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REACHING OUT….Roger Cohen got a bit of attention the other day for noting that Barack Obama’s Middle East team has an awful lot of Jewish foreign policy heavyweights but no Arab-American or Iranian-American representatives. “They’re knowledgeable, broad-minded and determined,” he conceded. “Still, on the diversity front they fall short. On the change-you-can-believe-in front, they also leave something to be desired.”

Today Laura Rozen reports that last week Obama had a quiet dinner at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and met with a different group:

Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner: Iran scholar Haleh Esfandiari, Pakistan expert Ahmed Rashid (who had flown in from Lahore), Obama friend and foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power of Harvard University (who accompanied PEOTUS to the meeting), incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and a few others. Obama told the group, none of whom reached would discuss the details, that he already felt in the bubble and was trying his best to meet with independent experts.

This all comes through the good offices of Lee Hamilton, all-around Washington wise man and president of the Wilson Center. But why did the meeting have to be such a secret?

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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