June 17, 2011

Golf Summit: High Hopes for a Violence-free Affair

<a href="www.petesouza.com">Pete Souza</a>/Wikimedia Commons

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President Obama and Speaker Boehner are all set for their much-anticipated golf summit tomorrow. In addition to golfing, they’ll reportedly be getting down to some serious business, mixing in discussions on the debt ceiling and spending cuts with their handicaps. The odds that anything concrete will come of their time on the links appears remote, though just maybe it will help cool some of the personal tensions that have boiled up between them from time to time. Boehner, for one, views golf as a great bonding exercise. “Playing golf with someone is a great way to really get to know someone. You start trying to hit that little white ball. You can’t be somebody that you’re not because all of you shows up,” he told 60 Minutes in December.

 

Whether or not Obama and Boehner emerge from their outing any chummier, hopes should at least be high that the two can comport themselves with slightly more class than Bolivian president Evo Morales, whose “friendly” soccer match last year pitting the president and his allies against a team led by a former political friend turned adversary yielded this priceless footage. (And yes, that guy is President Morales.)

 

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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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