February 2, 2016

Ted! Ted! Ted!

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Here are tonight’s big messages as we all fondly say “Goodbye, Iowa”:

  • Ted Cruz: I will have the shortest name of any president in history.
  • Marco Rubio: Benghazi!
  • Donald Trump: Finishing in the top ten is a great victory.
  • Jeb Bush: I have a short name too. And hey, I beat Carly.
  • Republican Party: We count votes a lot more efficiently than those loser Democrats.
  • Hillary Clinton: A win is a win. Let’s get out of here.
  • Bernie Sanders: Hmmm. Maybe we’re not that tired of Hillary’s emails after all.
  • Democratic Party: We may be slow, but we make up for it with a stereotypically cumbersome and complex voting process.

Iowa is historically so unpredictive of anything that I honestly didn’t have a lot of interest in tonight’s results. I was mainly curious about how Donald Trump would somehow spin his second place finish as a victory. The answer, it turned out, was to drone on about how “they” told him to skip Iowa because he wouldn’t even break the top ten. I assume this is the same “they” who repeatedly told Marco Rubio that he was too much of a schmuck to win. Whoever “they” are, they’ve been busy.

And now on to New Hampshire, a state inexplicably in love with Donald Trump. What’s that all about, anyway?

UPDATE: The photo above is from season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The name of the episode is “Goodbye, Iowa.”

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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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