Sarah Palin’s Common Sense Kickbacks

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The Washington Times reports that the Republican National Committee has paid off a quarter million dollars of Sarah Palin’s legal fees. RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen explains:

“That was payment for services she was providing, including a couple speeches, a couple fundraising letters and a telephone call,” Mr. Pullen said. “There was not a contract so far as I know. It was verbal.”

Former RNC Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf said he could not recall a similar arrangement for those helping the party build its financial base during his tenure. “Wow. I never paid anyone money to make speeches and sign direct-mail appeals,” Mr. Fahrenkopf said.

Presumably Palin doesn’t want anyone to say that she’s doing fundraising gigs for her own benefit (she’s just a suburban hockey mom fighting to take back America, after all), so instead she worked a deal with the RNC where she’d do fundraising for the party but have part of it kicked back to pay her personal bills. Politics as usual, I guess. But it still baffles me. Palin reportedly has earned upwards of $10 million over the past year and has loads of future earning potential too. So why not just pay the $600,000 legal bill herself and be done with it? It’s chump change for someone as rich as she is.

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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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