A Note to Our Readers

Sunday, Sunday, can't trust that day. Computer problems always seem to get in our way.

What should have been a straight hour of nonstop posting (three hours ago) has instead been nothing but error messages. On the plus side, we didn't lose any entries.

But we really had hoped to be sure that everyone had time to grab some sleep. We thank Betty and Cedric for staying with us especially since they're giving up sleep and will be headed straight to church. Everyone's been busy the past weekend and this weekend attempting to stop the confirmation of Alito to the Supreme Court. Some of us will be speaking to people on that topic later today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whine us a river.

But we've got an edition up. Ava and C.I. really didn't think they had anything left in them to give. But they managed to finish the race in the last lap. Check out their "TV: Mayberry on Crack aka My Name Is Earl." We think you'll enjoy it.


The other features were a group effort by the following:

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim;
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude;
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man;
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review;
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills);Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix;
Mike of Mikey Likes It!;
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz;
and Wally of The Daily Jot


For those who feel they've given so much in the last week, they're near the breaking point, we'd suggest that you start reading with "How do you think a story can change a life?" (Laura Flanders to Robert Redford).

After we did that, we thought about how that's advice we've given but we're not following. So we decided to do an easy feature where we each answered a question that had come up in the e-mails: "Mailbag."

"Osama plays Alanis, Bully Boy pretends to be a man" is the feature that took the most time and had C.I. cursing us all for our lousy book collections. (Hey, we're library users.) Seriously, it was a lot of work and it would have been easier if C.I. had been home and not on the road as made clear when C.I. sighed at one point and asked, "Rebecca, are you awake?" An excerpt from a Robert Parry book would fit in perfectly and C.I. kept waiting for Rebecca to suggest that. When she pulled the book down, she went to the index and started searching. Another sigh. "Try page 326." This happened repeatedly as we'd go through books and find us ourselves reading a chapter or chapters only to have C.I. sigh and ask us to flip to page ___. Since C.I. had no books packed for the road trip we've decided the title of reference librarian has been more than earned.

We'd hoped to have several features on abortion but in the end really only addressed it in
"A populist uprising greets the never-say-win Dems." If hopes were hours, we might all have a decent night's sleep.

That feature fits in nicely with our editorial this edition "Editorial: Senate Dems, if you're done enjoying that golden shower . . ."

We hope everyone grasps what's happening with Alito. We don't mean "filibuster!" (though we pray that will be the case). We mean that once again the Democrats thought they could dimiss the concerns of members of their own party. They have learned in the last week that such is not the case. We need to spend a lot of time between now and the election educating them on that reality.

We thank Maria, Trina and Ruth for allowing us to repost their contributions. We thank Dallas, always, for hunting down links. We thank our readers for their time. Hopefully we provide some enjoyment and you'll find something hear to make you think, make you laugh or enrage you to activism. Ideally all three but we'll go for what we can get.

See you next week.

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