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I watched bits and pieces of Kamala Harris’s townhall meeting on CNN, and the audience certainly seemed to like her. I like her too! She’s a good speaker and she knows how to work a room. Still, I wish more Democrats would learn the lesson of 2016: both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump earned big followings by talking like ordinary human beings rather than politicians. Audiences will stay more engaged—and cable news will put you on air a lot more—if you talk as if you weren’t reading off cue cards.

On the policy front, there’s an interesting choice to be made between our two frontrunners, Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Harris wants a big tax cut for the poor and middle class. Warren wants a big tax hike on the rich. Which would you prefer? For my money, I’d prefer the tax hike as a way of paying for universal health care. This combination would more effectively redistribute income, if that’s your goal, and would certainly do more for the poor and working class than yet another expansion of the EITC. If we ever truly want universal health care, I think we have to finally acknowledge that we can’t keep promising more tax cuts for the middle class.

And as long as we’re on the subject, I see that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz engaged in one of my pet peeves today: saying that we have to stop promising people “free health care.” Bah. Universal health care is no more “free health care” than Social Security is “free retirement.” We pay taxes, we get health care. Nobody calls it “free” except for the folks who don’t like it.

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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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