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Mike Huckabee says that Barack Obama is midwifing the birth of a “Union of American Socialist Republics” in his new budget.  “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

“If a prominent Democratic office holder, in 2005, delivered a speech referring to George W. Bush’s agenda as ‘fascism,’ comparing his administration to totalitarian regimes, and casually throwing in a reference to Hitler,” says Steve Benen, “that Democrat would have a very difficult time being taken seriously by the political establishment moving forward. Presidential ambitions would be largely out of the question.”

“Why Huckabee thinks that federally funded research into determining which medical treatments are effective is similar to being a totalitarian mass-murderer is a bit beyond me” says Matt Yglesias.  “But it’s par for the course in the uglier corners of conservatism, they’re just not corners Huckabee’s been known for dwelling in.”

“Either Huckabee is losing his ear or this is what you really have to say to get the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012,” says Mark Kleiman. 

I’d say (a) yes, Huckabee really believes this stuff, (b) no, a Democrat couldn’t get away with something like this, (c) yes, it’s what you have to do to win the GOP nomination these days, and (d) no, nobody really cares because talk radio has inured us to this kind of stuff.  Boys will be boys.  He’s just warming up the crowd.  Etc.

And the good news?  It demonstrates that things are going to get worse for Republicans before they get better.  “The party of Lincoln is now the Party of Limbaugh,” says Paul Begala, and he’s right.  Like most parties that have lost their way in the past, it’s now clear that they’ll spend at least four years insisting that what America really wants is an even more extreme version of what they voted against in 2008.  Cooler heads will eventually prevail, but not until 2016 at the earliest.  Maybe not until 2020.  Obama’s really got some running room in front of him.

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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.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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