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The Guardian reports today on Tommaso, the world’s richest cat. We’ve seen stories like this before, so it’s all a bit ho hum. But check this out:

In a handwritten will, signed on 26 November, 2009, Tommaso’s mistress—the childless widow of a successful builder—gave her lawyers the task of identifying “the animal welfare body or association to which to leave the inheritance and the task of looking after the cat Tommaso”. One of the lawyers, Anna Orecchioni, told the Rome daily Il Messaggero they considered several organisations without getting adequate guarantees of the cat’s future comfort and welfare.

Seriously? Tommaso’s owner left an inheritance of 10 million euros. You could build a cat-sized Taj Mahal with a permanent staff and still have 9 million euros left over. Are Italian animal welfare associations so bulging with cash that they can afford to turn down 10 million euros just because they don’t feel like guaranteeing posh treatment for a single cat?

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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.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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