Welcome to the 1990s Version 2.0

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Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the pride of Bakersfield and most likely our next Speaker of the House, was on Sean Hannity’s show last night. He assured Hannity that he would be a conservative speaker with a strategy to fight and win:

“And let me give you one example. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known that any of that had happened had we not fought to make that happen.”

That appears to be a reference to Clinton’s private server email woes.

Ya think? Benghazi is the modern version of Whitewater. I think everyone knows perfectly well that there’s nothing there and never has been, but it gives Republicans an institutional base to issue subpoenas and basically poke into anything that might hurt Hillary. Just as Whitewater led to Filegate led to the blue dress, Benghazi has led to emailgate, and from there, who knows? But obviously Republicans are hoping that if they just keep the investigation going, eventually they’ll get their blue dress.

It’s worth remembering just how much of the Whitewater investigation was aimed at Hillary back in the day. There were times when she took more hits than Bill. The press played along then, and they’re playing along now. In both cases, there was genuine news that justified a certain amount of coverage. But also in both cases, the amount of coverage was insanely out of sync with the actual evidence of serious wrongdoing. Welcome to the 1990s version 2.0.

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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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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.

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