The New American Image?: All Americans Carry Guns

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When musician and activist Michael Franti was in Iraq in 2004, he was the only American without a gun. He brought a wooden guitar instead. Hear Franti on Mother Jones Radio this weekend talking about his film and book I Know I’m Not Alone featuring laughing and singing Iraqis we never see on TV. And even though violence is spinning out of control, he’d go back now. Seriously. He wants all the troops to come home.

Journalist Sidney Blumenthal calls Bush radical in his new book How Bush Rules. It’s a collection of Blumenthal’s columns from The Guardian and Salon.com. Here is what he told us on the radio:

“Bush is not an idiot, he’s very shrewd and clever….he knows even now very little about the dynamics of foreign policy, he doesn’t have an analytical mind… He doesn’t know the degree to which he is manipulated in all sorts of ways by Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld. Cheney who controls a good deal of the information he sees and creates the reality around him. And Condi Rice who’s an enabler and flatterer who tells him what a great man he is constantly.”

Hear more from Blumenthal this weekend on Mother Jones Radio.

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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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