Breaking: Wolfowitz Is Out

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The World Bank and its president, Paul Wolfowitz, announced today that Mr. Wolfowitz will step down in June. The statement reveals that Bush won the terms he wanted for the neocon’s departure. The bank’s board suggested that its ethics policies “did not prove robust to the strain under which they were placed.” Which is really just fancy language for “Wolfie almost got away with it,” but manages to convey that the fault was somehow institutional, as Bush wanted. The board’s statement also included this hard-to-swallow gem: Wolfowitz “assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution and we accept that.” Obviously, he also acted in the best interests of his girlfriend, whose salary skyrocketed under the arrangement Wolfie brokered, even as he presented himself as a veritable crusader (there’s that word again) against government corruption. But there you have it: Bush and Wolfie took a parting shot at the institution that fights world hunger. You gotta love these guys.

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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.

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