Sen. Clinton’s ACLU Score Takes A Bit Of A Dive; Obama’s Stays About the Same

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In April, I reported on the most current ACLU scores of some senators, and Sen. Hillary Clinton had a score of 83%. The new scores have been pubished, and Clinton’s latest score is 67%, 16 points down from last time. Clinton voted for the Baucus/Tester Amendment, which defeated a motion to table the Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which expands Real ID legislation. She also voted against the Bennett Amendment (which passed), which removed from the Lobbying Transparency and Accountability Act a provision which would have made grassroots lobbying very difficult and mired in paperwork.

Clinton voted against expanded government spying powers, for cloture that would have permitted consideration of a vote to restore Habeas Corpus rights, for cloture to allow a vote on the Kennedy-Smith amendment (expansion of hate crimes legislation to include sexual orientation, gender identification, gender, and disability), and against the use of government-issued photo ID cards by voters.

Sen. Barack Obama has a score of 80%, and Sen. John McCain has a score of 50%, which appears to be an improvement over his last score of 33%, but there’s a catch: McCain was absent for 2/3 of the votes.

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid has maintained his 67% score. In the past, the leader of the Senate Democrats had scored as low as 40%.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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