The Vindication of “No”

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The main takeaway from Scott Brown’s win in the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday has to be that Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP’s strategy of filibustering absolutely everything the Democrats proposed was incredibly effective. The Republicans managed to prevent the Democrats from passing their main agenda items, confirming 175-plus administration officials, or even confirming most of Obama’s judicial nominees. Most important, the GOP was able to stall while the national mood shifted and Democrats became increasingly associated with the poor economy and (ironically) the “gridlock” in Washington.

This is great news for Republicans in the short term. House Democrats are wilting at the prospect of passing the Senate health care reform bill unchanged, which is the measure’s best remaining chance for making it into law. The national environment is looking increasingly GOP-friendly, and the Republicans appear poised to romp in the 2010 midterms.

In the long run, however, the vindication of the “party of ‘no'” strategy will hurt conservatives just as much as it’s hurting Democrats now. When the GOP is back in power, Democrats will surely adopt the same strategy the Republicans are employing now. Major conservative agenda items—things like privatizing Social Security—will inevitably run into filibusters (remember, Republicans haven’t had over 60 percent of the votes in the Senate since the ’20s). Conservative judges and presidential appointees will be even harder to confirm than they were in the Bush years. The GOP will be left with the only thing it’s been able to pass in recent years: war resolutions and tax cuts for the rich. How’d that work out last time?

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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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