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Sometimes I wake up and I’m instantly confused. My twitter stream is blazing with snark over some topic that I’ve never heard of, and every individual tweet simply assumes you know what the fuss is about. Today it’s #nolabels. WTF?

Well, it turns out that No Labels is the latest centrist brainchild of….someone. I’m not sure who. But it features such luminaries as Evan Bayh, Joe Lieberman, Michael Bloomberg, David Gergen, and a bunch of others. And what are they all about? I’m not sure. A pragmatic and sensible approach to our nation’s problems, of course, and God knows I’m OK with that, but beyond that it’s not clear. I browsed through their Issues page, but it was mostly just explanations of problems and links to reports and white papers from other organizations.

I don’t want to be instantly cynical about this. Who knows? Maybe it will catch on. But I dunno. Issues are pretty important to people, and No Labels categorically ignores social issues and doesn’t go much further on the rest of the issue spectrum either, saying “we don’t want to prejudge or lock ourselves into a given position on any issue when there is a much bigger cause that can unify us as Americans.”

Maybe. Turning down the outrage-o-meter certainly sounds like a good idea, but I’m not sure it means much to have a civil discussion if you don’t actually engage with all the stuff that normally turns our political discourse uncivil in the first place. In any case, now you know.

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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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