Breaking: Rove Had Hand in US Attorney Firings

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The Washington Post has obtained emails showing that Karl Rove, top political advisor to former President George W. Bush, played a significant role in the firing of a number of US attorneys for political reasons. You should go read the Post story 1) if, for some reason, this surprises you, 2) to laugh as a number of Rove’s statements are directly contradicted by the facts, and 3) to get the full details.

One quick, journalism-related note on the story. Marcy Wheeler is right that while none of this “is even remotely surprising” it “does suggest we’ll have these documents… in the relatively near future.” That’s great. But I would just point out that if the Washington Post followed the lead of the US attorneys’ scandal godfathers at Talking Points Memo—or Mother Jones’ own, similar practices—we’d already have those documents. The Post would have put them online so that members of the public could look at the source material and judge for themselves. But it’s not like the Post is in the business of informing the public or anything.

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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.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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