Up is Still Up, Down is Still Down

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I’m back! It was (mostly) dry in San Francisco, but it’s raining here in Southern California. This is not the way the world is supposed to work. However, just to prove that the world hasn’t been turned completely unpside down, it turns out that Republicans are still Republicans:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

….According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track. The two programs Shelby wants to move forward or else.

And this:

The senator who is shepherding the Obama administration’s package of Wall Street reforms through Congress said on Friday morning that talks with his Republican counterpart had broken down.

The senator, Christopher J. Dodd, indicated that Democrats would forge ahead with their own bill, after months of talks that had been aimed at reaching a bipartisan consensus.

I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. A leading member of the party that’s the scourge of earmarks is blocking all nominees for everything1 unless his earmarks are hustled back onto the fast track, and months of negotiations with the party that insists it’s willing to negotiate with Democrats in good faith have broken down because, in fact, they aren’t. They aren’t, as most of us with three-digit IQs already knew, willing to agree to any financial regulation that has even the slightest chance of actually regulating the behavior that caused the 2008 meltdown.

(And “slightest chance” is all we’re talking about here. It’s not as if the Democratic version of financial regulation was likely to put much of a dent in Wall Street in the first place.)

But I’ll take my good news where can I get it. And here it is: I got home late enough that I really don’t have much time to blog this latest bout of GOP hypocrisy and kowtowing. So I won’t. Catblogging is coming up next!

1No, that’s not a typo. All nominees. For everything.

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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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