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This is from a couple of days ago:

San Francisco’s board of supervisors has voted, by a veto-proof margin, to ban most of McDonald’s Happy Meals as they are now served in the restaurants. The measure will make San Francisco the first major city in the country to forbid restaurants from offering a free toy with meals that contain more than set levels of calories, sugar and fat.

….Daniel Conway, spokesman for the California Restaurant Assn., bemoaned the ordinance’s passage and contrasted it with San Franciscans’ exuberant feelings after the Giants won the world series on Monday night. “One day you’re world champions, and the next day, no toys for you,” Conway said.

That’s mighty sad. But here’s what I’m curious about: does McDonald’s or the California Restaurant Assn. have any kind of constitutional case to make against this statute based on the commerce clause? The obvious answer is no: the commerce clause merely gives the federal government the right to regulate commercial activity if it wants to. If it doesn’t, there’s nothing stopping states or local governments from passing any regulation they want. And they do. Every state has different insurance regulations, different environmental regulations, different health and safety regulations, etc.

And yet….something here bothers me. Leave aside the substantive question of whether San Francisco’s decision was a righteous blow for our children’s future or the first step down the slippery slope of fascism. McDonald’s, like every big company, sells standardized merchandise nationwide. This is impractical if every city in America decides to have its own rules. No toys in San Francisco. No trans fats in New York City. No styrofoam containers in Houston. No factory farmed beef in Seattle. No California potatoes in Boise. No artificial sweeteners in Boston. Etc.

I dunno. Does this make sense? What’s the proper dividing line between states and cities being allowed to set their own rules as they see fit, and nationwide companies being allowed to effectively sell their products nationwide? I haven’t really thought this through, but I imagine plenty of others have. What’s the state-of-the-art thinking on this?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

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.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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