January 29, 2021

Yes, Sen. Tim Kaine Is Still Harmonica Dude

In case you were wondering.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) rocks out on the harmonica at a Senate Christmas event in 2020, with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) on piano.Michael Brochstein/Zuma

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Tim Kaine, the Democratic senator from Virginia and 2016 vice presidential candidate, is back in the spotlight this week for his plans to file a censure resolution that could prevent former President Trump from holding federal office ever again.

That got me thinking, does he still carry all those harmonicas in his briefcase?

It turns out that he does—in his backpack, not a briefcase, his communications director corrected me. He has one in each of the main keys, from A to G, plus an E sharp.

Since the Senate is unlikely to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection, Kaine is writing a resolution that takes language from the 14th Amendment as a workaround to ensure that Trump can’t be reelected in 2024. (The resolution’s prospects in the divided Senate remain unclear.) And, being Tim Kaine, he’ll do all this with a backpack full of harmonicas.

Listen to Kaine jam out below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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