May 24, 2010

AZ Governor Fights Boycott With Puppets

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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has been fending off calls from around the country for a major boycott of her state for its passage of a draconian new immigration law. Last Friday, Brewer’s reelection campaign fought back with a new video that quickly went viral. (By Monday morning it had been viewed more than 260,000 times.) In it, a green puppet sings a little ditty about how reading “helps you know what you’re talking about,” mixed in with clips of various Obama administration officials acknowledging that they’ve never actually read the ten page Arizona statute they’ve been bashing. It doesn’t have quite the genius of Demon Sheep, but Brewer’s video does a decent job of making Attorney General Eric Holder and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano look pretty foolish.

 

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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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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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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