After four days of on again off again server problems due to a system wide upgrade performed by our hosting company, which we weren't aware of until after they had moved our site to their new servers, it has been universally agreed that TalkLeft doesn't want to change. It doesn't work on their new system, so they have moved us back to their "old server." Hopefully, you are no longer seeing a page that says "December 17" at the top.

Please let us know if you still get any error messages when you click on any of the permalinks, comments, "recent entries" section on the right, or if anything else doesn't work.

And a huge thanks to Kos of DailyKos and Ben at Movable Type for trying to work their way through this maze. Also, we're not mad at our hosting company, they had pleasant, dedicated live people available by phone and email and were just as perplexed as the rest of us.

Enough said.

We had some major problems yesterday while our hosting company was upgrading itself to provide additional services--our newsfeed went down, we couldn't publish new entries and the comments and permalinks got messed up. All appears to be fixed. If you notice anything amiss, please send us an email.

It was terrible timing, as we were just named one of the top web sites of 2002 by Law Technology News, published at Law.com.

A special thanks today to libertarian Radley Balko, a columnist for Fox News , a contributor to TechCentral Station, whose real job is with The Cato Institute, who wrote this about us today in his blog, TheAgitator:

"Talk Left.

While I'm jocking leftist bloggers, let me give some much-due praise to Talk Left, who will make the leap to "Blood on the Tracks" next time I update my blogroll.

Reasoned, unzealous, and always insightful. Unlike most leftist ranters, these guys almost always back up agument with evidence.

I of course don't agree with them on everything, but their civil liberties stuff is dead-on..... "

Thanks, Radley.

Dwight Meredith is taking nominations for the "Koufax Award" for best left of center blogging in various categories. Check out Body and Soul's nominations, they are top notch. And we'd say that even if we weren't on Jeanne's list.

Cursor is back from hiatus, and we are glad. It's a great source of progressive news written blog-style. It's also got a very readable format.

A big thanks to Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul and Lisa English of Ruminate This for their praise today. What a way to start the day!

skippy and Lisa of Ruminate this do their usual bang-up job of blogging around this weekend so that those who were off-line the past few days know where to go to catch up. Thanks to both of them.

Through Jim Cappozola at Rittenhouse Review, we learned that Ms. magazine is assembling a roster of women bloggers. Here are the details, and they are seeking recommendations.

Thanks to Jim for recommending us. He too is seeking the names and blog addresses of other women bloggers, both to recommend to Ms. and to add to his blogroll. So please send your favorites to him at rittenreview@earthlink.net.

Also thanks to Sisyphus Shrugged for recommending us.

Here are some of our favorites:

Lisa English of Ruminate This
Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul
Avedon Carol of Sideshow
Gail Davis of GailOnline
MadKane
Sisyphus Shrugged
Beyond Corporate
Kim at Free Pie
Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light
Ann Salisbury of Two Tears in a Bucket
Talkabluestreak
Eve Tushnet

Please give them a read and send your favorites to Ms. Magazine and Jim. We're know we've missed a bunch, so feel free to add them in the comments section here as well.

Check out MSNBC's Altercation which we again guest-hosted today for Eric Alterman who returns tomorrow.

Our topics include the Democrats' need to take a sharp left turn (advice former President Clinton disagrees with;) cities passing anti-war resolutions on Iraq; a new study showing marijuana is not a gateway drug; a made for Court TV movie airing tonight on false confessions; and a final Shanghai update on technology.

Some corrections are in order to our guest blog on Altercation today, submitted from Shanghai.

First, in saving the html version of what we wrote to Word, so we could send it as an attachment to MSNBC, our computer (not MSNBC's, they are blameless) changed some dashes to underlines in the urls to two of the linked-to articles, and as a result those hot-links don't work.

Here is the correct link to the news story about China's about-face on AIDS .

And here is the correct link to the article, High Court To Review Race-Based Admissions

As to the Supreme Court review of the Texas sodomy law case, thanks to PG and KevDC for pointing out that the Supreme Court Monday agreed to hear the case (we incorrectly stated that arguments were held Monday)--and that Lawrence v. Texas is the name of the Texas case the Court agreed to hear Monday, not the name of the 1986 case previously decided by the court in a split ruling(we botched that one in our editing.)

