January 2, 2009

Watch Your Tongue

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WATCH YOUR TONGUE….The Washington Post reports that a Muslim family was tossed off a flight to Orlando yesterday. AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson explains:

“At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn’t have made on the airplane, and other people heard them,” Hutcheson said. “Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions.”

“It just so happened” indeed. But it gets even worse. Apparently after making these comments that “shouldn’t” be made on an airplane and freaking out some high-strung passengers, the flight was delayed:

As a result of that report, federal officials made the decision to order all 104 passengers from the plane and re-screen them and their luggage before allowing the flight to take off for Orlando — two hours late and without the nine passengers.

So everybody was thoroughly rescreened, luggage was rechecked, and presumably it turned out that the Muslim family didn’t have so much as a nail file on them. But they were kicked off the flight anyway. And TSA’s reaction? Apparently they think the system worked exactly the way it was supposed to.

Welcome to 2009.

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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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