Welcome to the Al Franken Decade

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Al Franken, formerly of Saturday Night Live and the author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, will be sworn in as a US Senator from the state of Minnesota later this morning. It’s been a long journey for Al from late night comedian to CSPAN celebrity, and Mother Jones has been watching all the way.

Franken sat down for an interview with us way back in 1996, right after Big Fat Idiot soared to the top of best-seller lists. In 2004, he wrote an article for us about his USO tours. We reviewed a movie about Franken in 2006. In 2007, as Franken was gearing up for the Senate campaign, Jonathan Stein profiled him for the magazine. And we’ve covered the election and the recount battle exhaustively: we covered the initial vote count, noted his Mick Jagger stylings after the results came out, and watched as public opinion turned against Norm Coleman’s court fight. Later, I predicted (correctly) when Franken would be seated and reminded you what to call him when he won. And then Norm Coleman conceded, clearing the way for Al to get sworn in today.

You can safely assume that we’ll keep you posted.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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