May 16, 2016

My 6 Favorite Candidates for Senator From California

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Here in California it’s not hard to run for a Senate seat. It costs $3,480, which you can pay for in money or in signatures at the going rate of 34.8 cents per signature. This year, 34 people are competing for the seat opened up by Barbara Boxer’s retirement.

The favorite to win the Democratic nomination—and therefore become our future junior senator since the California Republican Party is a hopeless wreck—is Kamala Harris. But Harris is a serious politician, which means that her statement in the voting pamphlet is serious too. And boring. Others are far more interesting. Here are my favorite half dozen:

Massie Munroe
Finally, someone will put a stop to mind control slavery and saturate our job markets for five more centuries. Also: she’s a big Bernie Sanders fan.

AKINYEMI OLABODE AGBEDE
Rescue America!

PRESIDENT CRISTINA GRAPPO
I don’t know what she’s president of, but she’s mainstream Facebook.

JASON HANANIA
The robots are here, and one of them is running for the Senate. However, his campaign slogan is cryptic. Is Hanania a fan of 101 Dalmations? Is he promoting use of the lower case e? Is his brain constructed of mendelevium? Does he like driving from Los Angeles to Seattle?

HERBERT G. PETERS
Peters is apparently one of the few remaining admirers of Franklin Pierce, thanks to Pierce’s 1854 veto of a bill for the support of mentally ill indigents. Pierce issued his veto on the basis of states rights, which fit well with his support of slavery on the same grounds. Bygones.

LING LING SHI
We must fight the 10 giant chaos.

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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.

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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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