Press Secretary does Snow job on Imus

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It doesn’t take much to get Don Imus to endorse all manner of lies and distortions. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow found it was pretty easy on June 14 when he stated that George W. Bush had never linked Saddam Hussein with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Snow quoted Bush as saying “there’s no demonstrated link between Saddam [Hussein] and 9-11, and we’re never going to make that argument.” Of course, Bush did make that link. For example, he made it in his letter of March 21, 2003 to the Speaker of the House and the President Pre Tempre of the Senate. Dick Cheney made the same link on two different appearances on Meet the Press, and the September 11 Commission reported that as early as September 12, 2001, Bush asked his staff to explore links between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of the day before. Bush’s insistence that such a link be made is documented by former U.S. Treasurer Paul O’Neill in Ron Suskind’s The Price Of Loyalty, and by former national security specialist Richard A. Clarke in Against All Enemies.

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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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