Brian Kerns

honoring our rubber-stamp congress, whose members have found plenty of time to do squat

Image: Joe Ciardiello & Tomer Hanuka

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An American Legion official recalled being in a meeting with Kerns during the attack. Confronted with his lie and asked to account where he really was during the attacks, Kerns ran away from the media, saying, “Who knows?”

MTV’s Forgotten Music Award

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) wrote a tune called “America Rocks,” which formed part of the soundtrack to the movie Rat Race: “America rocks! America rocks! / From its busy, bustling cities, / To its quiet country walks, / It’s totally cool, it’s totally hot. / I mean, it’s like right there at the top.”

Senator Zell Miller (D-Ga.), concerned that “the pickup owners of this nation might get screwed in all this gas-guzzler talk about suvs and vans,” co-wrote, sang, and recorded “The Talking Pickup Truck Blues.” The song goes in part: “I hear some news from Washington / Of a crackpot scheme to raise some mon. / It’s an unkind way to raise a buck, / And it adds more cost to my pickup truck.”

Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.) played guitar with his band Regular Joe and, prior to leaving office last September, was often heard singing the alt-rock tune “Teenage Dirtbag.” It goes in part: “Oh, how she rocks in Keds and tube socks, / But she doesn’t know who I am, / And she doesn’t give a damn about me, / ‘Cause I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby.” “I think I should get points for not doing Perry Como songs,” said Scarborough.

Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) released a CD entitled Dick Armey’s Favorite Hits. (No, seriously.) The album cover features the House majority leader atop a horse and includes such titles as “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal.”

Back | And the winner is…

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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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