tell you the number of usually-politically-plugged-in friends who were calling me a month before the election asking me who were the Democratic nominees for Lt. Governor and Attorney General.

We can’t afford for that to be the prevailing national mood among Democrats in 2010. There is way too much at stake and it’s time to rally the Democratic troops, left, right and moderate. We really cannot afford to allow the Republicans to seize control of either the House or the Senate but if we behave like Virginia Democrats just did, that will almost surely be the case.

Comments?  Is lefty obsession with the public option going to torpedo Dems in 2010?  Or will everyone manage to get energized in time for the midterms?  I live in California, where elections are almost all preordained, so it’s hard for me to judge.  What’s it like in the rest of the country?

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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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