It's fund drive time again! But before we get to that, we have a few other items from the kitchen to share with you.

For the first time in several years, ETS! volunteers met for a planning retreat last month, and a number of decisions came out of that meeting. Perhaps most significantly, we're launching a blog! The ETS! blog will be underway by the time you read this. Eventually we'll incorporate it as part of a larger redesign of our own web site (more decisions from the retreat), but for the time being it's being hosted at ETS! volunteer Eddie Tews' web site, with the address http://feedthefish.org/etsblog/. Check it out!

This issue, we welcome Amber Croyle as our new calendar editor; calendar submissions can be sent directly to her at emailamberc@yahoo.com. Thanks to the other folks who also volunteered for this position! For anyone interested, we do have a couple of other vacancies. Both are as little or as much work as you want to make them: a Tabling Coordinator, and an Events Coordinator. The former organizes an ETS! table at community events, especially in summer; the latter would organize concerts and other fundraising events to help our chronically anemic bottom line. And, of course, we're always looking for folks to sell ads; if you're interested, contact Lance Scott at advertising@eatthestate.org. (For the others, e-mail info@eatthestate.org.)

Speaking of money, Eat the State! t-shirts and subscriptions make great holiday gifts! Once again, we're offering a year-end deal on our subscriptions: Buy one (for yourself or a friend) at our regular $24 for one year, and get another at half price--$36 for both. Also, we've lowered our subscription price for two years; it's now at a discounted $39. Take advantage of it!

Also, of course, we could use donations--hence, our semi-annual fund drive, which will last from now until the new year. Our goal again is $6,000, but we fell significantly short of that goal last summer, meaning that we now have a $2,000 debt to our printer (our major expense). It is essential that we do well this time around.

To that end, and in recognition of the holiday season, we're doing something this time we've never really done before: For a $50 donation (excluding a subscription) donors will have their choice of one of the following gifts for themselves or a friend:

* Paul Loeb's outstanding new anthology The Impossible Will Take A Little While; * A DVD of British MP George Galloway's appearance at the UW this fall; or * Your choice of tapes from the catalog of Alternative Radio.

Furthermore, a $100 donation gets you any two of these three items. We hope this is an incentive to get a few of you to donate a little more than you usually would, because, frankly, we need it. And our thanks to Paul Loeb, Mike McCormick, and David Barsamian for making these premiums possible.

We'll keep you updated, with our Eat the State! crockpot, as our fund drive progresses in the coming weeks. Help us make it the best one yet! Don't forget to check out the new blog, and thanks as always for your generous support.