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Howard Kurtz says that Sarah Palin is losing her mojo:

16 months after   [Fox] network chief Roger Ailes closed [a $3 million TV] deal in a meeting with Palin and her husband, Todd, the excitement has cooled. Palin’s regular appearances as a commentator no longer move the ratings needle without a promotional push. Palin was supposed to host prime-time specials dubbed Real American Stories, but Fox insiders tell me the idea was shelved early on. The first one bombed, losing a chunk of its audience as the show progressed.

….Between February and April, according to an analysis for Newsweek by General Sentiment, a company that tracks and measures online content, posts involving Palin fell 38.3 percent, to 235,032, over the past 30 days. Social-media mentions dropped in lockstep, down 32 percent over the same period, to 135,421.

Maybe this is due to her Tucson misstep, or her “blood libel” inanity, or maybe her semi-defense of birthers. But I think Kurtz has missed the real reason: Dana Milbank’s one-month boycott of all things Palin in February. I joined in on that, and you know what? After 30 days of cold turkey I was pretty much cured. Ignoring Sarah Palin turned out to be a lot easier than I thought, and by the time March rolled around I didn’t much care about her anymore. I think I’ve only mentioned her once or twice since then.

Fame is a fickle thing, I’m afraid, especially when you have nothing of actual substance to be famous about. In that department, it turned out that Sarah Palin’s half-life was even shorter than the Kardashian family’s.

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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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