Best Lawmaker Voicemail Ever

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I have a story up today on the new push by conservative lawmakers to challenge the Federal Reserve by promoting the use of gold and silver currency at the state level. So far, Utah is the lone state to pass such legislation (as of last week, gold and silver coins are now legal tender in the Beehive State), but more than a dozen states have considered “hard money” proposals since the start of 2009.

Georgia Republican Rep. Bobby Franklin, who sponsored a bill that’s currently before his state legislature mandating the use of gold and silver for paying state taxes, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for the article. That might be because, as his secretary told me, “he’s a little media-shy.” Or it might be because of a story my colleague Jen Phillips wrote two weeks ago, about a bill Franklin sponsored that would potentially proscribe prescribe the death penalty for women who have miscarriages. Or maybe the two are related.

But I’ve buried the lede. This is what you get when you call his home phone number:

This is State Represenative Bobby Franklin. Thank you for calling to give me encouragement about my sponsorship of House Bill 1, recognizing that pre-natal murder is murder. I’m not able to take that encouragement right now, so at the tone please leave your name, number, and a message.

Emphasis mine. For the record, we weren’t calling to offer encouragement.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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