July 31, 2009

Now You HAVE to Love Wedding Dance Couple

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Surely you watched this week’s viral sensation, JKWedding Entrance Dance. The funky-as-you-wanna-be nuptual entrance of Jill Peterson and Kevin Heiz to Chris Batterer Brown‘s Forever led to a bizillion downloads, lining the pockets of YouTube and the girlfriend beater himself. Which is not what this St. Paul couple had in mind, so they’ve created their own site, jkweddingdance.com, where you can watch the video and make a donation to the Sheila Wellstone Institute, which fights to end domestic violence.

Sheila, as you may know, was married to Senator Paul Wellstone, an old college professor of mine. Both were truly inspirational advocates who died when the Senator’s plane went down in a snowstorm. I don’t know if they knew Jill and Kevin or their families, but I’m sure they’d find this to be a pretty cool wedding gift all around. Bravo. Now, will Chris Brown step up and donate the money he’s made off the downloads? (H/T the always interesting Jezebel.)

Update: The inevitable, but still funny, divorce parody.

Clara Jeffery is Co-Editor of Mother Jones. You can read more of her clips here and follow her on Twitter here.

 

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists 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 hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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