The Best Places to Live in America

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Kiplinger’s magazine has just named its ten best cities to live in America, and San Francisco isn’t on the list. Washington, DC, however, is number three. Why, you ask? This year’s list is “all about jobs,” Kiplinger’s says, and DC is a great place to find and keep a job in a recession:

For better or worse, the federal government is big and getting bigger. And for the Washington, D.C., area economy, that means for the better. “The government just keeps spending and adding jobs,” says city spokesman Sean Madigan.

Only about one in eight workers in the Washington area—spanning D.C. proper and big chunks of adjoining Virginia and Maryland—are employed directly by the feds. Still, the government fuels nearby companies in almost every industry, especially law firms, lobbyists, and aerospace and defense companies.

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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.

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