McCain Gets the Boot From Project Vote Smart

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ProjectVoteSmart.gifProject Vote Smart, the nonpartisan voter-education nonprofit, confirms today that it has kicked John McCain off its board. Mother Jones reported on Monday that PVS was prepared to make the move due to McCain’s nine-month refusal to fill out its Political Courage Test. According to PVS President Richard Kimball, the nonprofit has a rule that bars nonrespondents from serving on its board.

PVS contacted the McCain campaign 25 times from June 2007 to February 2008 in the hopes of avoiding the embarrassment this move entails for both the organization and one of its long-time board members. Eventually, however, they were simply left with no choice. The senator who made his career on straight talk couldn’t spare some for the organization he served.

You can see the full story in Monday’s report.

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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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