A Note to Our Readers

Hey --
Another Sunday. Another rough Sunday.

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,

and Wally of The Daily Jot

We thank them all. We thank Dallas for his help (soundboard and links). We thank Isaiah for permission to reprint his illustrations.

Here's what we got:

Truest statement of the week -- Naomi Klein's speech has many amazing moments in it. We went with this one. Use the DN! link to figure out if you'd have selected something different.


Editorial: The death toll from the illegal war mou... -- "mounts." That cut off. So be it. We're too tired to mess with it. The 3700 mark has been crossed. A lot of marks have (but still no 'benchmarks'!) but the Bully Boy wants us to all believe the escalation has worked. It hasn't.

TV: Another cesspool trying to pass for news -- Ava and C.I. hitting hard. I thought they were going to do George Lopez. They didn't. They may be punishing me. It's also true that we were short on time and due to an idiot (and a stalker, Jim says it), they weren't in the mood. They want it noted that they are not endorsing any religion. (There's a reference to God where they're referring to God with a gender. That was for the piece. Not to endorse.) They also want it noted that they were promised ten minutes to do a rewrite on one section but they didn't get it. There wasn't time. The spacing on their reviews is always way off (due to our template, not their own spacing of it). I tried to fix it when I offered to put in their illustration (done by Jess and Rebecca) and ended up knocking out half their review. They had to retype it and there wasn't time for a real polish of the section they wanted to fix. If you're thinking, "They never want to polish!" That is correct. It's the sentence with "crap" in it, they say right now. They were limited because there was no time for an e-mail alert on language and they don't think "attitude" is the word they were searching for. Regardless, it is hard hitting and you will laugh. (And remember, they always hate what they write no matter what. I really love this week's commentary.)

Getting to know . . . Pelosi -- The idiot put us all behind. C.I. insisted on calling the parents (or in Ty's case, the grandparents) of each of us to say a security detail team came through the home, "I'm sure it's nothing but I want you to know what is going on." These were long conversations. (No one's parents were worried or grandparents in Ty's case. All of have been out here. All know the various security measures in the house. But C.I.'s attitude was, "I don't worry about me but if something happens, it would be to one of you." So everyone got notified about the idiot e-mailing.) Due to that putting us way behind starting time, Dona proposed short pieces all the way through. Ava looked at C.I. C.I. looked at Ava. "F**k that, we're not going soft just because a creep threatens." This is a long piece and took longer to research and discuss than it probably did to write.

17 US service members announced dead last week -- Dona's cry for a short piece did register here and one other place.

The boom goes bust -- Not here. C.I. brought in three friends to explain this to us. (As Mike noted last week, he's confused on this topic.) They were told "Keep it as simple as possible. We have to understand it and then we have to be able to explain it." The tutorial lasted about 45 minutes. Then we went to work writing. (Elaine, Rebecca, C.I. and Cedric already grasped the basics, just FYI.) (C.I. adds, "I believe Betty did as well.")

Once up a time . . . A scary tale -- Don't you love our fiction pieces?

Timothy J. Learn arrested for being AWOL in Ithaca... -- short pieces. Dona sighed a sigh of relief when this was completed.

Highlights -- Mike, Wally, Betty, Rebecca, Cedric, Kat and Elaine wrote this and picked highlights unless otherwise noted. We thank them for it.

So it was a shorter writing edition because it started late, it was a crazy Saturday evening (Ruth saw the e-mails, everyone else was avoiding them because the last were filled with abuse), but we pulled it off and didn't end up with the light edition Dona was willing to settle for. "Having pulled it together this weekend, I don't think we ever have an excuse," says Dona.

So that's that. See you next week.

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