Freedom’s Watch Finds Its Inner Mother Theresa

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Conservative advocacy group Freedom’s Watch, funded by billionaires such as Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a famously fierce critic of labor unions (see core issue area three here, “Standing up to Big Labor’s radical agenda”), revels in its newly discovered economic populist streak.

Yesterday, it launched an ad attacking House Democrats and speaker Nancy Pelosi for “doing nothing” to reduce high gas prices.

Today, it sends out emails attacking Congressional Democrats for being responsible for the housing crisis, the bad economy, and more high gas prices. And it’s rebranded itself as “mainstream,” too: “‘It is truly astonishing that two years after assuring the American people they possessed a ‘commonsense plan’ to combat high gas prices, Congressional Leaders are still struggling to put one together,’ said Ed Patru, spokesman for Freedom’s Watch, a mainstream conservative issues advocacy organization,” the group emails.

What’s next? After all, with Adelson’s fortune valued at $28 billion by Forbes this year, an expressed commitment by the former Boston cabbie to donate $200 million a year to charitable causes he favors, and given the fact that that, according to a recent column by George Will, Adelson’s casino empire is now the single largest foreign investor in China, Adelson alone would be in a position to make a meaningful contribution to those Americans losing their homes in foreclosures and consumers hurting at the gas pump. Stay tuned, as they say.

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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.

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.

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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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