Alaska Senate Race Just Keeps Getting Weirder

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Speaking of Alaska, if you’re not paying attention to the three-way-race up in the Last Frontier, you’re really missing out.

In just the past two weeks, we’ve had former Sen. Ted Stevens come back from the dead to endorse Lisa Murkowski. And in an appearance in Fairbanks last week, Murkowski burst into song to promote her write-in campaign. And hers is the relatively normal campaign when compared to Joe Miller’s.

Over the weekend, the tea-party backed Republican candidate admitted that he was suspended from his job with the Fairbanks North Star Borough for three days in 2008 for violating its ethics policy. “It is true, during a lunch hour I did get on borough computers and I participated in a private poll for about five minutes,” said Miller. “It was a mistake I made.”

But other reports state that, as a part-time employee, he didn’t get lunch breaks—and he was making a not-so-innocent attempt to oust state Republican Party Chairman Randy Ruedrich (a position he wanted for himself) by voting on four different office computers. And this comes after Miller’s security guards last week man-handled a reporter who was trying to ask about this very ethics issue. More information may be revealed later today, as a judge has ruled that Miller’s personnel files should be made public.

We’re eagerly awaiting those files, as I’m sure many folks are, given there’s only one week until the election.

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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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