After gays and flag-burning, what’s next for GOP?

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With the President and his panicky Republican allies seeking to rally the base with constitutional amendments against gay marriage and flag-burning, what else can they do to win support? They’re betting that the rural, Midwest and Southern voters who fell for their pandering before will respond again, even if they lose on those red-meat issues in Congress. But to shore up their support, here are some other measures under consideration by the Bush Administration:

1. Mandating that all grade-schoolers learn to read directly from the Bible — with chapbooks just like in colonial days.

2. Administration supporters are working with the Fox News Network to launch MolestTV, a 24/7 cable network highlighting coverage of trials, arrests and in-depth profiles of accused and convicted child molesters, mostly focusing on gays (even though critics of the new network note that a majority of pedophile cases involve heterosexuals.) Bill O’Reilly will anchor an hour show on the network, “Fighting for Our Kids,” focusing on politicians, liberal journalists and judges who are “soft on crime” while featuring regular appearances by representatives of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)

3. Executing a few scary-looking accused terrorists with “funny-sounding” Arabic names who have been held at Guantamano Bay.

4. Cracking down on all that cursing on HBO, once and for all.

5. Having Attorney General Gonzales order the arrest of mostly Jewish reporters for publishing leaked classified information about our secret intelligence-gathering and interrogation (i.e., domestic spying and torture) operations.

The closer we get to November, here are some other desperation moves being considered:

6. Putting out an all-gay list of fugitives and serial murderers on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

7. Banning all condoms and contraceptives from drug-stores because they promote “teen sex cults.”

8. Pushing a constitutional amendment calling for life imprisonment for all doctors who either perform abortions or tell patients how to join NARAL.

9. Finding one of those flag burners, somewhere, and ordering a federal SWAT team to invade his house for a high-profile arrest. (Failing that, arranging through shell groups and third-parties a payment to an undercover Republican operative willing to be the perp and take the fall. That’s Karl Rove’s idea, but some administration insiders say it goes too far, dubbing it “Operation Reichstag.”)

10. When all else fails, starting a pogrom. But this time, include illlegal immigrants, too. It’s helped rally the base in other countries, so why not try it here?

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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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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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