Party Ben’s 2007 Mother Jones Mashup: Faithless vs. George W. Bush’s SOTU

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Hello internet. I’m Party Ben. You might know me from such films as “That’s My Monkey 2: Ookin’ it Up,” and “Arm & Hammer: a Company With a Future.” Not really. Actually, I make those most mockable of musical items: mashups! Plus I also DJ in the Golden State, and do something called “creative direction” for San Francisco radio station LIVE 105. Good times.

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, I’ve been asked to be a guest blogger on this blog, focusing on musical and cultural items of note. I guess I’ll bring a refreshing lack of “writing skills” or “journalistic ethics” that they couldn’t find around the Mother Jones offices.

To celebrate my acceptance into the liberal media elite, I’ve updated one of my more political tracks for exclusive download by readers of this fine blog. It’s based on a song by Faithless, “Mass Destruction,” a deceptively jaunty anti-war number that appeared on their 2004 album “No Roots.” At that time I produced a novelty version featuring some appropriate excerpts of George W. Bush’s anti-evildoer speechifying. Despite my version’s simplicity (like, wow, echo!) it proved inexplicably popular. As is my usual method, I produced at least six different versions, including a long one that appeared on my website and a shorter one that got some radio play on my own and other stations. This new version uses excerpts of Bush’s recent State of the Union speech as well as some of the clips I used in the original mix. Compare and contrast! It’s Faithless vs. George W. Bush, “Mass Destruction” (Party Ben’s 2007 Mother Jones remix). Enjoy.

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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 canā€™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 wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”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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