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From Bill O’Reilly, responding on the air to Canadian viewer Peter Gillies, who noted that Canadians have higher life expectancies under their healthcare system than we do under ours:

Well that’s to be expected, Peter, because we have ten times as many people as you do. That translates to ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.

Note that this wasn’t just an off-the-cuff howler.  O’Reilly chose to air Gillies’ letter and had his response all teed up on the prompter.  Here are the alternatives for how this happened: (a) Not a single person on his staff noticed that this was nonsensical.  (b) Someone noticed but didn’t have guts to tell O’Reilly he was wrong.  (c) Someone noticed, told O’Reilly, but was unable to convince him that he’d flubbed his fourth grade arithmetic.  (d) O’Reilly does this stuff all by himself and doesn’t show it to anyone before airtime.  I’m going with (b).

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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