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When I returned home, I was greeted by a flood of email from one reader asking if I’d post my usual California ballot initiative guide. There are only two of them on tomorrow’s ballot, so why not. In case you don’t remember my general biases about the initiative process (nickel summary: I’d be happy to see it go away completely), you can read about them here. With that out of the way, here’s how I plan to vote:

  1. Term Limits: YES. On balance, term limits are a bad idea. But California voters approved them two decades ago and don’t seem inclined to remove them. Given that, Prop 28 is probably the best we can do right now. Instead of a 14-year term limit, split into six years in the Assembly and eight years in the Senate, it provides for a single 12-year term limit, all of which can be spent in one house. This would eliminate the ridiculous situation California is in now, where top leaders in the Assembly almost never have more than four years of legislative experience. Putting neophytes in charge of legislation is absurd, and we’ve been paying the price for this for a long time. Prop 28 isn’t a panacea, but it’s an improvement.

  1. Cigarette Tax Hike: NO. Regular readers know how I feel about ballot-box budgeting. It’s a scourge. I don’t have a problem with higher cigarette taxes, and yes, cancer research is a worthy cause. But there are lots of worthy causes, and it’s the legislature’s job to figure out which ones deserve funding on a year-to-year basis rather than enshrining specific priorities into law forever. We’re already funding dumb stem cell research and a dumb bullet train thanks to ill-conceived ballot measures, and we’re still paying off the dumb revenue bonds that Governor Arnold foisted on us in 2004. This has to stop. I don’t care how worthy the cause is.

On Prop 29, I’ll concede that reasonable people might think circumstances are special in California. A previous ballot initiative (the infamous Prop 13) requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature to increase taxes, which means that in practical terms there’s really no way for things like cigarette tax hikes to happen aside from ballot measures. That’s true, but I don’t find it convincing. Passing an endless stream of ticky-tack budget patches that become permanent parts of the legal code just isn’t a solution. It only makes things worse. If Californians won’t allow the legislature to increase taxes, they should live with the consequences. Maybe eventually they’ll figure out that this particular piece of Prop 13 was a bad idea.

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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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