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Dave Weigel tweets:

May I just say that Beck and the conservative blogosphere are doing themselves proud by dumping Medina.

Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. Debra Medina has flirted with 9/11 trutherism, apparently thinks there’s Soviet brainwashing afoot in the Texas police, believes Texas should be nullifying more federal laws, has been forced to deny that she’s a Bilderberger, and has been disowned as a nutjob by Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck! And of course she’s an unknown candidate running for governor against two longtime conservative stalwarts, so dropping her like a hot potato is pretty much cost-free. If you can’t dump someone like that, who can you dump?

On a more serious note, Dave looks at the bigger picture:

I think because the mainstream media were slow to cover the Tea Parties as anything but a ridiculous joke, there’s been a lot of overcompensating that imbues these activists with fresh, bold, out-of-nowhere political tactics. But that the fact is that some people on the political fringes have made lateral moves from Alex Jones-listening or Obama birth certificate-sleuthing or Bilderberg-obsessing into the Tea Party Movement. And if Glenn Beck hadn’t decided to see how far Medina wanted to go with this, she’d be on track to get into a gubernatorial run-off.

FWIW, I don’t think the tea party movement has any more chance of a long political life than Sarah Palin. Of course, for those of you who think I’m dismissing Palin too cavalierly, that might be bad news.

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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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