September 17, 2009

Dodd GOP Rival WWE CEO Linda McMahon Supports Dems

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World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon announced recently that she is poised to lay the smackdown on embattled Sen. Chris Dodd in the 2010 midterm elections. On first glance, this is definitely an uphill battle for McMahon. There are currently no Republican representatives in Congress throughout the northeast and polls show that former Rep. Rob Simmons already has a slight lead over Dodd.

But information released by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that McMahon has a history of donating to Democratic candidates and PACs, a fact that could help her in the mostly blue northeast state. Of the $90,000 she and her husband have contributed since 1989, 51 percent has gone to Democrats. Her top beneficiaries include Dem Mark Warner of Virginia, Obama chief of staff and former Rep. from Illinois Rahm Emanuel, and Dem-turned-Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

It’s looking more and more like the battle for Dodd’s seat could be the main event of the 2010 election cycle. And there’s no doubt that this video should be used in someone’s campaign ad… though I’m not sure whether it would hurt or help McMahon:

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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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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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