September 3, 2010

This Week in National Insecurity: Labor Day Edition

DOD photo / <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_soldiers_stuck_in_sand_in_southern_Afghanistan.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>

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Welcome, insecure reader: Today is our special Labor Day edition! As you plan your leisure activities for the long weekend, MoJo offers you a host of national-security-related entertainment options: watching Iraq’s hottest suicide-bombing-comedy TV show; playing Muslim dress-up in New York with Israeli spies; viewing the movie and playing the video game that the military doesn’t want you to see; speaking truth to power, only seven years too late; checking out the latest in militarized femme Christian emo rock; and harshly judging the dancing boys of Afghanistan.

The sitrep:

The United States government’s national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow. You’re welcome.

  • What do you get when you cross MTV’s Punk’d with Hurt Locker? You get the latest sign Iraq is becoming normal—like, America normal—a thriving celeb-reality TV industry! To wit: the new show, Put Him in Camp Bucca, on Iraq’s Al-Baghdadiya TV station, which frames up celebs for carrying car bombs, then secretly tapes the hilarity as they try to talk themselves out of incarceration at the new Abu Ghraib. Says a recent celebrity guest: “I am a family man. I have two kids. How could I do this to my family? I am telling you the truth, it’s not me who planted the bomb.” Ha ha ha ha, crazy. It’s cool, though, we’re doing the same thing. Just, like, not funny or anything.
  • Israeli Mossad spies of Arab descent, who are in the US posing as UN diplomats, also pose as American intelligence officers of Arab descent in order to convince Muslim Americans, mostly of Arab descent, to cooperate with them in rooting out domestic Hamas sympathizers, since (obviously!) the Muslim Americans will be much more helpful to US spooks than Israeli ones. Shockingly, this “inverted false flag” operation isn’t going so well. Simplify, Maccabean operatives. Simplify.

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.

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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.

payment methods

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