A Note to Our Readers

Hey --
Another Sunday.

First, if you see a "note" in the future and there's no note in it, remember this: "This will be up in a bit. C.I.'s doing the morning entry at The Common Ills. When C.I. rejoins us, we'll do the note. We're including this now so there's a link (for the entry C.I.'s working on)." We posted that
to explain what was going on. Doing that gives five of us a break and allows C.I. to be able to work on The Common Ills entry so that when the "note" is done here, we're all done at the same time.

Second, while waiting, Jess and Ty looked at the e-mails that had come in so far. There was a question about stats for The Nation. That should be in this edition but none of the six have seen the latest issue. (Subscribed copies still have not arrived.) If we have two issues we can cover next week, we'll do so. That feature, as Melanie worried, is not being dropped. Ava and C.I. were smart to start it when they steered the edition. We will continue it and we will cover every issue unless we announce that we're dropping the stats feature.

Now let's give some credit. The following worked on this edtion:


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 say thank you and also thank you to Dallas who hunted down links and was a sound board. We also thank Rebecca for her work on photo shopping our illustrations.

New content?

Truest statement of the week -- Mike and me (Jim) picked this early in the week. E-mails coming in throughout the week backed up that choice. The only problem with it? As JG wondered in an e-mail, "Why is this running at The Common Ills and not The Nation?" Good question.

Note -- We were off by 20 minutes. That was due to Kat and Dona finding the impeachment advertisement in the paper and wanting that to go with the editorial. It's also true that after Rebecca works on what we send her, C.I. has to send it to The Common Ills and we pick it up from there. Hello (the program used to send the illustrations) can be very slow.

Highlights -- Cedric, Betty, Kat, Rebecca, Elaine, Wally and Mike worked on this themselves -- writing and selecting. We thank them and then some.

MyTV's Fascist House -- Yes, it's back. We get e-mails requesting this all the time. It is a continous feature, a humor collage. It's also a pain in the butt. It's the core six plus Kat working on these. How it works is we keep clipping file of interesting photos. When it's time to do a collage, we all pick out what we think would work. Then we usually debate a theme. (This week's theme is Condi's Middle East Bully Trip won't garner the attention her usual trips do -- the bloom is off that rose.) When we've finally got both down, we begin cutting the pictures based on how we think they'll be used. At which points, we start assembling on our chosen background. Then it's time to recut (to take out edges and also to make them fit better). Then it's time to grab the glue sticks after we all agree on where things are going to go. It's usually at least an hour and half after we grab the clipping file before we grab the glue sticks. It's not a "quick feature" by any means.

Bacon -- we worked on this poem earlier last week and punched it up during the edition with input from all participating. (Text on the collage, FYI, is provided by all participating in the edition.)

File it under "Thank God she was born in 1925!" -- Kat was the one who came up with the suggestion for this feature. We'd forgotten about it but it was in the clipping file for future collages. She was looking at the picture that ran in The New York Times and noticed Big Babs delighted smirk/smile. It was a good idea and we bumped two other things to work on this.

The Little Boy Who Cried WMD -- Yes, we fixed the title since it first posted. Dick Cheney is the pig, note the glasses.

Abeer and Ehren -- Did you know that one of Abeer's alleged gang rapists and the one alleged to have shot her dead was diagonsed, by the military, with what we'll call 'mental issues' before the rape and murders? Hopefully, you did. Did you know that their is a Camp Resistance in support of Ehren Watada? Hopefully, you did. But considering how little coverage both have received in independent media, we won't assume you knew. These are two developments we think you need to know about.


Escalation: The non-plan -- One of our two longest features. It's a look at Bully Boy's foolish and tragic 'plan' to do more of the same. Many links in this feature. The photo is public domain. (Janet e-mailed already to ask about that. It was taken by a White House photographer (tax payer money) and is on the White House page -- public domain. Please note Anthony Arnove is hitting the road to make speaking appearences in conjuction with the new paperback version of IRAQ: The Logic of Withdrawal. Dates scheduled thus far are noted in the feature.

TV: Ugly Betty, Beautiful TV -- Ava and C.I. were surprised to discover that after their fall 2006 TV commentary, readers thought they'd immediately pick up this show for review. They were actually planning to wait awhile. With both coming down with food poisoning and being busy prior to that, they went ahead and reviewed this after finding out where the show was in broadcasted episodes. There are no spoilers but they strongly urge that if you already like the show, do not miss the broadcast this Thursday. (On ABC. And they say, "Sorry if we didn't note it airs on Thursday in the review. If we didn't, we'll go in and add that.") This is a long commentary. Their regular readers will probably read through it so quick that they may not grasp that but it is a long one (and one of the two longest pieces this week).


Editorial: The unmentionable -- Hey, remember when impeachment was being seriously raised by any number of independent media outlets? While Congress may have to follow Nancy Pelosi's lead when she says it's off the table -- why the hell is independent media? Or is not all that "independent"? Were the scanner large enough, we'd have feature the entire full page advertisement.

And that's it for this week. Hopefully, you found something that made you think or made your blood boil. Hopefully, it'll motivate you to take some action.

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