Support Reason in Your Time of Need! Donate Now! And Help End the Repetitive Use of Exclamation Points!

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We're still in the thick of our first-ever webathon here at reason online. 

This week, we're asking you, the readers of this website (including the award-winning, content-and-comment-rich blog Hit & Run), to help underwrite our efforts in producing the nation's, the world's, the galaxy's only journalistic enterprise dedicated to championing "Free Minds and Free Markets."

Founded in 1968 as an alternative to the played-out politics of right vs. left, conservative vs. liberal, Klingon vs. Romulan, reason is needed more than ever as we slouch into a 21st century in which civil liberties, economic freedom, free expression, pharmacological freedom, and much, much more are under attack.

You read the intertubes: If Washington gets its way—on the bailout, on war, on torture, on reregulation, on expanded powers for government at all levels (typically in concert with well-connected members of the "private" sector)—we're all screwed six ways to Sunday (and Sundays a long ways off!). reason counters all this with engaged and effective journalism that makes the principled case for maximum freedom and liberty in every situation. We're happy warriors against the busybodies who want to run your life for you.

Go here to donate now and see what sort of swag different giving levels will get you.

And as you wait for your reason bumper sticker (yours for a $25 donation!) or a "Swag pack" filled with all sorts of logo-ized merchandise that will annoy and intrigue your conservative and liberal friends (just $250!), chew on these words from Price Is Right and reason.tv host Drew Carey:

We need a magazine like yours to help fight the stupid drug laws, the stupid immigration laws, and stupid big government in general. "Free Minds and Free Markets!" Right on, my man. Freedom!

Or these, from Christopher Hitchens:

Mirthless officials are subtracting time from their "real" tasks in order to impose themselves where they have no business.

Such a mentality requires an eloquent and witty opposition, as well as a tough-minded one. I find that reason keeps my own arteries from hardening or flooding with adrenaline out of sheer irritation, because in the face of arbitrary power and flock-like conformism it continues to ask, in a polite but firm tone of voice, not only "why?" but "why not?"

Help keep us going for the next 40 years! 2048 is just around the corner and if the past is prologue, those folks are going to need a lot of help fighting off the forces of repression.

Please give what you can now.

Bonus video: I discuss my first encounter with reason, during the twilight of the Carter years, and reveal the two great secrets the magazine taught me. Secrets of power and hope that have never been urgent.

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