Off the Trail, and on the Warpath

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It turns out Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was half right. After a poor showing in Iowa last night, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., dropped his bid to be the Democratic nominee for president—and, as such, will not be captive to the pander-inducing whims of electoral politics when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is reconsidered later this month. But that doesn’t mean he won’t be back on the floor of the Senate blocking any FISA bill that contains an immunity provision for the telecommunications industry. Here’s what he said in his concession letter:

“The fight to restore the Constitution and stop retroactive immunity does not end with my Presidential campaign. FISA will come back in a few weeks and my pledge to filibuster ANY bill that includes retroactive immunity remains operative.

You’ve been an invaluable ally in the battle, and I’ll need you to stick by my side despite tonight’s caucus results.”

So he’s on record—the filibuster will continue.

Incidentally, Dodd has actually received more money from telecom companies than has Reid, but both receive far less than the top two recipients—Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Oh. And the fourth largest Senate recipient of telecom money? Intelligence Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller.

—Brian Beutler
The Media Consortium

Brian Beutler is the Washington correspondent for the Media Consortium, a network of progressive media organizations, including Mother Jones.

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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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

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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