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This lovely little flower is a Zauschneria, named after Johann Baptista Josef Zauschner. It’s also known as a California fuchsia or a “hummingbird flower.”

This is a strangely difficult flower to photograph. There are loads of them along my normal morning walk, and I keep taking picture after picture of them. For some reason, though, the pictures always look—what? Kind of cartoony. There’s not much sense of depth, and the petals look like they’ve just been colored in. It’s odd.

But this one turned out pretty well, and I like the framing of the two flowers in the background. However, the real reason I’m putting this up today is that I’m tired of Zauschnerias. I keep taking pictures of them, and I’ll probably keep doing it forever until I post one. Now that I have, I can stop.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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