Senate Will Have ‘No Confidence’ Vote on Gonzales

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The Senate will hold a preliminary vote on Monday on whether to hold a thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote on AG AG. Republicans promise to vote against the proposal, but surely at least a few will break ranks. Republican Arlen Specter has hypothesized that Gonzales will resign before facing a “no confidence” vote. The funny thing is, the Senate could (and should) actually impeach Gonzales.

(If you haven’t been following why Gonzo is such a Gonzo, you haven’t been reading our blog, now have you? What it boils down to is this: U.S. Attorneys may be political appointees, but firing them for refusing to prosecute bogus “voter fraud” cases to keep minorities home on Election Day is unacceptable. So is hiring second-rate attorneys because they’ve been dutiful contributors to the Republican Party. So is prosecuting the first-ever voting rights case alleging white people were discriminated against. So is neglecting genuine civil rights cases. And so is having major diversity problems in the DOJ, when one of the department’s primary functions is to prevent institutionalized discrimination. Oh yeah, and so is perjury.)

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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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