October 20, 2006

Republicans Want Republican Out in Orange County

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California’s well-heeled Orange County has a long history of hostility to immigrants, but a letter aimed at scaring Latinos away from the polls, sent out by the campaign staff of a Republican congressional candidate, was too much even for the local GOP. The chairman of the county’s Republican Party is calling on Tan Nguyen to drop out of the race, and the US Department of Justice is even considering filing charges, the Orange County Register says this morning. The letter, which went out to about 14,000 Latino voters, warns (falsely, of course) that it’s a crime punishable by jail or deportation for immigrants to vote.

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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.

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