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Ronald McDonald and Michael Moore would certainly agree that it doesn’t
hurt to look like a clown when you’re peddling your product to the masses. And so would Morgan
Spurlock, whose highly marketable Moore-style film documents his month long, all-McDonald’s
diet.

Morning, noon, and night, Spurlock chows down at the Golden Arches,
accepting “Supersizing” when offered. On day two of the adventure (“Every eight-year-old’s dream,”
he says), our hero spews his drive-thru lunch out the window of a minivan. Along the way, Spurlock
discovers a kinky hair in his McSundae; finds that, at least among first-graders, Ronald may be
more famous than Jesus; and struggles to land an interview with the CEO whose corporation’s caloric
cuisine causes him to gain 17 pounds in 12 days.

This is funny stuff—and deadly serious, too. Its message may
already have gotten through to corporate headquarters: In March, McDonald’s announced it is phasing
out Supersizing. But the real question is whether Spurlock’s little movie can reach the supersize
folks his camcorder captures largely from the shoulders down. No doubt, most of them lack the slumming
filmmaker’s close medical supervision, not to mention his awareness of de facto corporate food
poisoning. Spurlock, meanwhile, plays his blood tests and weight gain almost purely for laughs.
Ironic that a critic of the fast-food industry would pack his product with superfluity at the expense
of substance.

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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.

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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.

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