President Barack Obama and Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), in happier days. | White House photo/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/3859976149/">Pete Souza</a> (<a href="http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml">Government Work</a>).

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The big political news today is that Sen. Evan Bayh (D–Ind.) has decided not to run for reelection. He made this decision four days before the deadline for candidates to qualify for the June primary ballot, leaving Democrats in a considerable bind. Dave Weigel:

Here are two measures of what a surprise this is. One: Ken Spain, spokesman for the NRCC, simply tweets “unreal” as he begins a series of observations about what this means for Democrats. Two: a Democratic strategist confirms to me that Bayh didn’t let anyone at any level of the party know about this, and shares with me an expletive I won’t share about the man himself.

Luke Russert tweets:Amazing, Bayh told his staff he was done on Friday and didn’t call Harry Reid until 25 minutes ago!!!” If that’s true, it’s pretty remarkable behavior even for someone as famously callow as Bayh.

So why did he quit so suddenly? His official statement says he’s frustrated with the Senate because there is “too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.” Maybe. Alternatively, he’s tired of taking hits from party liberals, who aren’t exactly fans of his ostentatious centrism and bipartisan preening. That’s pretty much Marc Ambinder’s take:He wanted to be POTUS and came to hate the Senate and liberal activists. He wanted no mas.”

In any case, Bayh had already raised $13 million for his reelection campaign, and up until a few days ago he was assuring party leaders that he would run. Pulling out at this late date is a pretty explicit show of pique, and an obvious gift to Republicans, whose odds of picking up Indiana in November just went way up. Bayh didn’t quite give Democrats the finger on his way out, but he did everything short of it.

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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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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.

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