The GOP’s Reality Distortion Field

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People used to jokingly refer to Steve Jobs’s “reality distortion field,” his ability to convince the public that Apple’s products existed on a plane of revolutionary awesomeness that no other company in history had ever matched. This is pretty much how I feel when I listen to Republican debates. They seem to take place in some kind of weird extra-dimensional bubble in which mundane laws of evidence and logic are no longer considered necessary. Paul Waldman captures this magical thinking in last night’s debate:

  1. Health care in general, and Medicare in particular, are bankrupting our country.
  2. But government should never try to figure out which treatments are effective.
  3. Medicare should pay for any treatment anyone wants, regardless of whether it works or what it costs.
  4. If an insurance company refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s their right as actors in the free market; if Medicare refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s Washington bureaucrats trying to kill you.
  5. We need to cut Medicare benefits, because don’t forget it’s bankrupting our country.

That’s about the shape of it: Medicare costs too much, but all proposed cuts to Medicare are a death sentence for seniors. Unless, of course, those cuts are really, really deep and come from Paul Ryan. Don’t try to make sense of it. It will just make your head hurt.

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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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