April 20, 2011

Video: Carolina Tea Partiers Love Trump!

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Karl Rove must be horrified at what American conservatism’s become. Earlier this week, the master of top-down political messaging took billionaire birther Donald Trump to task for discrediting the Republican Party with his anti-Obama claptrap and joke presidential candidacy. “This is a mistake,” Rove said of the Donald’s crass tack. “It will marginalize him and he’s falling into Barack Obama’s trap.”

Or, it will make him insanely popular with the base of the base of the GOP. Witness this six minutes of jaw-dropping testimony from South Carolina tea partiers at a rally Monday, where Gov. Nikki Haley and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Nowhere Near South Carolina) spoke to the crowd. Democratic operative Tyler Jones documented the tea partiers’ zeitgeist on film. “I interviewed around 25 people total and probably 75 percent of them said they were supporting Donald Trump,” Jones told Slate‘s Dave Weigel, “and just about every single person is a birther. I took two hours of footage and chopped it down to six minutes of mind-blowing stuff.”

On one level, not all that surprising. On another level…well, here’s what Weigel says:

Remember those interviews with racist Democratic voters in West Virginia back in 2008? Remember the interviews outside McCain-Palin rallies — that nice gentleman with the toy monkey who called it “little Hussein”? Yeah. Things are not better now. And there aren’t any Democratic primary rallies at which conservatives can record competing videos.

Anyway, check out this video. It really has to be seen to be believed:

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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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