What Happened to Health Care?

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Every White House tries to control media narratives. They frequently succeed.

Early this week, for example, the CIA Inspector General’s report from 2004 was released, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a probe of detainee abuse, the White House announced its plan to create a special interrogation group for high-value detainees, the government released more Office of Legal Counsel memos from the Bush era, and Michael Jackson’s death was ruled a homicide. The administration can, and almost certainly did, plan those first four. The Jackson thing was a bonus for them.

You see, the health care debate wasn’t going well. The president’s poll numbers were falling, too much attention was being lavished on nutcases and liars, and there wasn’t anything Congress was going to do to move forward, since, well, they’re on vacation. There’s nothing like foreign policy, torture, and terrorism to swing the media’s attention away from domestic issues. A pretty solid rule of White House press strategy is that if something comes out on a Monday, they want you to be talking and writing about it. If it comes out on a Friday afternoon, they don’t. The Ben Bernanke news was planned, too, of course: he doesn’t have to be reappointed for months. But hey, it all worked: health care’s off the front pages, and the president can enjoy his vacation, at least for a few days. Thank whoever killed Michael Jackson. But you can also thank the White House press strategy team.

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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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