April 5, 2012

Quote of the Day: Does Nikki Haley Tip Sikhs Better?

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From Time’s Belinda Luscombe at the end of an interview with South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who was born and raised as a Sikh:

In New York City, which you’re visiting for a couple of days, a lot of our taxi drivers are Sikhs. If you get one, are you going to give him a slightly bigger tip?

This is outrageous. Why does Luscombe casually accept the gender normative view that all taxi drivers are male?

(By the way, Haley answered that she gives the same tip to everyone. She also quite charitably refrained from slugging Luscombe.)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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