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.

A big thanks to Skippy and Tacitus for their support, even when they disagree with our positions. Disagreement is fine, personal attacks cheapen the commenter and feed the opposition.

Damn Foreigner has moved so please update your bookmarks. Mark Kleiman too.

Congrats to Atrios and Daily Kos who have had 1 million unique visitors for the month of September--records for both sites. We always begin our blog day by reading both of them--it's no surprise that the rest of the politically-oriented news world does too.

TalkLeft had its one millionth unique visitor early this morning. We began stat counting on June 22, 2002. There have been 1,611,409 page views in that time.

Unique visitors are not the same as hits. For example, for the month of September, 2003, we've had 89, 111 unique visitors who have made 204,720 visits and viewed 431,961 pages. Hits just for September, 2003 so far number 865, 506.

The blogs and internet news sites referring us the most visitors for the month of September are Atrios, Warblogs.cc, Instapundit, Daily Kos, Buzzflash and Cursor. Thanks, guys!

According to Blogstreet, today we are the 11th most influential blog and the 66th most popular blog.

Most importantly, thanks to all of you who have read and supported this site with words of encouragement, links and donations. Tommorrow is our (the author's) birthday so we feel like hitting one million today is an extra present.

One of our stat programs gave these meanings to the various terms:

It's Bill O'Reilly Day around the blogosphere with many bloggers writing as O'Reilly today. Atrios has outdone himself. Don't miss it.