Ron Paul Demonstrates He’s a True GOP Trendsetter

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For chrissake. Ron Paul’s excuse for writing lots of racist and nutball crap in his newsletters is that he didn’t write the newsletters and doesn’t know who did.1 Now Newt Gingrich has decided this is such a peachy excuse that he’s going to use it too:

The Wall Street Journal reports today on a memo from April 2006 on the website of Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation. In the memo, filed under the “Newt Notes” column and written in the first person, Gingrich calls RomneyCare the “most exciting development of the past few weeks” and says he “agree[s] strongly” with the “principle” of the individual mandate….These days the mandate, and by extension RomneyCare, are treif2 in GOP orthodoxy. What to do, then, about this memo?

[Gingrich spokesman R.C.] Hammond said the Newt Notes essay wasn’t written by Mr. Gingrich himself.

I would like to announce for the record that I have been paying various local high school students to write most of this blog for the past ten years. I never asked for their names and paid them under the table by giving them answers to SAT questions, so I don’t know who they are. I assume this brings an end to questions about some of the unfortunate posts written here, which I disavow completely. As of now, it’s old news. Move along, please.

1Actually, “doesn’t know” should be rendered in scare quotes. Paul is lying. He knows perfectly well who wrote this stuff.

2adj. Judaism ritually unfit to be eaten; not kosher.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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