Top Ten Winners of the Budget Showdown Debacle


Conventional wisdom has it that President Obama was a winner in the budget showdown, John Boehner was a loser, everyone hates Ted Cruz, blah blah blah. But that stuff will all blow over within days. Here’s a top ten list of the real winners:

Wall Street: They didn’t panic because they figured Congress would do the right thing at the last second, just like always. They were right.

Kathleen Sebelius: If not for the shutdown, the media would have focused its attention 24/7 on the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. By now, Sebelius would be in about the same mental shape as the House stenographer if Republicans hadn’t helpfully covered for her.

Pandas: For two weeks, anyway, they got to grow up without millions of prying eyes following their every move and cooing about how cute they are.

Netflix: Furloughed federal workers had plenty of free time on their hands, and a lot of them turned to Netflix to fill all those empty hours.

Robert Costa: He was everyone’s go-to reporter for the inside scoop on what Republicans were thinking at each step along the way. A new job and a big raise can’t be too far off.

Iran: Benjamin Netanyahu wants everyone to be outraged over Iran’s peace overtures, but no one is listening. For the moment, anyway, Obamacare is the only existential threat that American conservatives have time for.

China: They want to see a “de-Americanized world.” After watching the know-nothing takeover of the American government by the tea party, horrified leaders across the globe are inclined to think that’s not such a bad idea.

Random House: Following Ted Cruz’s epic filibuster, Green Eggs and Ham is all set to become the Christmas present of choice for millions of devoted tea partiers this holiday season.

The World War II Memorial: I’ve been there, and it’s really not a very good memorial. But now it’s the infamous site of the Barrycade! Attendance should skyrocket.

Democrats: They actually stuck together! Can you believe it? Republican overreach was so egregious that it accomplished in two weeks what no one in history had managed to accomplish in over two centuries. Will Rogers is spinning in his grave.

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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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