A Competent Bush Nominee?

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Ezra Klein notes that Bush’s nomination for Treasury Secretary, Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, is a “serious, competent guy” who—shockingly—supported the Kyoto Protocol. (More to the point, he has stated that unless the United States puts emissions limits in place, “U.S. companies will lose ground to their competitors.”)

That sounds nice (insofar as a pro-Wall Street Treasury Secretary can sound “nice”), but it also sounds a lot like a description of Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, who, despite helping Ron Suskind produce a very nice book exposing the sheer mendacity and close-mindedness of the current administration, didn’t really affect much in the way of policy.

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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 canā€™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.

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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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”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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