A Note to Our Readers

Hey --
Late Sunday when we're coming back for the note. It was a long, long edition.

Let's start by noting who participated in the writing of this edition:

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

We thank all of the above and we thank Dallas for helping with links and being a soundboard. We thank Rebecca for photo shopping our illustrations.

It was the weekend of a national call for support of war resisters and we were all participating in that. (Not just those of us on the West coast.) We hope you did something as well.

Let's get to new content.

So what's going on this edition? -- We had one feature that just was notes, we had one feature that needed rewriting, we had one feature that needed heavy editing (it's still a very long piece, it was much longer). We had Wally out on the West coast with us and we wanted his ass in bed because he was leaving today so we sent him packing at three with the promise to wake him back up. (Wally worked on all features except three.) We also created our own problems. In the first hours of the writing session, we had company who ended up raving over Ava & C.I.'s TV reviews and normally they say "Enough" and it's dropped. But the rest of us (Kat, Dona, Ty, Wally, Jess, Ava and me, Jim) were feeding into that. At the end of it, Ava and C.I. were wondering if they could write a thing this weekend? We forget that they never read their reviews after they're up. They had planned to knock out the review early. Instead, they avoided it and avoided it. So in the final hours of the edition, Dona and I went off to edit the long piece, Ava and C.I. went off to write the TV review and Mike, Kat Rebecca, Ty and Jess did this note to give a heads up.

Highlights -- Mike, Kat, Rebecca, Ty and Jess also selected highlights and posted this to get it up. We love their choices and we're so glad that they did this. We know the longest part of this is selecting the highlights. We think they made good choices. As soon as Beta mode for Blogger/Blogspot, we intend to return to e-mailing highlights to the site. There is no way to do them any other way. We used to attempt that. It took hours. When we copy and paste, every sentence, every paragraph, runs together and we end up having to respace the whole thing. That's time consuming. C.I. figured out that if we e-mailed we could do it more quickly. Even so, that's one hour of time. That's selecting the highlights, e-mailing and hoping that they hit the site (if not, we have to e-mail them repeatedly). Beta mode does not allow you to e-mail to a website. So for now, we're doing highlights this way. Our apologies to Kat (who helped us pick highlights last week) because we offered nothing from her site. That was an oversight on our part. Thanks again to Mike, Kat, Rebecca, Ty and Jess for getting two posted while everyone was wondering, "Are they on vacation?"

Bully Boy Jokes -- This had to go up third. And to get Wally to go to sleep, we'd told him we needed him fresh because we wanted to come up with our own joke. These are three blonde jokes that Rebecca enjoyed (a long list was e-mailed to her by a friend this week) and this was our "short feature" (as planned by Dona). It should have been up earlier but we were avoiding waking Wally to allow him to get as much sleep as possible. (Since we're scattered all over, Wally is usually EST time. When we say he went to sleep at three in the morning, we mean PST because he was out here on the West coast.) Wally, Jess, Dona and Jim came up with the original joke, Rebecca, Mike, Kat, Ty and Jess selected the blonde jokes to adapt and Ava and C.I. polished the original joke (which was much longer and wordier).

