A note to our readers

Hey --

As Sonny & Cher sing on "Trust Me," "There are a million things I'd like to be . . ." And that's the story of this edition. But we couldn't stay up all morning so we went with the best of what we had.

Along with Dallas, the following participated in the writing of 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),
Trina of Trina's Kitchen,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ,
Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends,
Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts,
and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.

And what did we come up with?

• Truest statement of the week

Jason Ditz easily won hands down.

• Editorial: Better a Cassandra than a Pollyanna

This wasn't the planned editorial. The planned editorial went through seven full drafts and never got any better. At the last minute, we decided to grab the Iraq story and write around it.

• TV: Animated Blackface

Best piece in this edition, hands down. Ava and C.I. finished this near the end of the writing session. When I (Jim) read this, I knew we had at least one strong piece.

• Roundtable

Iraq elections take place in days and there's very little coverage. We can't control them. We can control what we do. So we offer a roundtable on the Iraq elections.

• Deliver Us From The Drama Queens

This was a piece I loathed. I have no idea why. Dona worked on editing (she says "a minor edit") and when we were trying to figure out what could be posted she said this piece causing me to groan. But I read over it and it suddenly worked. (I credit Dona's edit.)

• KBR's bad week

This was one of the nightmare pieces and what we did to make it publishable was basically strip out the bulk of what we wrote and turn it into a short piece.

• Citizens participate in a democracy

This combines writing from three separate features with a new opening noting an NPR radio program. This is a piece that was made in the editing.

• Military assistance harms reform (ETAN)

A repost from ETAN.

• HRW on Iraq

We worked hard on a piece about the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Mosul and it just did not work out. We were pretty disappointed about that until Jess said, "We could repost Human Rights Watch's press release." Duh. Why didn't we think of that before we spent nearly three hours working on that one piece that never came together.

• Highlights

Mike, Elaine, Betty, Wally, Marcia, Stan, Ann, Cedric, Kat, Ruth and Rebecca wrote this and we thank them for it.


And that's what we ended up with. Not anywhere near what we were hoping for. But like Sonny & Cher sang, "There are a million things I'd like to be . . . "

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