May 26, 2016

Today’s PSA: It’s Time to Brush Up On All the Clinton Crap of the 90s

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Yesterday I nominated Joe Conason to write a series of cheat sheets on all the Hillary Clinton “scandals” of the 90s. Today he emailed to beg off, offering an excuse about having to finish up a “book,” which I gather from context is some kind of long, paper-based blog post. Anybody ever heard of this before?

But all is not lost. While we wait for this “book,” it turns out that he and Gene Lyons have created “The Hunting of Hillary,” an abridged version of their original comprehensive look at all the Clinton crap of the 90s. And it’s free! I read most of it over lunch today, and if you need a quick refresher on this stuff, it’s pretty good.

For those of you who are new to all this, I’ll warn you right off that you might initially feel inundated by a horde of Hales and McDougals and Tuckers and Nelsons and Scaifes. Don’t worry, though: it will start to make sense eventually. They’re mostly just various types of unsavory Arkansas political fauna.

Anyway, it’s all here in PDF form, free for nothing more than an email address. I hate to do this to you, but I have a feeling we’re all going to need to brush up on this stuff sooner rather than later. Might as well do it now.

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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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