By Walter Moore, Candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles, WalterMooreForMayor.com

Great news, my friends: tonight, our fellow Kevin James Show listeners pushed us across the $150,000 contribution level!

That's the minimum amount needed to qualify for matching funds. It's important for several reasons:

Double Your Money. From now on, when you contribute to my campaign, the City will match your contribution, up to $500. So if you contribute, say $100, I'll get another $100 from the City, for a total of $200. That will double our ability to reach voters who don't follow local politics.

"Viable Candidate." The (biased) local media have, so far, justified the "news blackout" on my campaign by claiming I wasn't a "viable" candidate because I hadn't raised enough money to be worthy. Qualifying for matching funds eliminates that pretext. Now they'll have to stop ignoring me, and start lying about me. But even that will be progress, because our fellow voters will figure out, despite the disinformation, that they can get a Mayoral upgrade.

Debate Showdown. Matching funds come with "strings attached." One of those strings is that any candidate who accepts matching funds must debate any other candidate who accepts matching funds. So Villaraigosa will either have to debate me or forego at least a million dollars in matching funds. Either way, he loses, and we and the people of L.A. will win. If he debates me, we'll win in a landslide. If he refuses, the public will infer, correctly, that he is afraid to try defending his record and his policies.

This Is The Beginning, Not The End. Please do not make the mistake of thinking we can stop raising money. Quite the contrary. Qualifying for matching funds simply gets me in the arena. And I'm not sitting on a $150,000 war chest by any means: the money I've received so far has gone into all those ads you've heard so far, plus the yard signs and bumper stickers, rent for the auditoriums for the rallies, and so on. You know the expression: you have to spend money to make money.

We still need hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy radio and TV ads to reach our fellow voters. You would not believe how much TV ads cost, by the way. So if you haven't contributed yet, please do, and urge your friends and neighbors to do likewise.

We can win. We can fix this city.

Thank you so much for your support and your encouragement. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you at the rally on October 14, 2008, starting at 7:00 p.m. at the Woodland Hills Marriott. We'll get to hear from Doug McIntyre and Kevin James, and we'll have yard signs and bumper stickers galore, too.

Click here to contribute.