October 1, 2013

Sad Birthday Cards for Yosemite and NASA, 123 and 55 Today


It’s your party, and we’ll shut it down if we want to.

That’s the message congressional Republicans sent Yosemite National Park and NASA today, on their respective 123rd and 55th birthdays. 

Yosemite’s special day will now include such celebratory activities as instructing all day visitors to immediately leave the park and kicking out overnight RVs and campers. Worst surprise party ever.

NASA put out a cheery graphic today celebrating its five decades of astronomic successes, from putting 12 people on the moon, four landers on Mars, and one craft in interstellar space. To honor their hard work, the government gave 97 percent of NASA staffers unpaid vacations. The space program effectively got grounded on its own birthday. Robots got the shaft too; Curiosity Rover poked at H2O molecules in Mars dust on Thursday, and got furloughed on Tuesday. 

Congress may be giving them the Sixteen Candles treatment, but we wanted to let Yosemite and NASA know we care.

 

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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