Republican Candidates Agree on List of Debate Demands

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After last week’s CNBC fiasco, Republican candidates for president are meeting tonight to discuss their conditions for participating in future debates. A source with one of the campaigns has been texting me from inside the meeting with a list of their demands:

  1. There will be no “gotcha” questions about math.
  2. All graphics that appear beside candidates must be approved by the campaign.
  3. There will be a ten-minute break halfway through the debate.
  4. Each candidate will be allowed to phone a friend for one question.
  5. All 14 candidates will be allowed on the main stage. At the end of each 15-minute period, candidates will vote one participant out of the debate. In the final round, the seven remaining candidates will get to ask the moderators questions.
  6. No non-English speaking networks will be allowed to participate.
  7. Each podium will include the candidate’s website address in a minimum of 3-inch type.
  8. Male moderators must wear red ties.
  9. Each campaign will be allowed to veto a maximum of two moderators each.
  10. Fox News will be exempt from all these rules.
  11. Candidates can “steal” a question from another candidate once per debate.
  12. Frank Luntz “dial” responses will be run across the screen in real time.

Three of these are real and have been seriously discussed. Can you guess which ones? Answer here.

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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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