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I don’t have a lot to say about this (I don’t live in LA and don’t know its politics well), but thought it was interesting enough to highlight:

The Los Angeles Police Commission forwarded to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday the names of three finalists to become the next police chief — a list that contained no women or minorities, but sparked little initial criticism.

….In the not-so-distant past, when tensions between the LAPD and minority communities in the city ran high, the selection of three white men as finalists would almost certainly have set off intense criticism. On Tuesday, however, news of the decision was met generally with praise as officials and outsiders said reforms made under [Bill] Bratton had largely rendered racial and gender politics a moot point.

John Mack, the commission president and a prominent African American civil rights activist, said he was struck by how little attention was devoted to race and ethnicity when the panel held community meetings throughout the city seeking the public’s guidance on a new chief, including in Watts, Crenshaw and the San Fernando Valley.

The day is young, and racial politics may yet rear its head, but if Bratton has really accomplished this it’s a helluva lot more impressive than any of his other reforms.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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