February 27, 2016

Let Us Take a Minute to Fully Appreciate the Current State of American Politics

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Do you remember this famous video of the South Korean parliament from a few years ago?

How infantile! This is supposed to be a mature democracy. What the hell is going on?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marco Rubio on Friday morning, making his case against Donald Trump:

Can you feel the burn? And here is Trump a few hours later making his case against Rubio:

Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it? The presidential campaign of one of our great political parties has now degenerated into two guys in suits insulting each other for sweating a lot during a debate.

By the way, Trump’s schtick came during an event where he announced the endorsement of New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Trump now has the following endorsements:

  • Sarah Palin, crackpot former Republican VP candidate.
  • Teresa Giudice, star of Real Housewives of New Jersey.
  • Geert Wilders, Dutch Islamaphobe and leader of the Party for Freedom.
  • Joe Arpaio, famous Arizona sheriff fond of chain gangs, dressing inmates in pink underwear, feeding them moldy food, and too many other lunatic acts to count.
  • Paul LePage, wingnut governor of Maine who memorably said that Maine’s biggest problem was “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty….they come up here, they sell their heroin.”
  • David Duke, noted white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
  • Alex Jones, insane talk radio conspiracy monger.
  • Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelical leader of Liberty University, whose endorsement came despite Trump’s well-known string of affairs, remarriages, skinflint charitable giving, and apparent lack of any serious Christian faith.
  • Ann Coulter, political commentator noted for her Islamaphobia, hatred of illegal immigrants, and general descent into highly-calculated derangement.
  • Dennis Rodman, famous basketball player and friend to Kim Jung-un
  • Juanita Brodderick and Paula Jones, who both made sketchy but famous accusations of sexual harassment against Bill Clinton.
  • Willie Robertson, homophobic star of Duck Dynasty.
  • Carl Paladino, racist emailer and secret-daughter-hiding former Republican candidate for New York governor.
  • Chris Christie, ambitious, tough-guy governor of New Jersey embroiled in a controversy over punishing a political opponent by deliberately shutting down two lanes on the George Washington bridge and tying up traffic for miles.

This man is currently leading the national Republican polls by more than 20 points over his nearest competitor.

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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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