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Was I too hard on Bernie Sanders yesterday? Maybe! I mentioned that although he hadn’t done much for Hillary Clinton, he seemed to have plenty of time to campaign against Debbie Wasserman Schultz in her primary race. However, a reader who lives in her district says Bernie didn’t actually do anything:

Sanders was a total no-show, who spent his time between the conventions and now doing nothing as far as anyone can tell.  One visit here might have been enough to swing the election, actually calling around would have helped. So don’t give Sanders even the credit of doing more than saying he was endorsing Canova and then checking out.

OK. Maybe Sanders didn’t really care all that much about DSW. And anyway, as of today he’s finally campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Eric Levitz reports:

At present, the Democratic nominee is struggling to win over the septuagenarian senator’s strongest demographic: Recent polls have shown more than 30 percent of millennial voters defecting to third-party candidates.

In a separate interview on Friday morning, Sanders implored such voters to “think hard” before casting a “protest” ballot. “Think about what the country looks like and think about whether you’re comfortable with four years of a Trump presidency,” Sanders said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And I would suggest to those people: Let us elect Hillary Clinton as president. And the day after, let us mobilize millions of people around the progressive agenda, which, by the way, as you know, was passed in the Democratic platform.”

“This is what I know. In politics too much we look at personality….Don’t get hung up on Trump’s kids and whatever, the story of the birther issue. Stay focused on the issue of relevance to your life. I think Clinton is far and away the superior candidate.

And Sanders will be campaigning for Clinton this weekend in the uber-swing state of Ohio. I wonder if there’s a live feed available? I’ll be very interested to hear what he says. Will it basically be a repeat of his stump speech, focusing on TPP and income inequality and so forth, or will he really campaign for Hillary Clinton? If he does, and if he was just waiting for Labor Day to get going, then all is forgiven.

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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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