What's good to read today? Atrios on identity politics.

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on Walmart's agenda.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite on the recent Hosting Matters DOS attacks and cyberterrorism--not.

Oliver Willis has picked himself a bride.

Hesiod at Counterspin tells us what we need to know about Republicans and the gay marriage issue. For more, check out Dave Cullen at Conclusive Evidence who keeps all his posts on this issue on one page.

Melanie is the new guest blogger for Daily Kos and she's doing a great job. Kos, by the way, should be a father any day now.

Avedon Carol at Sideshow tackles Republicans and who should pay for the war in Iraq.

David Neiwert of Orcinus on Bush and First-Amendment zones.

Patrick Taylor of LegalWrites details the deportation of Maher Aher from begining to end.

What's good to read today? Atrios on identity politics.

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on Walmart's agenda.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite on the recent Hosting Matters DOS attacks and cyberterrorism--not.

Oliver Willis has picked himself a bride.

Hesiod at Counterspin tells us what we need to know about Republicans and the gay marriage issue. For more, check out Dave Cullen at Conclusive Evidence who keeps all his posts on this issue on one page.

Melanie is the new guest blogger for Daily Kos and she's doing a great job. Kos, by the way, should be a father any day now.

Avedon Carol at Sideshow tackles Republicans and who should pay for the war in Iraq.

David Neiwert of Orcinus on Bush and First-Amendment zones.

Patrick Taylor of LegalWrites details the deportation of Maher Aher from begining to end.

Yesterday we traveled to West Palm Beach. From Denver, that's an all day trip. Today we start our assignment--at 6am with a jog on the beach followed by our first meeting at 8am. We'll check back in this afternoon.

Our newsfeed (on the left) won't be updated until Sunday or Monday. We recommend you visit Hamster, Cursor, Buzzflash , How Appealing and Common Dreams for news and views of interest.

On a related note: This is our first trip with our new laptop generously and anonymously purchased from our Amazon wishlist last month. It's awesome--just what we wanted--and so much faster and better than our old one which was on its last leg. In case our benefactor is reading TalkLeft today, we just wanted to express our thanks again.

Yesterday we traveled to West Palm Beach. From Denver, that's an all day trip. Today we start our assignment--at 6am with a jog on the beach followed by our first meeting at 8am. We'll check back in this afternoon.

Our newsfeed (on the left) won't be updated until Sunday or Monday. We recommend you visit Hamster, Cursor, Buzzflash , How Appealing and Common Dreams for news and views of interest.

On a related note: This is our first trip with our new laptop generously and anonymously purchased from our Amazon wishlist last month. It's awesome--just what we wanted--and so much faster and better than our old one which was on its last leg. In case our benefactor is reading TalkLeft today, we just wanted to express our thanks again.

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.