MyDD's Todd Beeton -- who is tirelessly traversing the country reporting on the campaigns and events -- wrote a must-read report, "Obama's "Universal" Healthcare Deception," noting that John Edwards also sensibly included mandates. Beeton quotes Obama's stump speech:

My opponents think the government should force you to buy healthcare. I believe that the reason people don't have healthcare isn't that they don't want it, it's that they can't afford it.

"The line would often get a big cheer but I haven't heard it lately," Beeton observes.  

We're almost at the end of the 2008 MyDD Fundraiser.  Soon there won't be anymore Please Contribute to MyDD Today links and that means we only have a little more time to do the right thing and make this campaign a success.

I just made my own donation and I'm proud to tell you a little bit about why I did.

I made my own modest contribution, because I know that the money I contributed will go directly to defraying the expenses of two extraordinary bloggers and pillars of this community, Todd Beeton and Jonathan Singer.

These two guys work their asses off on a daily basis to bring you unmatched political reporting.  I know, because I've seen them in action.

Yesterday, I was at the Obama rally in Alexandria where Todd, after a late night covering the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Richmond, was listening to an education round table event with Senator Obama and some concerned citizens.  When I say he was listening, I mean it.  The whole room could hear the Senator, but only one small speaker was picking up the feed from the other participants' microphones.  While many national reporters took this as an invitation to catch up on their email, Todd was part of a small group clustered around that one speaker, listening to the Senator answer questions about special ed and math homework.

I walked over with Todd to the main event, a rally in the home gymnasium of the T.C. Williams High School Titans of Remember the Titans fame - I wrote about it earlier here.  It was my first Obama speech since the 2004 convention, but Todd had seen a pretty similar speech the night before, so he jumped in the car to drive an hour North to Bowie, Maryland to hear Bill Clinton speak.

The night before that, I was hanging out with Jonathan Singer, who isn't letting a full course-load at law school get in the way of his work for this site.  It was a Saturday night in a city of beautiful women and strong drinks.  Or maybe it's strong women and beautiful drinks, it doesn't really matter.  The point is, that he spent most of it on the couch in my apartment watching election returns and blogging.  I finally dragged him out a little before midnight and despite the late evening, he was up before me the next morning to watch Dubya' on Faux y Amigos.

I can't say it any clearer, Todd and Jonathan are deeply committed to this community and this movement.  They support our habits as political junkies and their insights make us better activists.  Now it's our turn to support them.  Please give what you can so they can keep going and make MyDD even stronger in 2008.

Click here to contribute.

Hi, I'm dipping my toe back in the water here at MyDD for a brief moment.  In June, Chris and I launched OpenLeft to explore politics in a more explicitly ideological direction.  Since we left, Todd has come on board here, and Jonathan has really put his stamp on this place.  I miss posting here, but it is a different place now, one that the two of them (and Jerome) have really created along with all of you.  They took MyDD, which if I may say so was a great blog, and have made it simply indispensable.

Now, I could go on and talk about how awesome they are, but that's not the point of this post.  Blogging the way they do, with 50K people screaming every day about how they are biased against one candidate or issue or another, while going on the road and doing interviews and constantly scanning the news, is hard.  It's really damned hard.  It's also incredibly fun, which is why they do it and why all of us are here and write diaries and whatnot.  But it doesn't really pay the bills, and it's axiomatic of our society that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

The reason the corporate media is so shitty is because it's free.  NBC and CBS and Fox News don't charge you anything for their content, because you are the product that they sell to soap companies and car companies and defense contractors.  They don't really care about the truth and they certainly don't care if you know what the truth is, because the truth to them isn't very profitable.  In fact, if NBC tells the truth about the war or the housing bubble, they may cost their defense contracting or financial services arm more money than they make in a whole year of advertising at CNBC.  You are their product, so while their content is free, it comes at the cost of systematic lying.

Blogs are different, but they are not immune from the golden rule, that he who has the gold makes the rules.  If you want Jonathan and Todd to be limited in what they can do, in the interviews they can get, in the places they can travel, then by all means keep them dependent on advertising from soap companies, movies, and progressive nonprofits.  I can assure though that content on MyDD that you consume every single day will suffer in ways you will never notice, but that will be immensely costly to all of our understanding of politics and ability to affect change.

If you believe, as I do, that quality in content is important and that it is way more expensive in the long-run to consume lies for free than to pay for truth today, drop $50 in the kitty for Jonathan and Todd.  Truth, like our democracy, is only sustainable if we fight for it, and sometimes that means investing in the people who are obsessed with bringing us news, content, and often original information with a deep sense of integrity.

Let's keep this institution growing and flourishing, and together we will change the country as fundamentally over the next thirty years years as we have in the last five.  

So please, throw them some coin, and thanks for letting me come back for a moment.