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I’m late to this and I don’t really have anything substantive to add, but just for the record:

Did we really, seriously, strong-arm the governments of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy to deny the president of Bolivia permission to fly over their airspace? All because some moron in one of our intelligence services that supposedly tracks every communication on the planet decided that Evo Morales was serious when he joked about taking Edward Snowden home with him from Moscow?

If every country in South America responded by expelling every diplomat in every American embassy, it would hardly seem like an overreaction to me. This would have been outrageous and thuggish behavior even if Snowden had been in Morales’ plane. But he wasn’t, so it’s actually outrageous, thuggish, and clownish. Jesus.

UPDATE: The original headline of this post was “Obama Finally Shows His Chicago Thug Side for Real.” This was obviously a nod to the endless tea party invocations of Obama as a Chicago thug, but it’s been taken by many as a racial dog whistle. I apologize for that, since it certainly wasn’t my intent. I think the treatment of Morales’s plane was outrageous behavior, and quite likely a result of pressure from the United States, but that’s all.

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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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