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BAD PUNDITS….Foreign Policy rounds up the top ten worst predictions of 2008 today. Bill Kristol tops the list, and while I can’t argue with that in a cosmic, karmic kind of sense, I have to confess that predicting Hillary Clinton would beat Barack Obama hardly qualifies as uniquely idiotic. Surely he’s said something dumber than that recently?

Personally, I would have given the #1 spot to Don Luskin, who claimed, on the day before Bear Stearns collapsed, that it was ridiculous to say we were in a recession. That’s an epic fail.

However, if I were Walter Wagner I’d sue for crystal ball malpractice. He’s the guy who predicted that the Large Hadron Collider would destroy the earth, and FP says, “The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.” But the truth is that the LHC never reached its full operational capacity before a malfunction shut it down. It might yet suck the planet into a black hole, and won’t the FP editors have egg on their faces if that happens.

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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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