February 22, 2019

Kamala Harris and the Coat of Many Colors

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First it was Kamala Harris and the chicken. Last weekend it was Kamala Harris and the coat of many colors. Robin Abcarian tells us that we are doomed:

It was too much for Very Serious Journalist Brit Hume. “This is just embarrassing,” tweeted the Fox News anchor. “So now journalists are going shopping with Harris, helping pick out clothes and then putting out glowing tweets about it.” James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal chimed in….David Martosko of the Daily Mail added….

….This is the kind of clueless sexism that we can expect to see repeated through the 2020 campaign cycle, particularly as there are so many women running.

When it came to Hume’s arrogant tweet, it wasn’t just his sexism on display. It was also his hypocrisy, and the pernicious double standard that finds virtue in “manly” pursuits such as hunting and skydiving and triviality in “female” pursuits such as shopping.

In 2015, a bunch of political reporters, including MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt and the New York Times’ Ashley Parker, went trap shooting with then-aspiring presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina….No one accused those reporters of getting too cozy with Graham.

I think I’ve made up my mind. I am going to vote for the candidate who generates the greatest amount of idiotic pushback from men on Twitter. The contest starts 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.

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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