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Here are a few miscellaneous things from my afternoon trawl of the news:

Thing the first:

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is in talks with President Donald Trump’s administration about taking an ambassadorship position, according to sources close to the governor. No offer has been extended yet, according to The Star’s sources, but the governor has discussed the possibility of taking a position as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for food and agriculture, a position that would move the Midwestern governor to Rome.

The ambassador for what? There are two takeaways from this: (a) Trump really doesn’t want Brownback in his administration, and (b) Brownback really wants to get out of Kansas. His tenure as governor has been a nonstop trainwreck, highlighted by his huge tax cuts for the rich that have tanked the state’s economy. There’s really no way to fix things without raising taxes, so Brownback just wants to hightail it out of the governor’s mansion and leave the problem to somebody else. And hey, Rome is a nice place for an exile.

Thing the second:

Check out this picture of Trump holding a conference in the Oval Office:

Trump is apparently so insecure that he holds every conference from behind his desk, even when it involves seven people. Who does that? In all the pictures I’ve seen before of presidents, they’re out from behind the desk sitting on a chair or a sofa on equal terms with everyone else. But Trump seems to need the desk to remind himself that he’s in charge.

Thing the third:

This is just a bit of a ramble that’s on my mind. I’ve been trying to figure out how to respond to the Republican health care plan, but nothing seems quite right. I’ve written plenty about the details, and so have others, but none of this really gets the true story across.

Here’s the thing: anyone with even a cursory knowledge of health care knows that the Republican plan isn’t serious. Paul Ryan knows it. Mitch McConnell knows it. Mike Pence knows it. Mick Mulvaney knows it. Everyone knows it. It’s just a cynical joke. It will cover virtually no one, and will quite possibly destroy the individual insurance market in the process. Its only purpose is to repeal about $600 billion in taxes on the rich.

This is not really controversial or even very partisan. The plan just doesn’t do much of anything for anybody except the rich. But we’re all expected to stroke our chins and pretend that it’s a serious proposal that should be seriously analyzed. There’s something badly wrong about this. Why do we all have to do this?

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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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