Need To Read: September 24, 2009

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Today’s must-reads jumped out of the pot:

  • HIV Vaccine Shows Promise (Bloomberg)
  • David Paterson Opens Up (NYT)
  • Bill McKibben: Is Obama Even Trying on Climate? (MoJo)
  • Glenn Beck: Frog Murderer (MoJo)
  • Someone In Creigh Deeds’ Campaign Thinks Honesty Is The Best Policy (WaPo)
  • Clinton Compared Gore to Mussolini? (MoJo)
  • How Richard Posner Became A Keynesian (The New Republic)
  • The Spy Who Loved Hamas (MoJo)
  • Jack Shafer: “Sometimes it takes an outsider like Andrew Breitbart to show the press corps the way.” (Slate)
  • Things That Make Claire McCaskill’s Head “Pop Off” (MoJo)
  • Obama Echoes Bush on State Secrets? (MoJo)
  • Sen. Inhofe’s Climate Sceptic Road Show (MoJo)

Follow me! David Corn, Mother Jones’ DC bureau chief, also tweets, as does awesome new MoJo blogger Kate Sheppard. So do my colleagues Daniel Schulman and Rachel Morris and our editors-in-chief, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein. Follow them, too! (The magazine’s main account is @motherjones.)

 

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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