A note to our readers

Hey --

Another Sunday. We're tired, but the edition is done.

Along with Dallas, the following helped with this edition:

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, and Ava,
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,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
and Marcia SICKOFITRDLZ.

We thank them all.

Before I (Jim) go further, let me note on illustration, none are up as I type this. We are at "25% complete" on Flickr. It was at 20% forever. We finally decided to start posting the articles without illustrations due to how long it is taking. [Added: Illustrations are now loaded. Thank you to Betty's oldest son for the roundtable illustration. Thanks to him and Kat for the Barack drawing for the human rights article. Thank you to Kat for snagging the Ralph Nader button two weeks ago -- we scanned it last weekend but no one wanted to mess with Flickr. C.I. hands out buttons and other things to groups they speak with and the Nader buttons go quickly. Kat snagged it two weeks ago so we'd have one to scan. Thanks to Mike for letting us scan his Students for Nader - Gonzalez '08 button last weekend.]

Now let's talk about new content.


Truest statement of the week -- This is Glen Ford, calling out Pathetics for Obama. Black Agenda Report is one

Truest statement of the week II -- we had two strong choices, so we went with both. This is Marie Cocco.


Editorial: Who did you get into bed with? -- This went up out of order. Jess said, "Oh just put it up, we're still editing other things." We like this editorial and Ruth's already given us a carry-over idea for next week. (Hopefully, she'll remember it because as soon as we get to sleep, we're out.)


TV: The dog days of summer and the dogs -- Ava and C.I. knew they were covering Flashpoint but what else? Camilo could fit in to it. Especially since it looked like no war resister article or editorial this week. They ended up covering a great deal. They wrote this right after the roundtable because we were worried about the edition and I asked them to hit as hard as they could and on as many topics as they could. They did just that. They also grumbled because they didn't want to write and drink. They're not opposed to either and really not opposed to the two together. However, when I basically tell them, "Not to make you nervous or pressured, but the entire edition is on your shoulders . . .," they figure they better have their full wits about them. When this was done, they rejoined us and the first thing they said was, "We're drinking, someone else take notes." I suspect the references to "vodka stingers and tequila chasers" derived from that. (Ava says it's possible, however, they do not drink wine coolers.) When they handed over the longhand version, my question was, "How good is it?" The reply was "It doesn't stink completely." From the two of them, that is high praise. (Seriously, they always answer "crap" except when they say -- in sing-song voices -- "Crap, crap, cracp, crap, crap . . ." When I read it outloud it gave us the energy to pursue an edition that we had so very little pre-planning for and so very few ideas being tossed out.

Roundtable -- Please, Dona requested, when we do a roundtable, don't mention features we plan to work on. Impossible! But Dona's referring mainly to our DVD review. That was the last thing we wrote and we would have completed the writing of the edition much, much sooner without it.
This roundtable covers a number of topics and we didn't get to the e-mails I thought we would. I should also note that we had no idea what we'd be writing when we started the roundtable.
DVD: Stop-Loss -- This was the last article we wrote because it was the only one we had planned other than Ava and C.I.'s TV commentary. So thinking we'd have four articles to post, we kept saving this. We were so tired, we couldn't even edit it. Every attempt caused problems. Finally, C.I. picked up the phone and called Mike to see if he'd already gone to sleep (when we edit, we send everyone not signing the note to bed). He was actually still up. Did Mike want to take a crack at editing a piece? Sure. We thank him for trying. We thank him for suceeding. This is about a third of the length in the last draft we were pleased with. Thank you, Mike.

Barack Obama on human rights, 'Screw 'em' -- While coddling Barack, 'independent' media let a lot of things slide. We've wanted to do this article for awhile and it was in our odds and ends file. Tell you how we remembered it in a minute.

What's The Progressive lying about now? -- With no ideas, we raided a theme Mike posted on last week. This is how we ended up with three articles. When we raided Mike's theme, C.I. pointed out the debates and how little scrutiny they had. We were all "uh-huh." And then, as we were finishing up, C.I. pointed out one of the wacky statements by Barack. It had flown over all our heads when the debate took place.

One year later, Barack answers the question -- At that point we were listening. C.I. said, "Another example is how he was asked in a debate that he offered more than just words and could be trusted?" That would be great, I agreed. "Yeah," said C.I., "especially since it was almost exactly a year ago and he's caved on FISA."

Are children allergic to Barack? -- This was one that caught our attention and became the point where we got excited about the edition. This was the wacky thing Barack said and Dona loved it when C.I. quoted it because it was strange and because it could be a, you know this is coming, "Short feature!"

Who's driving in the Indycar Race!!!! -- Dallas found the press release while hunting down a McCain link for the article on spying. He came back and asked, "Does anyone know anything about ____?" We didn't. We thought it was interesting enough to note and if there's more on this event during the week, we'll note it next Sunday.

Highlights -- Mike, Elaine, Betty, Rebecca, Ruth, Marcia, Cedric and Kat wrote this and picked all highlights unless otherwise noted. We thank them.

That's it. We'll see you next week. It was a very long 'night.' Dona went through 6 liters of Diet Coke and just opened her fourth pack of cigarettes.

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