So much for blogging from China before dawn and editing on airplanes....our apologies to all. We'll try to do better tomorrow when we are again filling in for Eric, this time from Denver.

Also, thanks to Instapundit for his warm compliment on our Altercation guest blog today (even though he, too, noticed our error but was kind enough not to mention it.) Instapundit thinks the Texas sodomy law is dumb and backs it up with a law review article he and Dave Koppel wrote in 2000 on state police powers in general with a particular focus on sodomy laws.

The article has many worth-reading quotes from actual cases striking down sodomy laws. Such as:

"The individual's right to freely exercise his or her liberty is not dependent upon whether the majority believes such exercise to be moral, dishonorable, or wrong. Simply because something is beyond the pale of "majoritarian morality" does not place it beyond the scope of constitutional protection. To allow the moral indignation of a majority (or, even worse, a loud and/or radical minority) to justify criminalizing private consensual conduct would be a strike against freedoms paid for and preserved by our forefathers. Majority opinion should never dictate a free society's willingness to battle for the protection of its citizens' liberties. To allow such a thing would, in and of itself, be an immoral and insulting affront to our constitutional democracy." Powell v. State, 510 S.E.2d 18, 27 (Ga. 1998) and

"Simply because the majority, speaking through the General Assembly, finds one type of extramarital intercourse more offensive than another, does not provide a rational basis for criminalizing the sexual preference of homosexuals." Commonwealth v. Wasson, 842 S.W.2d at 502 (Kentucky) and

"The usual justification for laws against such conduct is that, even though it does not injure any identifiable victim, it contributes to moral deterioration of society. One need not endorse wholesale repeal of all "victimless" crimes in order to recognize that legislating penal sanctions solely to maintain widely held concepts of morality and aesthetics is a costly enterprise. It sacrifices personal liberty, not because the actor's conduct results in harm to another citizen but only because it is inconsistent with the majoritarian notion of acceptable behavior." Wasson at 498.

Eric Alterman of MSNBC's Altercation has graciously asked us to fill in for him on Tuesday. Of course, we're delighted to do it. We're also flying home from China on Tuesday so this should be no small feat, but we're determined to make the column a worthy one. Since in one hour it will be Tuesday here (13 hours ahead of New York, 16 ahead of California) we're going to forego more posting on TalkLeft until we're back home.

China may be the most service-people friendly country we've ever been in. From the airport pickup which consists of a driver and a hotel staff person waiting at baggage claim to drive us to the hotel in a brand new Audi, to the reception people who showed us three rooms at check-in and gave us our choice, to the staff at the executive lounge who provide three meals a day and cocktails gratis along with big screen tv's tuned to CNN and every important newspaper and magazine we can think of, to the three 20-something year olds who just spent an hour in our room at 10 at night because the hotel's broadband server went down and they wanted to make sure we knew how to get dialup access in the interim--even though they don't speak English and we can't speak a word of Chinese--we are duly impressed.

Shanghai is rolling out every stop to get the 2010 World Expo--the papers here report that all the citizens, from the elderly to the working class to the college kids are in favor of it. It truly is a city of the future and wants badly to compete in every sense with New York, London and Hong Kong. In our book it already does. Business and the economy here are robust and China tends to build things with an eye towards what will be needed ten years from now. The streets are safe and so is the drinking water--parks are filled in the early morning with people doing T'ai Chi--the art museum is world class, Placido Domingo played here last night with two other famous tenors...we're even more impressed with Shanghai than we were last year on our first trip.

Thanks to Lisa English of Ruminate This for spreading the word on our take of the China AIDS epidemic--we have been a big follower of Lisa's since she began Ruminate This--she always has a new take on the topic of the day, and her writing ability is second to none in our opinion.

We'll be back here Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, and don't forget to check out Altercation Tuesday.

TalkLeft is blogging from Shanghai today. It is Saturday morning here, while it is dinnertime Friday in Colorado.

We were going to take a respite from blogging until our return on Tuesday, but watching the Asian edition of CNN on television provides an interesting perspective on world events and China itself is so fascinating that we have decided to report from here.

This is our second visit to this incredibly modern and technologically advanced city. We'll be back this afternoon, hopefully with some fresh insights. Our newsfeed will resume Saturday, U.S. time.