The end? -- the long piece. Everyone worked on this. It was huge. Dona says that two-thirds were cut by us (Dona and Jim). That sounds right. On the writing, we spent hours and hours on this. Ava and C.I. worked the phones for stories and almost all of those are included. Two were pulled. The first by someone who felt it would be obvious (identity) and didn't want the wrath of Baby Cries A Lot. The first called another person Ava and C.I. had spoken with for this feature and the second asked that we obscure a bit. We weren't sure we could so we offered to pull it. We were told to forget it and just include it. But because there was a concern, we (Dona and I) pulled it when we felt it still came off too obvious. (Three incidents are very obvious and the people passing those on don't give a damn. They are among those who were included. Though Ava and C.I. did call everyone back, after Dona and I edited this, and said, "Last chance." No one wanted anything pulled.) Is it the end of Air America Radio? We'll find out shortly. We avoided the weekend shows because (possibly due to not being promoted) they evolved on their own and are usually far stronger than anything you can find during the week. We skipped the issue of race. Betty suggested that because there have been only two African-Americans as co-hosts during the week (there's currently one), they've never had a Hispanic during the week as a host, go down the list. Why is that? Maybe because behind the scenes, it's primarly White and male? It is an issue but Betty suggested we note the absence of people of color and focus on the problems with what did make it to air. Cedric was in agreement on that and Ty proposed that if there was time, we go back and add more. The writing of this took forever. There was no more time. Why is this feature important? Well, books are being shopped. (Sh, no one's supposed to know.) The network may be out to go under. If it does the right-wing will be screaming, "The left isn't even big enough to support a radio network." How do they know? The left didn't get a network. It got a few programs, but the majority of what was offered was centrist crap. It didn't reflect the left. It reflected desired election outcomes for the Democratic Party. And it's not been a leader on Iraq. In fact, it's done more, as a network, to suppress the peace movement than anything else (and that is a topic of a book proposal). We also think it could pull through (Ava and C.I. said they didn't feel hyped on a call to one board member but they wondered if there was some self-delusion involved in the claim that it would pull through). If it does, people need to be demanding more. The left needs to quit settling. "We have to do this" is the biggest cop out in the world. You don't have to settle for entertainment. Let's see some life and spirit in independent media and less desire to be generic enough to appeal to the right. To take AAR, the right-wing has not listened in significant numbers and they never will. Stop trying to middle-of-the-road it and start getting ideas out there. If you don't, we have no use for you. You water down the left and damage it otherwise. Just like AAR has harmed the peace movement. (We love that book proposal and thank ___ for faxing it to us while we were writing this feature.)

Bully Boy amused by the Beltway Babies -- This was the piece we only had notes for. We had notes and we had the illustration. We felt it was our strongest illustration and there was no way we weren't writing a piece to go with it. All illustrations this edition were done by Kat, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava, Wally, C.I. and me (Jim). It was a blast to have Wally with us for the weekend by the way. We wish he could have stayed longer and were sad to put him on a plane this evening.

Alice in Pressland -- This illustration was intended to go with a piece on Danny Schechter's Death of the Media. This is now the second week that got postponed. That was due to too many calls coming in from people saying they'd been approached about the 'rescue' of AAR and said no. The text was written for another feature. C.I. felt it could be adapted to fit the illustration or we could write the Schechter piece? We finished this edition (posting it all) after one p.m. Sunday (PST). Those of us who were on the West coast, woke up Saturday morning at six a.m. That's thirty-one hours and we had peace events to attend. We were exhausted. We went with revising something we'd already written. However, as Dona points out, though not noted in the feature, it does have to do with the Schechter piece we're writing. We are writing it. It will be next week. There's another feature we repeatedly had to postpone because other things came up. That one ended up being a popular editiorial when it went up after it had been repeatedly postponed so hopefully this will as well. (C.I. says, "More likely we'll have lost our energy.") We have discussed the book before. That's not what this is. Hopefully, you can see it next week. The book is a very brief one, but it's an important one.

Baby Cheney-Poe, the facts of life -- Every site received e-mails about the Mary Cheney pregnancy. Rebecca almost wrote about it but grabbed the trial (Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin, Patti Ackerman and Missy Comely Beattie) instead. The trial mattered. So we covered the pregnancy here.

Laura Flanders spoke with Yanar Mohammed and Carol... -- If you missed Saturday's show, you missed a lot.

Editorial: Peggy Kerry the War Moron -- The court case. Verdict is expected tomorrow morning. (Monday morning.) They're asking supporters to come to the court tomorrow.

TV: Stand Back, Standoff -- Ava and C.I. wrote this, they do the TV commentaries. How hard was it after the praise? (They really hate the praise.) Ava says do the fact that the sessions had gone on so long, that they didn't think anything was up at the site yet (some features were), they didn't have time to think about it and just plunged in. They both hadn't intended to include the opening (or the strands it picks up on later in the review) and just put that in to get started. When they finished their first and only draft, they were too tired to try to rework it and called the friend the questions were asked to, read it (the entire review) over the phone, and made sure it was okay to include. It was so it stayed.

And that's it for this week. We're finally done. Now we can rest. See you next week.


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