September 21, 2009

Need To Read: September 21, 2009

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Today’s must-reads didn’t make any deals with the pharmaceutical industry:

  • Baucus Bill Sticks To Pharma Deal That Supposedly Wasn’t Struck (Ryan Grim/HuffPo)
  • Why is it at all controversial to demand that debit card customers be able to decline overdraft “protection?” (WaPo)
  • You have no idea what health care really costs  (Ezra Klein/WaPo)
  • McChrystal’s Report (Kevin Drum/MoJo)
  • The New Black Panthers and Me (MoJo)
  • How the Baucus Plan Bilks People Over 50 (MoJo)
  • How the US removed half a ton of uranium from Kazakhstan (Is Nice!/WaPo)
  • Olympia Snowe: “My Party Has Changed” (Steve Benen/The Washington Monthly)
  • Blue Dogs Aim To Scuttle/Pre-Empt Obama’s Financial Regulatory Reforms (Politico)
  • Did the White House Give Joe Wilson Everything He Wanted? In a Word: Yes (Brian Beutler/TPM)
  • “On every major measurement, the Census shows the country lost ground during the Bush years.” (The Atlantic)
  • Obama Admin. Pressured NY Gov. David Paterson Not To Run for Reelection; Paterson Running Anyway (NYT)
  • Atul Gawande for Senate: Best. Idea. Ever. (Yglesias)
  • Shocking news: CIA Directors conclude CIA shouldn’t be investigated for murder (Glenn Greenwald)
  • A Brief History of Macroeconomics (Paul Krugman/NYT)

I post items like these throughout the day on twitter. You should follow me, of course. David Corn, Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief, also tweets. So do my colleagues Daniel Schulman and Rachel Morris and our editors-in-chief, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein. Follow them, too! (The magazine’s main account is @motherjones.)

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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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