Hit the Tip Jar for First Draft!
You know, the Freepi raised something like $60,000 this pastquarter to fund their daily hatefests, their Gore derangement syndrome and “I’m not racist BUT” blank-verse and jokes about how women and their ovaries are all infecting them with pussitude and donkey show T-shirts and such.
I’m not saying that because I want to be in some kind of contest with them. That would put me closer to the Freepi than I like to get without a decontamination suit. Ew. I’m saying that there’s a lot of well-funded hate out there, a lot of curiously well-supported voices making big bucks to spout incoherencies about how we want to destroy America and don’t let’s forget one of my favorite right-wing moments, “We’re not hateful, you’re just an ugly fat whore.”
What you’re supporting here is a counterweight, a way to push the conversation, a way to push back against the steady pounding surf of every single day being told that you’re alone and you’re crazy and you’re stupid and your views don’t matter in the New America. When we started doing this back in 2004 (good God, I forgot our 3rd blogiversery, I should go buy Holden some flowers) we weren’t voices in the wilderness or anything (uphill both ways in the snow) but blogtopia was hardly a juggernaut and you were a lot more likely than not to be called a terrorist sympathizer and at best ignored. We were fighting to tell the story we wanted to tell, the story that needed telling. I was talking to the college kids at DuPage and told them:
There’s a lot of meta crap going on right now about journalism and blogging, and how the Internet is the root of all evil, and whatnot, and it gets stupider every day, but what I eventually came around to was that we simply weren’t seeing the stories we wanted to tell being told, so we had to do it. Nobody was gonna do it for us.
What we did in the past year, since we last did one of these things, what you supported:
We covered, with crack vans and all, the Democratic victories in the House and Senate.
We raised money for causes from sick ferrets to twice-destroyed homes.
We took a Krewe to New Orleans and gutted a house.
We sifted through approximately 3,000 words of the stupidest things any American president has ever said, for the LOLs but also for the OMGs and the WTFs.
We upgraded our chinchillas to super-chinchillas and redesigned the site to make it better.
We fought the fights that needed fighting, and in the coming year, we’ve got a lot more fights to fight. There’s Democratic and Republican conventions coming up in the next year. A presidential election. Books and videos, punditry and stupidity, and don’t let’s forget this assclown is in office for another year from January. A story in New Orleans that isn’t nearly over. There’s all kinds of things we want to do, but we can’t do it alone. We need your help to keep telling these stories.
If you’ve already given, thank you.If you haven’t, donate if you can.
A.