This post is a confluence between Thanksgiving Day and the wrap-up of our Autumn Fundraiser.
The red bench in the photo above has now been dusted with snow — an adumbration of things to come, since our next fundraiser will be Winter 2017, sometime in the frigid days after the beginning of the new year.
We have a lot to be thankful for at the moment. Perhaps the single biggest cause for gratitude is that we won’t have eight years of President Hillary (or more likely, a year or so of the Empress, followed by ten years of Kommie Kaine) to look forward to. I also thank the Lord for the soon-to-be-realized opportunity to use the phrase “former President Obama”. What a pleasure that will be! It was a long eight years, but we made it.
And our just-completed bleg gives us ample additional reason to be thankful: despite the fact that Dymphna’s travails kept us from doing a fresh post every day, donors showed up with heartening regularity. It seems that the compact format of this fundraiser didn’t inhibit donations all that much, if at all.
So thank you all for showing up. And thank you also for contributing to the comments — that was another unexpected side effect of the unitary fundraiser: a far larger response than usual in the comments.
Below is the final list of places from which donations came (giving me the opportunity to show off my new software for breaking out Australian states and Canadian provinces).
Update Nov. 25 1:30pm: Alaska just sent in a gift, thereby adding another state to the list:
Stateside: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming
Near Abroad: Mexico
Far Abroad: Croatia, Germany, India, Israel, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Slovenia, Sweden, Thailand, and the UK
Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan
Australia: Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The most apt description of the kind of fundraising we do here came up in the comments on a different post, a translated op-ed from Switzerland about the recent American presidential election. The comment in question was a response to another commenter named scherado, who had been addressing the author of the op-ed, Markus Somm:
Mr Somm, I appreciate your perspective.
I, the non-journalist, perceive that government by the people — parliamentary, constitutional, representative republic, and so on— can NOT function properly WITHOUT a proper press. You have stated very well the illness.
Will someone suggest the remedy, any remedy?
Our Israeli correspondent MC weighed in with a reply:
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