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DISHING ON PALIN….Don’t lie: you know you want to hear it. The presidential campaign has only been over for 24 hours, but that’s all it’s taken for two months of accumulated bitterness and rage from McCain staffers toward Sarah Palin to finally explode onto the news pages. For starters, here is John McCain’s private opinion of Palin, as reported by the Guardian:

An exasperated McCain has been telling friends in recent weeks that Palin is even more trouble than a pitbull. In one joke doing the rounds, the Republican presidential candidate has been asking friends: what is the difference between Sarah Palin and a pitbull? The friendly canine eventually lets go, is the McCain punchline.

Here is the McCain campaign’s take on Palin’s clothing extravaganza, as reported by Newsweek:

Newsweek has also learned that Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy…..An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

And here are some “McCain staffers” explaining that Palin is not just a moron, but a bad-tempered moron, as reported by Fox’s Carl Cameron:

There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked the degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency. We’re told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, that being Canada, the US, and Mexico. We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent rather than a country just in itself. A whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability. She got very angry at staff, thought that she was mishandled, was particularly angry about the way the Katie Couric interview went. She didn’t accept preparation for that interview when the aides say that that was part of the problem. And that there were times where she was hard to control emotionally. There’s talk of temper tantrums at bad news clippings.

Regarding the last report, Shep Smith asks the obvious question: “How could they end up with a running mate who doesn’t know that Africa is a continent?” Cameron explains that the vetting process “was truncated.”

Earlier today, I had in mind a post about Palin that would have started out by saying that I didn’t think she was stupid, just completely uninterested in national policy issues prior to August 29th. Needless to say, I’m glad I didn’t write that post.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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