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Here’s the last year’s worth of answers to a Washington Post poll question about whether or not the government should regulate greenhouse gases even if it costs you an extra 25 bucks a month.  As you can see, in the most recent survey support for regulation jumped from 39% to 55%.

Over at NRO, Kathryn Jean Lopez takes this as evidence of trickery on the Post’s part.  In previous polls they asked how you’d feel if your electric bill went up $25, but in the latest poll they asked how you’d feel if your energy bill went up by $25.  “And so 55 percent wanted to feel good,” she says, “and could do so with the less direct question.”

I think I’d take a wee bit different lesson from this: polls like this are lousy indicators of true public opinion.  Asking about “energy costs” isn’t nefarious, it’s just more accurate since cap-and-trade affects all energy, not just electricity.  Still, the change in public opinion is surprisingly strong anyway, which mostly goes to show that there are a lot of people who simply don’t have very strong opinions on this topic.  And that in turn means there’s a pretty wide scope for public opinion to be influenced.  How are we doing on that?

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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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