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The New Black Panther story never really took off. Shirley Sherrod disappeared from the news after a few days. Birthright citizenship seems to be sliding back under the rock it came from. Thank God, then, for the Ground Zero mosque, which National Journal informs me went “national” while I was gone this weekend:

Until Friday night, the controversy over a proposed mosque near the site of the World Trade Center in NYC was a phenomenon of cable news networks, an obsession in the narrow I-95 corridor. Then, Pres. Obama weighed in.

….House Min. Leader John Boehner signaled GOPers would press the issue in a Saturday statement in which he called both the mosque itself and Obama’s reaction “deeply troubling.” If Boehner’s saying it, most House GOPers will follow suit.

— Associating Obama with the mosque is less geared toward influencing the midterm elections than it is about undermining Obama’s hopes in ’12. GOPers’ goals in ’08 were partly about making Obama seem like the “other,” and criticism during his first term has focused on his efforts at building international cooperation. In a time of economic angst, voters tend to focus inward, and appealing to the international community leaves Obama open to GOP attacks, fair or unfair….Expect Dem candidates across the country to be forced to choose between their president and the GOP’s position.

Meanwhile, over in the New York Times, following in the footsteps of giants, Ross Douthat puts a sophisticated conservative sheen on this latest bout of hysterical bigotry. Aside from the complete lack of actual evidence for anything he says, I especially like his endorsement of both “fair means and foul” to make sure newbies get the message that they need to toe the WASP line. That’s a nice touch.

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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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