WATCH: Senator Kyl’s START Gamble [Cartoon]

A little nuclear terrorism is a small price to pay for political gains.


Mother Jones illustrator Zina Saunders creates editorial animations riffing on the political news and current events of the week. In this week’s animation, Key Senate Republican Jon Kyl is upping the ante in his game against Obama: he’s determined to stop START, even after Republican bigwigs like Henry Kissinger and George Schultz came out in support of ratifying the nuclear missile agreement with Russia. Wiley Kyl smells victory in his gamble to put a Republican in the White House in 2012; after all, a little nuclear terrorism is a small price to pay. And since you ask: Yes, Saunders does all her own awesome songs and cartoon voiceovers.—The Editors

Here are the lyrics, written and performed by Zina:

Kyl’s feeling lucky, got the world on a string

He’s in a gambling mood and he’s betting everything

It’s a scary game but one he’s glad to play

He’ll show them what he’s made of and what he’s set to pay.

Missiles and treaties don’t mean a thing to him

Who cares about a war when there’s a race to win

Who cares if it’s disaster, who cares if it’s the end

He’s gonna get Obama out, replace him a friend 

Watch him as he gambles, spin the wheel and see

He’s betting with the world on taking back DC.

He thinks it might be useful if we should go to war

It would fire up his voters and even up the score.

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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.

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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.

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