Crazy GOP Fundraiser Watch

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A few weeks ago I reported two senators, John Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, had introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, a bill that would give the president and commerce secretary power to halt internet traffic on “critical” networks in the name of “national security.”

And today, David Corn sent me a hysterical email he received from a conservative PAC, the Republican Majority Campaign, urging the reader to contact his representative in order to stop “Barack Hussein Obama and his cronies” from their “power grab”—Rockefeller and Snowe’s bill.

Politicians and lobbyists want to take away our Constitutional rights — we need to make sure they FAIL. And we’ve got a GREAT way to do that!

We’ve set up a website where you can send “blast faxes”to EVERY SINGLE MEMBER OF CONGRESS, telling them to say NO to this attempt to take over the entire internet! For less that what it would cost you to gather every fax number and send all those faxes yourself, you can send HUNDREDS of faxes, ALL AT ONCE to Capitol Hill — to make SURE they hear your voice!

Of course, I clicked the link to the “blast fax” page. And of course, it wants me to pay them: Just $119 to fax all 535 members of Congress!—”about what it would cost you in time and telephone charges.”

If this seems shady, it should. In what world does it cost $119 to send 535 pages via fax? Secondly, as they’ve obviously discovered email, why aren’t they using an email blast? Third, why don’t they just list the names of the members of the Senate Commerce Committee so I can call them myself?

In March of last year, TPM Muckraker linked the Republican Majority Campaign to Republican PACs that shut down after the Washington Post reported its founders were running them like their own piggy banks, taking in loads of money but only spending a tiny fraction of it on political action. At the time, TPM called the Republican Majority Campaign a “murky group,” but this fundraising scheme parading as an action letter just seems brazen to me.

UPDATE: Joe the Plumber is also getting in on the shady GOP fundraising party.

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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.

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 won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—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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