December 4, 2014

This Pro-Hillary Cowboy Anthem Will Make Your Ears Bleed

Stand With Hillary

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The 2016 presidential election’s stupid season has begun. Sure, it’s only been a month since the midterms, but a bevy of super-PACs are already boosting Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign. Three new pro-Hillary groups have been established in the past six weeks, the Washington Post‘s Matea Gold noted Thursday.

One of those new super-PACs is Stand With Hillary, which debuted by releasing a truly horrendous pro-Hillary country anthem. In the video—which leans heavily on shots of barns, tractors, and construction workers—a bearded cowboy croons about his desire for Clinton to run for president one more time. “Now it’s 2016,” he sings, “and this time I’m a thinkin’, guys put your boots on and let’s smash this ceiling,” at which point a pane of glass with 2016 written on it is literally smashed with a sledgehammer. Oy vey.

“Don’t matter if you’re living across this great land in a red or blue state,” he sings. “Cuz our American dream is at stake and there’s some hard choices that need to be made. We’re needing a leader who is tough and ready, who’s got vision.” It’s left unsaid whether this cowboy favors Clinton for her hawkish foreign policy views, her support of fracking, or her thoughts on parental leave laws.

But purely as a piece of music, this is rubbish. If you want a better country song, try some Blake Shelton. And if you want a song to serve as the soundtrack to Clinton’s presidential rerun, it’s never a bad time to revisit the 2008 classic “Hillary4U&Me”:

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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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