A note to our readers

Hey --

Another Sunday. Fairly quick for us. Longest delay was an hour and half. We'll get to it.

Along with Dallas, the following worked on 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,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ
and Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends.

We thank everyone. Dona and I (Jim) will be filling in for C.I. tonight at The Common Ills. (C.I.'s already posted an entry this morning and Kat's CD review is also up.)

Let's turn to what we have for this edition:

Truest statement of the week -- John Pilger and it wasn't just the truest, it was the truest to start with considering today.

Truest statement of the week II -- We had six other truest nominees and we kept coming back to Chuck Todd. Possibly because his statements mesh with last week's "Editorial: The simulated 'stimulus'." Regardless, we're happy to give a truest to Todd.

Editorial: It's the people's movement -- This was a fun editorial. As Mike's noted, in recent weeks there haven't been a lot of editorial's that we've had fun writing. We had fun writing this one. That doesn't mean it's 'fun' to read and it's certainly not a 'light' subject.

TV: Dollhouse is baroque, somebody better fix it -- Ava and C.I.'s latest TV commentary. They wanted more time to work on this but they didn't have it because they had to be done by X to get sleep befor going to Y. Where they'll see Z. :D This is really a great commentary and it's pulling several strands together that you might not think connect but that actually do. I knew they were doing Dollhouse so when I read this outloud to everyone and came across their first sentence with Barack, I though, "Oh, that's funny." (And it was.) But I didn't think they were going to be coming back to that topic. I thought they were just going to stick with Dollhouse. Which would have been fine. But, again, there are many strands woven together for this commentary and it may be my favorite so far this year.

Giggles at the smack-down hide the real issue -- Time constraints today meant Ava and C.I. were promised we'd be done by X. We didn't make that. But to speed things along, we posted with less discussion about order. I personally think the roundtable should be here and it's not. It's the sort of thing we would have debated and debated with more time. (Jess argued for this to be up high because it's a topic that will be in the news Thursday when a report is released.)

The sexism at Harper's -- Why don't you do more on books! That is the non-stop cry. And with this feature, we found a way to do more on books. We hope you enjoy it. This was the final article we wrote for this edition. (It's the one the gang mentions in "Highlights.")

I'm ready for my mani-pedi, Mr. DeMille -- We are woefully low on short features! So yelled Dona early in the edition. She was right. We have two short features. We should have had more to ensure that we were done earlier.

Animation roundtable -- Ava and C.I. did not work on this -- kind of. What illustrations were we using? That was the first question they had when they rejoined us (we'd finished this roundtable by then). We said the latest (which is used) comic Isaiah drew and the three he has up at his new site. No, no, no -- we were informed -- if the scope increased and became a discussion on animation period we needed a wide range of illustrations and we certainly didn't need to repost the three he had up at his site because why do people need to go there if we've got them right here? So Ava and C.I. quickly came up with a list of 12 illustrations that we narrowed down to what's in here. And then? Isaiah's written about the older illustrations (posted via Hello! and not Flickr) and how Blogger/Blogspot makes them large no matter if you check "small," "medium" or "large." How to get around it? C.I. spent forever finding the manual code and putting it in (in HTML) and that was the longest delay we had this edition. We thank Isaiah for the use of his illustrations, we thank him for agreeing to talk to us and we hope it's okay that it ended up an animation roundtable. That wasn't planned. We were planning a straight interview with him.


The continued witch hunt of Senator Roland Burris -- We all knew this was coming Thursday night when doing the roundtable for Gina and Krista's newsletter. C.I, Betty and Stan were very vocal about this nonsense that every day Roland Burris has to jump through a new hoop, that he is charged with no crime and yet, once again, actions that would get no senator impeached are being said to be reason enough for him to step down. If he's got reason to step down, Senator Burris, please step down. If he doesn't, if what we're seeing lately is all there is, Senator Burris, continue with your work. We had planned to sit this out while it played out. But it never plays out. The press never has enough of this. They have never have any real facts, they never have any crime they can say he's guilty of, but every damn week there's some 'scandal' they've just found out about. We have to wonder how many reporters they have covering other senators because it seems to us there's a whole squad covering Burris.

Small change turns to no change -- You know you're tired when you can't recognize a headline. I write the headlines for almost every article we post and I wrote this one but I had to ask, "What is this?" Okay, the White House press conference Friday.

Our celebrity hero -- This is our another short feature. And this is true. For some reason, the White House labels photos of Barack, in the jpeg code, "hero" over and over.

FTA Tuesday -- FTA out on DVD Tuesday and airs on Sundance Monday night.

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

And that's it. We'll see you next weekend.



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