A Note to Our Readers

Hey --
Sunday, Sunday. Set your clocks forward if you haven't already. On the computer I'm typing this on, the time didn't drop forward automatically, so that's your heads up: Set your clocks ahead an hour.

So we lost an hour, we had our usual problems. Ava and C.I. ended up tying portions of the roundtable for us which we hate to ask (since they already take the notes of the roundtable) and it was funny to notice that both "rested their eyes" and jerked awake suddenly while baring missing a key stroke.

So who helped with the writing of this edition:

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

Of course, we also need to note Dallas for all his help and we need to thank Rebecca for photoshopping our illustrations. New content?

Highlights -- Mike, Kat, Cedric, Betty, Elaine, Wally and Rebecca picked the highlights and wrote this entry.

The Nation Stats -- Yes, another new issue of The Nation. By the way, we're glad so many of you enjoyed the film still we used last week for this feature. We heard you, we'll keep using it throughout the rest of the year.

Answer the questions -- Hey, did you hear about the magazine that self-stroked itself -- IN PUBLIC! -- in January and again in February for their bravery and their refusal to bend to pressure or censor? Did you catch that? Well did you catch the detail that they killed a story in December? Probably not. A lot of talk of HOW DARE SALON KILL THE STORY but, it turns out, The Nation agreed to run the story, postponed it due to their nonstop electoral fluff and then killed it. Seems like Salon needs to be let off the hook because, as anyone knows who's paid attention to Salon's history, they have a long record of killing pieces. (And of retracting printed pieces.) But wasn't that interesting that in December they kill a story, in January they write about their bravery in the 70s and in February they write about their bravery in the 60s. Both pieces by "publishers" (apparently when a woman becomes a publisher, you have to create a new title to make sure a man's still on the masthead?) of the magazine and neither, while self-stroking, bothered to tell you about the killed story.

Ann Coulter joins the cast of South Park -- Are you listening to Sunday Salon right now? We are. A lot of anger flying in the calls. (The topic is immigration.) 2nd hour deals with the sort of speech that Coulter used and then had to rush around saying "I'm not a homophobe! I'm not a homophobe!" 2nd hour is almost here, as Dona just noted. Dona also notes that South Park has three gay stereotypes (in reply to a dumb ass who's already e-mailed). The traffic in gay stereotypes. It's not "progress."

Empower yourself with WMD (the documentary) -- the 19th is the 4th anniversary of the start of the illegal war. If you're having a house party, Danny Schechter's WMD is the DVD to show. Big thank you to Dallas who told us, as we were writing the feature, "You can go ahead and use it." He told us what happened at the 2004 screening of WMD he went to (told us in 2005) and we have pressured him before to let us share it. We didn't this weekend. We long ago gave up on it. So thank you to Dallas for sharing the story (finally!).

Roundtable -- That's a third of what was done. Exactly a third. Betty wanted it noted that Cedric, Wally and Rebecca were at her place and eating during much of the roundtable. (She's not sure how much they were talking. and wanted that noted in case someone asked, "Why isn't __ talking more?")

TV: The In Between -- Ava and C.I. tossed this off quicker than usual because, Ava, "We were supposedly going to finish the edition early." Oh well, when do we ever finish early? This is an interesting review and one that they tried to write short because we'd sworn (Dona and I) that this would be a quick edition. When that wasn't the case, they went back in added the last section re: ratings.

Editorial: Sccoter with kid gloves -- We wanted to write about MADRE's report. We will do that that next week. We were all too tired. Wally loves the comic of Isaiah's we used. (We all love that one but it's one of Wally's all time favorites.) He said, "Post that and we can try to write something to go with it. Everyone will just look at the comic anyway!" Well, they may have to. We were drained by the time we got around to writing this. We thank Isaiah for his permission to reprint any and all of his comics and illustrations.

Truest statement of the week -- This week's pick is "statements" plural. We thought this was a very important exchange (there are others in the same segment we're highlighting). When we heard this episode of Democracy Now! we all agreed this would be our pick when the weekend rolled around.

So that's it. We had to drop MADRE until next week and we also dropped another idea. Next week, we should have a MyTV's Fascist House and, fingers crossed, we'll all be able to work on it and not just the six of us plus Kat.

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