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.

 

We were built for times like these

Russian bots are impersonating us. Trump and his allies want to silence us. AI wants to (and does!) steal our content. The list goes on. But with 50 years of experience, we know we were built for this moment: We’re ready to keep diving deep and uncovering the truth, then getting that to you right here, completely accessible and never behind a paywall.

While our work is free to read, watch, and listen to online, it’s incredibly costly to make. Court documents, travel, research: It all adds up. Because we’re a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on reader support to fund our investigations. Will you stand with us in these extraordinary times, as headlines clamour for our attention and disinformation is rampant? We can’t get the truth out without you.

We were built for times like these

Russian bots are impersonating us. Trump and his allies want to silence us. AI wants to (and does!) steal our content. The list goes on. But with 50 years of experience, we know we were built for this moment: We’re ready to keep diving deep and uncovering the truth, then getting that to you right here, completely accessible and never behind a paywall.

While our work is free to read, watch, and listen to online, it’s incredibly costly to make. Court documents, travel, research: It all adds up. Because we’re a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on reader support to fund our investigations. Will you stand with us in these extraordinary times, as headlines clamour for our attention and disinformation is rampant? We can’t get the truth out without you.

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

INDEPENDENT. BECAUSE OF YOU.

Mother Jones has no billionaires calling the shots—just readers like you making fearless reporting possible

Donate