The Key Moment in Last Night’s Debate

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For what it’s worth, I just want to highlight this exchange from the debate last night. It’s already gotten a fair amount of attention, but I think it was by far the most important exchange of the night. Chris Wallace asked Romney about Perry’s support for allowing illegal immigrants to attend Texas universities and pay normal in-state resident tuition:

ROMNEY: To go to the University of Texas, if you’re an illegal alien, you get an in-state tuition discount. You know how much that is? That’s $22,000 a year. Four years of college, almost $100,000 discount if you are an illegal alien go to the University of Texas. If you are a United States citizen from any one of the other 49 states, you have to pay $100,000 more. That doesn’t make sense to me. That kind of magnet draws people into this country to get that education, to get the $100,000 break. It makes no sense.

PERRY: For a decade, I’ve been the governor of a state with a 1,200-mile border with Mexico. We put $400 million of our taxpayer money into securing that border. We’ve got our Texas Ranger recon teams there now….But if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children, because they will become a drag on our society.

This really seems like a killer exchange to me. This idea that Perry wants to give a $100,000 subsidy to illegal immigrants is just electoral gold among the Republican primary crowd. And Perry is stuck: not only did he support this, but he’s dug himself into a big hole by defending it so uncompromisingly. There’s just no way he can back away from it now, and if Romney is smart — and he is — he is going to pound on this over and over and over.

Also note Perry’s unusual tin ear here. If you don’t see things his way, he said, “I don’t think you have a heart.” This kind of bluster goes over great when it’s aimed at Obama-loving liberals, but it’s like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull when it’s aimed at fellow conservatives. The audience didn’t like it, and I expect Romney to make very good use of this.

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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.

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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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