We're on the road today. Here's an open thread. Please, be nice. Ok, how about civil?

We're on the road today. Here's an open thread. Please, be nice. Ok, how about civil?

We've been off-line all day. Our hosting company had another attack--they also host Instapundit, Calpundit, Ruminate This and many other sites, all of which were down. We're restored now, but depending on your ISP, it may take longer for the address changes the hosting company had to put in effect to show up for some people than others. So, please be patient.

Meanwhile, we were not silent today-- Here's a transcript of the web chat we did on the Sniper Trial for the Washington Post.

A big thanks to Howard Bashman of How Appealing for blogging about our upcoming chat and, as we later found out, for logging on and submitting a question...which we answered--can you figure out which one it was?

Jim Capozzola of Rittenhouse Review is in a tough spot and could use some help. If you're a blogger or a reader of blogs, please hit his paypal button. If you're associated with any reputable publication, take our word for it: you ought to hire this brilliant man and kick-ass writer immediately.

In other blogging news, we're pleased to see that Dwight Meredith, formerly of PLA, will be blogging over at Wampum, courtesy of Mary Beth. Great news. Here's Dwight's announcement.

Lots of good reading around the bloggerhood this weekend:

Lisa English of Ruminate This has the latest on the blackbox voting story.

Daily Kos on the "Wesley Clark Praises Republicans" propoganda.

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on Bolivia.

Beautiful Horizens on the trial of Fernández Larios. Larios, a former Chilean military officer and admitted terrorist conspirator, was found liable under the Alien Torts Claims Act by a Miami jury for the death of Winston Cabello, a Chilean economist murdered as part of the infamous "Caravan of Death" tour shortly after the coup in Chile in 1973.

David Neiwert of Orcinus on the so-called "First Amendment zones" that are being deployed wherever President Bush and Vice President Cheney appear these days.

Skippy on the Bush family banking connection to the Nazis of pre-war Germany. Hesiod of Counterspin on his delayed reaction to same.

Say hello to LegalWrites, by members of Open Source Politics.

Oliver Willis is angry over news that the State Department had forewarnings about problems plaguing Iraq.

Pacific Views sums up the Saturday blogs.

And on a lighter note, Politics in the Zeros touts Friendster. If we were in our 20's and lived in California, we'd be tempted.

Our hosting company didn't actually have a melt-down this evening but we were down the past five hours. We're back up now, as are Instapundit, Calpundit, Ruminate This and Matt Yglesias. The short explanation: "There was a denial of service attack on our network that caused the sites we host to be unreachable."

Here's the long story--it sounds like it was an intentional attack and security and authorities have been called in.

We knew Hosting Matters would be on top of it. They've been great to us.

Jay Allen has put up the link to his new, free comment-spamming plug-in for MT. Get it now, you won't be sorry.

Update: Problem fixed, you can add comments again. It was our mistake but our always helpful hosting company, Hosting Matters, found the error and fixed it.

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We have just been advised that people are getting error messages when trying to post comments. We're checking into it and will get it fixed as soon as possible. Thanks to those of you who let us know.

Daily Kos, always miles ahead of the pack, has made the move from MT to Scoop. The move will be fully complete in the next day or two, but if, like us, you can't wait, you can go check it out now here. You can also register and get acquainted with the new features. It is really awesome. Kos, you've done us all proud.

Kos has leaped into the Instapundit and Atrios category in daily visitors. About 40,000 people a day read his blog. Kos was also kind enough to re-design TalkLeft for us back in June, 2002. We are thrilled that he has had such great success. And we bet this is only the beginning.

Atrios has beat our record. Last month we wrote Will Link for Laptop and a generous reader bought us our brand new Sony Vaio with no strings attached in 7 hours. (Atrios linked to our post right after it went up, which likely was a big help in getting the word out.)

Monday, Atrios put out a plea for his own new Sony laptop (same model we asked for.) Someone bought it for him in 3 hours....on top of that, appreciative readers maxed out his Amazon Honor account with $3,400 in donations.

We think it's great when readers show their appreciation for bloggers' efforts with donations. We know others disagree, and each to his or her own, but we're happy for Atrios. He deserves it.

We just got hit with 31 "preteen" spamming comments. We don't have the time to individually find the posts, delete the comments and then rebuild the entries. We spent a few hours doing that yesterday with "lolita" comments. So if you see a comment with "preteen" that says something about this being a nice site, don't read it. It's child pr0n.

Lots of other MT blogs are being hit, and we understand a solution may be out tomorrow. We'll install it when it's available, provided we can figure out the instructions.

Update: We have such a great hosting company. It's called Hosting Matters. They are totally on top of the problem and have just instituted a block on the range of IP addresses this spam is coming from. We've gone through several hosting companies, and really think this one is tops. The site works fast and they are always available to respond to problems. We found them through Instapundit, but we know that lots of other big weblogs use them as well. Calpundit is one that comes to mind. So if you're in the need of a new hosting company, we highly recommend them.

Apparently we're not the only one getting hit with comment spam from a robot named Lolita that leaves links to explicit material --particularly involving pre-teens. So is Teresa at Making Light. Thanks to Reading & Writing who did some digging and found out who's behind it.

Update: There's a cure. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist will be released Monday.