Friday Valentine Cat Blogging – 15 February 2013

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It’s not too late for some Valentine’s Day catblogging, is it? Of course not. Today I have two cats for you. On the top is a picture from one of my childhood books, The Valentine Cat. It features a poor-but-honest shoemaker’s apprentice, an evil chimney sweep, and a good-hearted princess. Plus a cat, who the evil chimney sweep lures away and uses to clean chimneys. I’m afraid to ask where the author got the idea of cleaning chimneys by lowering a cat down the flue, but it does serve a plot point by covering up the cat’s distinctive heart marking. In the end, as you can guess, everything turns out well for the shoemaker and the princess (and the cat), but not so well for the evil chimney sweep. Let that be a lesson to you.

Right below that, we have our other Valentine Cat, with her own distinctive white mark on her forehead. It’s sort of valentine-shaped if you cross your eyes and, um — oh, forget it. It’s just not valentine-shaped, is it? Such a pity. But Domino is curled up under a valentine-themed quilt called “Key to my Heart.” The hearts are appliquéd on, and it was made in 1991, when Marian and I were engaged. It’s machine stitched and hand quilted.

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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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