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You can see right now the sort of ferocity and the hurricane of bamboozlement this White House is capable of unleashing when faced with a pretty much impossible to challenge case that they misled the American people in making the case for the Iraq war.

Much the same with public corruption and all the interwoven scandals only now bubbling to the surface in Washington and through the various tentacles of the DC political machine — Abramoff, Safavian, DeLay, Reed, Norquist, Scanlon, Ney, Burns, Pombo, Tobin, the Duke, Tomlinson, the yet to be discovered cronies at FEMA and DHS. The same wave after wave of bamboozlement and misdirection is in store as these stories unfold.

So, yes, this is another bid for our fundraiser. But let me take just a quick moment to explain again what we’re trying to do. We want to create a site, a blog devoted to a meticulously factual chronicling, explaining and aggressively reporting on the web of corruption in today’s Washington. Basically, more focused, more frequently updated, and making more connections than any well-balanced person could possibly want. In all seriousness, these are really complicated stories (not usually ethically complicated, but factually so). And the forest is always threatening to get lost for the trees. We want to set up a special TPM site devoted to keeping these stories in focus. And we want to hire one and hopefully two full-time people — reporter-bloggers — to help keep us and all our readers up to speed on the story.

That’s what this is for, basically for salaries for these two yet-to-be-hired (yet to be found, for that matter) people. We don’t and never will charge for access to any of our sites. So if you think this is a site you’re likely to read often and get something out of, we’re asking if you can chip in some funds for the not insubstantial costs of launching the new site and getting it on its feet.

That’s our pitch. It’ll be an experiment in blog-journalism. And we’ll do our best to make it fun in addition to worthwhile. So if you’d like to join us and make a contribution, click right here. As of 4:16 PM we’re up to 768 contributors. And we’re going to do our best to get to 1000 by the end of the evening.

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