When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton decided to work together--with her becoming secretary of state--part of the deal was that the William J. Clinton Foundation, which funds the former president's globetrotting do-gooding and his presidential library, would release all of its donors going back to 1997. For years, Bill Clinton had declined to reveal who was backing his foundation. But the point, as a foundation press release noted, was "to ensure that not even the appearance of a conflict of interest existed between the Clinton Foundation's operations and Senator Clinton's anticpated service as Secretary of State."

On Thursday, the foundation posted the names of those donors on its website--all 2922 pages of them. The list includes a host of foreign governments (Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Taiwan), Stephen Speilberg's foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Blackwater, General Motors, Freddie Mac, and Citigroup's foundation.

Beyond the specific contributions, what's notable is that this list is damn hard to navigate. To review the contributors, a visitor--say, a journalist--has to click through nearly 3000 pages. As of today, it was not searchable. And the names are provided without addresses or any identifying information. (Political campaigns have to provide the Federal Elections Commission addresses and employment information for their donors.) So who's this Nasser Al-Rashid, who gave between $1 million and $5 million. Cut to Google: he's a Saudi Arabian businessman, supposedly an influential adviser to the Saudi royal family, and owner of one of the largest yachts in the world. Saudis have been especially generous to the Clinton Foundation.

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The man giving the invocation at Obama's inauguration doesn't like gays, his pick for Secretary of Agriculture is a supporter of corn-based ethanol with only incipient reformist tendencies, his choice for Interior seems to have big fans in the oil and mining community, and his next Transportation Secretary is a Republican lacking any serious record on transit issues. In short, the trepidation that Obama's early cabinet picks triggered in parts of the left continues as he fills in the few remaining spots.

So should those of us on the left get all hot and bothered? There are three ways to think about Obama's frequently uninspiring and occasionally troubling appointments.

(1) These appointees are bad symbolism in the service of good policy. Because Obama is picking people who occupy the center, center-left, and center-right, he can count on the support of huge swaths of the people from all ideological backgrounds when he tries to push genuinely progressive policy initiatives.

Unfortunately, we simply cannot accept this as true. Not yet, anyway. We don't know that Obama wants to push genuinely progressive policy initiatives. There are reasons to suggest that he does, of course. But Democrats who take it as a matter of faith that Obama is tapping people like Warren to co-opt the right and get them behind him for when he passes wonderfully liberal policy are projecting their hopes onto Obama's future policy agenda. We don't know the policy yet. All we know is the symbolism.

Besides, Rahm Emmanuel puts the lie to this idea somewhat. Rahm isn't just willing to use bad symbolism in service of good policy. His career in the House leadership involved several episodes where he used bad policy in service of keeping Democrats in power.

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Okay, here's the good news: Unlike other nonprofits, Mother Jones did not invest its portfolio with ponzi master Bernie Madoff. But here's the bad news: In recent weeks, we've heard from major donors saying that they've taken such a beating in the market, they have no choice but to pull funding they already promised to us—funding that was paying for our kick-ass reporters in Washington. This is not General Motors-size money we're talking about—about $125,000 so far has evaporated—but for an organization our size, it is a big chunk, especially at a time when we're already slashing the budget to deal with the broader financial crisis and the severe downturn in print advertising. Managers are taking pay cuts, we'll be running somewhat smaller issues, we're subletting office space, but at this point the only way to reduce expenses even further is to lay off reporters and cut back on investigating the powers that be. That's the last thing we want to do: With Washington in transition and billions flying out the door, someone has to dig into where the bailout money is going.

This is where you come in. We're not asking you to pay for private jets or chauffeured Town Cars; every penny of your donation goes to the overworked, underpaid investigative reporters whose work you see here every day. Anything helps, and it's super easy—just follow this link. Think about it: Right now the Wall Street bailout has each and every one of us on the hook for $11,600 and counting. We'll keep track of your money for a lot less than that.

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It is easy to groan at the selection of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as Barack Obama's Secretary of Agriculture. Ezra Klein over at the Prospect notes that the pick signals two important things that are sure to disappoint food policy reformers. (1) Politicians from agricultural states are enmeshed in the politics of farm subsidies, and Iowa, as the number one corn-producing state in the country, can likely count on a continued flow of poisonous corn subsidies under Vilsack. (2) USDA will continue to be a department for food producers instead of one for food consumers, meaning that food policy decisions will be made with the needs of agribusiness first and the needs of low-income kids with little access to healthy food options second. (If you don't know why those two things are at odds, you haven't been listening to Michael Pollan.) It is because a conventional pick like Vilsack likely means the continuation of policies that harm both eaters and small farmers that food activists were passing around a petition to get a reformer the job. Alas, it didn't happen.

But before we throw our foodie/organic-only/locavore selves into complete despair, let's take a closer look at Vilsack. For a former governor of a corn behemoth, he's actually has the right instincts.

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