A note to our readers

Another weekend of problems. It's especially frustrating when we're actually done, pieces completed, and they won't post.

We all went over to The Common Ills to work on the morning entry there. We were, most of us, up for 28 hours straight at that point. Some of us longer.

But we got an edition together and now that the "artwork" and the TV review and the editorial has posted, it's done as soon as this goes up.

What do we have in this edition?

A wonderful interview with Maria where she talks about a number of topics. When we asked Maria, Tuesday, if we could interview her, she said sure. She cautioned that we'd probably only have a paragraph we could use from it. She underestimated herself.

Maria's probably best known for, with Miguel and Francisco, providing the weekly rundown of headlines from Democracy Now! After that, she's probably best known as inspiring the title of Elaine's site (Like Maria Said Paz). Common Ills community members weren't surprised Elaine would honor her in the title of the site. So if you're a casual reader, read the interview and find out why she's a valued member of The Common Ills community.

We offer a "Third Estate Sunday Review News Review." The first sign of technical problems. Betty had to alter the skit in progress as a result of linkage problems. As Betty said, we all learn to adapt. That seems to be the message of each edition on our end.

We had a simple idea for one feature, the work space of the Bully Boy. It ended up being a nightmare in another way. But it's up and thanks to Rebecca for letting us post the "art" to her site.

Ava and C.I. have their TV review. Calm down. Probably should have noted that at the beginning. It's called "The Yawn at Home."

We finally address Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Man in our book discussion. We have our editorial. So there's a number of things you can read.

What's up for next week?

We'll be in D.C. taking part in the protests. We could take the weekend off but we're going to attempt to do that and to turn out a fresh edition. (If that fails, the plan is to highlight past features with new prefaces explaining your reactions to them and our reactions to them. But ideally we're shooting for all new content.)

For this edition we thank Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz, Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Betty of Thomas Friedman is a Great Man, Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills), Mike of Mikey Likes It!, Jess's parents, Dallas and Maria.

A number of you wrote to say how happy you were to see Folding Star last week. We were too.
You don't decide to end a blog easy. We respect Folding Star's decision and we're happy that FS still participates with us when time permits.

If you read this online or in print and that's where you stop, you may have limited awareness of the gina & krista round-robin. That's a newsletter for members of The Common Ills that publishes every Friday. They do roundtables and editorials. Isaiah always provides with them with an illustration. It's worth reading and we all look forward to finding it in our inboxes on Friday. But we want to give a special shout out to Gina and Krista (or to Krista and Gina) because they really went all out last week providing daily round-robins to cover the John Roberts Jr. hearings. This included roundtables that all of us working on this edition participated in. This included analysis from Erika and from Marcia each day. This included tips on what was coming up. And on Friday it included Rebecca's article on her abortion, the one her ex-in-laws do not want up at her site.

We're hardly mainstream here, but Gina and Krista really are the underground, tipping off the community to things, keeping the community cohesive. And last week, they did daily round-robins. We always value their work but they deserve a special shout out this week.

We'll see you next week. We'll be tired but energized from the activities and we hope you will be as well (see our editorial, nothing planned in your area is no excuse not to do something).

As a final note, I (Jim) will no longer be responding to right-wingers who e-mail this site. I had done that in the past. I'd enjoyed the exchange and found it funny. (Many of them did as well.)
But Ava ended up in the e-mails on her day and found a disgusting e-mail (printed in the round-robin with Ava's response). I read those most of the time and just laugh. Others don't find them amusing on any level. The one Ava stumbled across was especially disgusting.

If my attitude towards the e-mails has led some right-wingers to believe it's okay to write those things (Dona thinks my attitude has), I've sent out the wrong message. So from now on, I'll read and if I reply, I'll reply to the people that are really part of the community.

-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.