January 8, 2010

Friday Cat Blogging – 8 January 2010

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It’s Friday! Hooray! Time for cats. On the left, Domino is helping Marian as she works on some pattern drafting. This help consists primarily of sitting on her left arm, which she doesn’t really need anyway. So it all works out.

But what about Inkblot? What’s he doing? Answer: looking wistfully at the TV wondering how long he has to wait until Kevin shows up on Bill Moyers Journal. Not long, Inkblot! It airs on PBS, and David Corn and I will be on tonight at 9 pm (though you should probably check your local listings to make sure that’s when it airs in your area).  We’ll be talking about the finance lobby and its almost unchecked influence over both Congress and the country as a whole during the past several decades. Hopefully I was not totally incoherent as I railed against banks, talked about the evils of excessive leverage, described the outrageously favorable treatment that the financial sector gets from Congress, and chastised Barack Obama for not doing enough to fight back. A program description is here. And the article that sparked my television debut, “Capital City,” is in the latest issue of the magazine.

FUN TIDBIT ALERT: When they put on makeup for the show, they applied it to both my face and my hands. Apparently it’s important to make sure your skin tone is even for all exposed parts of your body.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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