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As you may know, eBay zillionaire Meg Whitman is running for governor in California. She’s been pretty assiduously avoiding reporters who might ask real questions, but she is running ads and giving speeches:

Whitman was asked by an attendee at a Redondo Beach campaign event whether as governor she would “force your attorney general to file suit” against the [healthcare] reforms, as more than a dozen attorneys general in other states have said they would.

“The answer to that is yes,” said Whitman, drawing the most sustained, and loudest, applause of the hourlong event.

This is quite a campaign we’re having. In a nutshell, nobody on the Democratic side really wants to run, so Jerry Brown is getting a free ride to an encore nomination. (Jerry Brown!) On the Republican side, we have two mega-rich candidates, Whitman and Steve Poizner, who, as near as I can tell, are basically fairly moderate conservatives. This, however, is completely unacceptable to California’s GOP, so they’ve been spending tens of millions of dollars running ads with one purpose: to position themselves as heirs to Barry Goldwater and their opponent as more liberal than Nancy Pelosi. It’s a pretty unedifying spectacle. And what makes it even worse is that despite the fact that they both have enormous trainloads of money to spend, they keep running the same damn ads over and over and over again. It’s really boring.

But that’s what it takes to win the admiration of California Republicans these days: faux pandering on idiotic questions like repealing healthcare reform, which Whitman knows perfectly well she can’t do and wouldn’t work even if she did. I can’t wait for Poizner’s response, which will probably try to paint her as a sellout for not demanding that California secede from the union if healthcare reform isn’t repealed. It’s only March, but the silly season is already well underway here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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