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Hey, good morning.  Anything new going on today?  Let’s see…..NASA crashed a probe into the moon….a car bomb killed 49 people in Pakistan….Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace prize….

Wait a second.  Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize?  What for?  Says here it’s in recognition of “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

I’m going to head out into the blogosphere and see what people think of this.  But before I do, I just want to say that this is ridiculous.  I mean, I’m all in favor of making wingnut heads explode, but the guy’s been in office for slightly less than nine months.  That’s barely enough time to make a baby, let alone bring world peace.  Shouldn’t the luminaries in Oslo have waited until he had done something more significant than making nice with his former primary opponent before declaring him a man for the ages?

Oh well.  Sometimes people do dumb things.  At least we get to see wingnut heads explode.

UPDATE: OK, I’ve now spent a few minutes taking in reaction from all corners.  Is there anyone who’s defending this choice?  Couldn’t they have just given it to Bono instead?  At least then maybe we’d get some nice music at the awards ceremony.

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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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