September 17, 2018

Rip Van Kevin Wakes Up and Surveys the Day

Behold the fabulous new Apple Watch, which for some reason will not be subject to Donald Trump's new tariffs. Lucky Apple.Apple Inc.

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Under normal circumstances, Thursday is evil dex day and Sunday is crash day. This is just the nature of the beast. Three days after taking the stuff, it wears off and I crash for five or six hours.

But this week I took the dex on Friday, so today was crash day. But this was no ordinary crash: I think the lights went out around 10 am and I didn’t fully pull out of it until 6 pm. I have no idea what made it so extreme this time, but I’m now seriously thinking of following my doctor’s advice (or permission, I suppose) to just go ahead and reduce the dex from 20 mg to 12 mg each week. This is ridiculous.

So what happened while I was basically in a coma?

  • Donald Trump decided to raise taxes on American consumers yet again, this time by $20 billion. This tax is known as a “tariff” by some, but it’s still a tax. Where is Grover Norquist when you need him?
  • Trump has also decided to unilaterally declassify a bunch of documents related to the Russia investigation. This is insane. It’s an ongoing investigation, and he’s obviously doing this solely in the desperate hope that somewhere in all the texts and warrants and interviews there will be some snippets he can use to fuel yet more Twitter rants about how unfairly he’s being treated. How long are Republicans going to let him do this?
  • Larry Kudlow went on TV this morning and said our deficits are too high. But this is absolutely not because of the Republican tax bill. No way. The problem is that we’re spending too much on entitlements and they need to be cut—after the election, of course. “Entitlements” is code for either (a) Social Security and Medicare, or (b) spending on the poor. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Kudlow is probably thinking of (b).

If we’re grading on a curve, I suppose this counts as a pretty average day. Of course, we’re also dealing with the aftermath of a huge hurricane and we have a Supreme Court nominee who’s been credibly accused of attempted rape. In the Trump Era, though, I suppose even this isn’t enough to nudge the needle very far off normal.

BY THE WAY: This came up at the panel discussion I was on last Thursday, so I’m going to repeat it now. Despite the intense craziness of the Trump presidency, I still fundamentally believe the world is plodding along pretty normally. Liberal democracy is doing fine. Anti-immigrant sentiment is temporary. Brexit is a fluke. It’s unsurprising that a couple of eastern European countries are backsliding on authoritarianism. The economy is OK.

On a scale of zero to World War II, the current threats to liberal democracy are barely noticeable. Donald Trump is an insect compared to Mao or Stalin or Hitler or even peanuts like Nasser or Noriega. Brexit is stupid, but Britain will survive. Vladimir Putin may want to recreate the Soviet empire, but so far he’s managed to recover only a few square miles. And the Middle East is the same as it’s been for the past half century.

I sure hope everyone helps prove me right—or at least helps to get the ball rolling on proving me right—in November.

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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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