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Josh Marshall makes the point today that one thing hurting congressional Democrats is that they aren’t doing enough to force Republicans to cast embarrassing votes that can be used against them during the upcoming midterm elections.  Matt Yglesias calls this belief “a bit dangerous and delusional”:

Look out the window at the state of the labor market. Not the labor market for the Washington DC metro area or for the kind of college-educated professionals likely to be social acquaintances of congressional staff, but of the country as a whole. How on earth is the electoral situation not going to be bleak for the party in charge? This is the worst recession since World War II.

Under the circumstances, there are two useful things a member of congress can do. One is to take actions that improve the economic situation. The other is to pass laws that tackle important long-run problems. But if you can’t do the first thing, I think you’re really fooling yourself if you think some kind of parliamentary hijinks are going to transform the situation.

I think my take is different: there’s no reason Dems shouldn’t be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Fixing the economy would clearly do Democrats more good than anything else, but honestly, it’s too late for anything passed this month to have much effect by September. And although I’m in favor of tackling long-term problems, that probably has a pretty negligible effect on short-term opinion too.

So whatever happens on these fronts, that’s the background that you have to accept. If the economy sucks, it’s going to be bad news for Dems. But once you’ve done everything you can to improve the economy and address things like healthcare reform, why not also do whatever else you can to scare up a few votes? Playing games with wedge votes probably won’t have a huge effect, but you might as well give it a try. Unless it’s literally preventing you from doing more important stuff, there’s no reason not to.

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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.

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