Thank You, Jesus: Stewart and Colbert Returning to Our TVs

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The NY Times is reporting that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will return to the airwaves on January 7th, the same week their late-night buddies at the major networks are also planning to return. None of the shows will have their writing staffs, since the strike that took the shows off the air is still ongoing, and one wonders how that will affect the content. Without my writers, for instance, I can’t even answer the phone. Helloooo? Whaaaat? Darrrrr? Thank you very much. Anyway, the Times says both the hosts will have to improvise basically everything they say, which seems like it might be easier for Stewart, but again, who knows. The hosts said in a statement that they would, of course, prefer to bring their writers with them, and “if we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.” Cute. Since both hosts are members of the Writers Guild, will we see any protests, officially-sanctioned or otherwise (like what happened to the hapless Carson Daly) against the shows? Tune in in two weeks…

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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.

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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