September 6, 2018

A Short Breather

This is what Brett Kavanaugh has looked like most of the day.Alex Edelman/CNP via ZUMA

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This has been a weirdly rushed day for me. I had the whole 5-hour infusion thing going, which slows me down to begin with, but then I decided to produce a whole bunch of charts about the auto industry for no particular reason, and that took a bunch of time. I finally finished, and then decided to write a long post about different measures of inflation. Why? I’ll explain in the next post. But it took forever, and I kept making mistakes, and by the time the infusion was done and I’d had lunch I still wasn’t done. So I plodded along after I got home and finally finished the damn thing around 3 pm.

In the meantime, I don’t really know what’s going on in the rest of the world. People are still blabbing about the anonymous op-ed, which I don’t really care about since it’s kind of a publicity stunt and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know before. And I really don’t care who wrote it.¹ Come on, folks.

So that leaves Brett Kavanaugh. Tell me if I have this right: Democrats are doing a pretty good job of going after him and leaving an impressive amount of chaos in their wake, and Kavanaugh is mostly responding like a deer in headlights. This is pretty interesting, but it also doesn’t matter. Unless Kavanaugh turns out to be the Zodiac Killer, Republicans are going to confirm him and that’s that—even if they have to keep half his career hidden from view in order to pull it off. Democrats can squawk and complain all they want, but in the end Kavanaugh will be a conservative Supreme Court justice who will probably serve for 30 or 40 years. Nothing else matters.

So now I’ll go ahead and write the post I was planning to write about wage growth over the past year. Believe me, you will be so fascinated you’ll barely be able to remove your eyeballs from your screen. It’s coming up soon.

¹Unless it turns out to have been written by someone really high up. That would be super interesting. Maybe Vladimir Putin can tell us?

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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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