A Note to Our Readers

Hey --
Another Sunday. Another rough Sunday. Is there any other kind?

Here's who worked on 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,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
and Ruth of Ruth's Report

We thank all of the above and Dallas for hunting down links and being a soundboard and Eddie as well. Eddie? As Ava and C.I. always say, we'll get to it.


Here's what we've got:

Truest statement of the week -- there were five serious contenders for this by Camilo Mejia in his Democracy Now! interview. Ava and C.I. wisely grabbed one section to quote and thereby allowed us to drop down to four.

Truest statement of the week II -- Mejia also was interviewed by Deepa Fernandes and that was a remarkable interview. Ava and C.I. (who review Wakeupcall in Hilda's Mix Tuesday) argued strongly for two "truest" this week. Dona, seeing no end in sight to the edition, immediately jumped on board.

Editorial: IVAW supports war resisters, do you? -- Screen caps are from Democracy Now! We attempted to note that where the first one runs but it just made the parenthetical too convaluted. We noted it at the end. This is an editorial we're all pleased with.

TV: Fox tried to tell news 'jokes', no one laughed... -- Ava and C.I.'s response was unprintable when we asked, "Could you postpone George Lopez again?" They are threatening to take it to Maria, Francisco and Miguel's newsletter (the review). Dona and I (Jim -- and this time Dona joined me in asking) weren't sure what we had this week. Ava and C.I. pointed out they'd planned to mention Now with David Branccacio but -- at the end of their ____ George Lopez piece that keeps getting postponed! Well they saw the nonsense on Fox last week, couldn't they grab that. Grunting, cursing and looking like they might rip our hearts out, they finally agreed but noted they couldn't write it until at least six a.m. PST because they'd need to call TV and newspaper friends in Texas. The show was set there (I watched it, or tried to, and didn't pick up on that but I didn't make it through more than about two minutes). They did research from six a.m. PST through eight a.m. PST (that's eight to ten in the morning in Texas) by calling "everyone" they knew in journalism living in that state. We had no idea what they'd end up with and were incredibly pleased when we read it. (Ava notes that we may not get a shot at George Lopez, they may just carry that piece over to the newsletter instead.) Ava and C.I., of course, wrote the piece (and edited). Eddie e-mailed a screen cap from NOW that he took. We were happy to include it and thank him for it. (That's community member Eddie, Ava notes.)


Thoughts on GreenStone Media and the real lesson -- The monster piece. This took six hours to write. This took two hours to edit (C.I. notes Jess, Dona and I did a wonderful job editing). We brought Ruth in for this. She also helped with the editorial. We appreciate Ruth's help so much.
The original of this ran five times as long. We cut out a lot of qualifiers in the editing stage (and asked Ava and C.I. to polish two lines for us, Jess notes). We supported GreenStone Media and we hope that's clear. Yes, it failed (and that was the hardest statement to get in there though, surprise, Dona was the big resister on that). But it didn't fail in terms of the quality of programs. We think there are lessons to be learned from this. The biggest being that some 'friends' prove they aren't. It's difficult to get the word out when the small media's not interested in helping you. But, Jess says, as Carole King sings, "Ain't That The Way"?


Bully Boy lies about Vietnam -- who calls him out?... -- Ty did the editing here solo. Blame him for anything wrong! Seriously, this was another long piece and Ty boiled it down. Ruth also worked on this. We think. We're all tired and can't remember.

FAIR late to the party and a little lost -- C.I. did not work on this. Ava also did not work on this. They were doing research for their TV commentary. C.I.'s noted as not working on it because when this was proposed, C.I. said, "Do it without me." C.I. also notes that "Wally and Cedric wrote their posts. I helped by calling a friend with [Barack] Obama's campaign to make sure he hadn't said what the paper reported and I maybe helped with two or three word choices. I don't believe I did anything else. Wally and Cedric are being overly generous." We'll note Wally and Cedric said, "Don't believe it if C.I. tries to give us all the credit. It was a three way post." They anticipated C.I. would make a statement in the note and asked Jess to write that down and be sure it was included here.

Obama sucks up again -- While it's wrong of The New York Times to distort Obama's statements, the statements that were actually made bear examination.

Highlights -- Mike, Kat, Cedric, Elaine, Rebecca, Betty and Wally wrote this and made selections. By the way, Mike says he's doing a "Behind the Web" post on this edition Monday so check that out.

Supermarket check out? -- We were so far behind and Ty checked the e-mails to find people were seriously in doubt that we'd be posting this Sunday due to the long delay. Dona said, "Get a 'We're posting' message up NOW!" I said, "We need something more than that." We were tired (and Dona and I love to argue) so 15 minutes of back and forth ensued before Ava and C.I. said an unprintable and then told us the rumor we note at the top. That did lower the volume of the e-mails coming in, Ty says, and had everyone attempting to guess what chain it is?

So that's what we've got. Hope you found something to make you laugh/cry/scream or all three. See you next week.



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