October 22, 2015

The Hillary Show Now Playing on Capitol Hill

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We have a minor technical problem here at Command Central. My cable company recently switched to all-digital signals, and warned me that this meant I needed a mini-cable box for every TV in the house. I got one for the bedroom TV, but never bothered getting one for the teensy little TV I keep next to my desk.

So instead of getting CNN, I just get some soothing guitar music and a message telling me that my TV doesn’t work. Still, I have Twitter. And online feeds. And transcripts. For example, here’s a piece of Trey Gowdy’s endless opening statement:

Madam Secretary, I understand there are people frankly in both parties who have suggested that this investigation is about you. Let me assure you it is not.

Um, OK. Please continue:

Your e-mails are no less or no more important than the e-mails of anyone else. It just took us a little bit longer to get them and it garnered a little more attention in the process….Our country is strong enough to handle the truth and our fellow citizens expect us to pursue the truth wherever the facts take us….They deserve the truth. They deserve the whole truth. They deserve nothing but the truth. The people we work for deserve the truth. The friends and family of the four who lost their lives deserve the truth. We’re going to find the truth because there is no statute of limitations on the truth.

Roger that. Just the facts, ma’am. The thought of making this committee a political witch hunt has never crossed anyone’s mind.

Anyway, so far there appears to be nothing new to come out of the hearing—though a few joke memes have been spawned by the news that Hillary Clinton didn’t have a computer in her office and claims to have transacted very little business via email. And that actually seems to be true. She sent and received about 20 emails a day, which is pretty minuscule for a secretary of state. I’m a B-list blogger and I get considerably more than that.

Also, I gather that Rep. Susan Brooks tried to imply that Hillary erased incriminating emails from around the time of the Benghazi attacks. Needless to say, she had zero evidence for this, so she didn’t really land any blows.

If anything interesting happens, I’ll try to keep you updated.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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