Mitt Romney Winning the Race for the 1 Percent

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The Washington Post reports today that Barack Obama has received donations from 30 billionaires while Mitt Romney has received donations from 42 billionaires. Ho hum. But there’s this fascinating little tidbit halfway through the story:

Romney has attracted the support of Redskins owner Dan Snyder and other billionaires, including California real estate developer Donald Bren, who is worth $12 billion, and developer and publisher Sam Zell, who is worth $5 billion.

As a lifelong reader of the Los Angeles Times, I’d say that the support of Sam Zell ought to be reason enough to disqualify anyone from the presidency. I suppose there’s a good chance that he’s not actually much more of an asshole than hundreds of other billionaires, but he sure went out of his way to make it more obvious than usual. He’s just lucky that LA also has Frank McCourt around, which means there’s at least one zillionaire here that we all hate even more.

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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