September 16, 2015

Debate Liveblogging Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern: Come See if Kevin Can Make It Through the Whole Thing

Tom Stathis/AP

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Updated: Read more live updates here

Last night my editor asked if I was planning to liveblog today’s debate. Sure, I said. I always think I’m going to swear off this stuff eventually, but then I cave in yet again. So, yes, I’ll be liveblogging Donald and Ben and the nine dwarfs.

But wait! This thing is three hours long? And I’m promising to liveblog it? Whose lunatic idea was this?

I figure maybe this is meant as a destruction test, sort of like American Ninja Warrior. Sure, you feel fine at first. You’re halfway through and your arms are strong and loose. Then you hit the salmon ladder and start to feel a twinge. And then the swinging tires. You barely make it. You stop to take a breath, but your body just can’t take much more. Sure enough, when you try to take on the Psycho Chain, your body rebels, and it’s into the drink.

Maybe we’ll see the same thing tonight. After 90 minutes, everyone is still feeling pumped. After 120 minutes, they’re having a little trouble finding the right words. Finally, around the 150-minute mark, their minds are foggy and their legs are tired and the tension becomes too much. Everyone starts having their own “oops” moments.

Diabolical, isn’t it? If it doesn’t work, I recommend making the next debate an all-day affair, 6 a.m. to midnight. That’ll weed out the pretenders from the folks who really have the desire and commitment to become the next American Ninja President.

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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.

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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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