Brodner’s Cartoon du Jour: R is for Rush

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Sarah Palin’s celebrity-burn-rate continues at volcanic temps. We happy blog workers here are always glad to help. Forget the Super Bowl; dig Sarah’s flying wedge…against herself.

So after pissing off Tea Partiers with a very un-populist $100,000 fee for her chirp at their convention in Nashville, she is caught referring to scribbles she made on her hand (remember her “Obama, the guy with the teleprompter”?). Next she carried her “Rahm Emanuel is toast for using the word retard” campaign to Fox News. When asked if it was okay that Rush Limbaugh used it, she said, uh-huh.

I have to wonder, where is the rest of her policy? I’m sure the R-word is written around there somewhere. It’s her registered trademark.

From the Huffington Post:

On Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, she said his comments calling liberal groups “f-ing retards” was “indecent and insensitive” and cause for his dismissal.

But the former governor went to great and sometimes awkward lengths to insist that when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh used the same exact term to describe the same exact group, it was simply in the role of political humorist.

“They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups “retards.” “Rush Limbaugh was using satire…I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with “f-ing retards,” and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there.”

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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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