Desperate Republicans Try Sex

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They’ve got to know they’re in trouble when they’re scraping the bottom of barrel this hard to come up with muck to throw at Democrats. Trying to tip the scales in a tight New York House race, the Republican National Committee has been running an ad declaring that the Democratic candidate called a phone-sex line and left taxpayers with the bill. Strictly speaking, it’s true: there was a phone call placed from the hotel room of candidate Michael Arcuri, a county district attorney, to a 1-800 fantasy line. Billing records show it lasted all of one minute, cost $1.25 – and was followed immediately by a call to the state Department of Criminal Justice Services, which has nearly the identical number. It was so obviously a misdial that Arcuri is threatening a libel suit, and seven television stations have refused to run the ad.

But that’s minor-league mud-slinging compared to the efforts of several GOP candidates to link their opponents to pedophilia! Yep, you read that right: since Nancy Pelosi marched in a gay pride parade that included the icky North American Man/Boy Love Association, and California candidate Charlie Brown (no kidding) supports the ACLU who sometime, somewhere filed a suit on behalf of the same NAMBLA, they are ipso facto advocates of sodomizing teenage boys. I could have sworn that was some other politician…

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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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