Now with captions! If anyone has any suggestions for art (links to non-copyright archives of big images, please) then use the contact link in the top menu.

Ditto for improvements to the captions. Sometimes my invention flagged!

... since there are these nice new sidebars, and with winter coming on, hamster kibble is at a premium...

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NOTE This is expected behavior (except for the ugly whitespace after the opening of the quote.

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NOTE This is expected behavior (except for the ugly whitespace after the opening of the quote.

See the Calendar link in the top menu bar. The only event on it right now is, fittingly, DCBlogger's live blog with Katie of HealthCare Now! To create an event:

After talking to VastLeft, I made some improvements to the menus; if you want to file a bug report or feature request, please see how.

Please try the revised All posts and All comments items in the top menu (which applies to the whole site).

And please try the revised My posts and My comments items in the lower menu (which applies only to you, the individual user.

Thanks!

If your bug reports or feature requests are in comments, there's no way for me to track or respond to them because they're all scattered everywhere.

So I suggest the following procedure:

If you couldn't hear it from me, maybe you can hear it from Avedon:

All I know is that so far Obama looks like the very epitome of Village thinking. Am I wrong? Show me where. Because based on the evidence, the only reason some people have for so fervently believing in Obama's progressivism is the racist assumption that because black Democrats have historically been pretty good on this war and justice stuff, Obama must be, too. Except that Obama and his supporters have been simultaneously telling us all along that he heralds a "new generation" of (post-racial) leadership, divorced from all those embarrassing old dark people with southern accents who got beaten up and risked (and sometimes lost) their lives trying to make the rest of us aware that justice is still a dream.

Ouch!

Gotta let the hamsters out for a run.

Yet another Republican talking point from Mr. Waffle:

Democrat Barack Obama argued that voters are yearning for "straight talk and honesty" on the economy as he sought distinctions with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton just nine days before the next round of primaries in the hotly contested race for the presidential nomination.

"Straight talk, straight talk..." I just know I've heard some candidate use that before... Now, who could it be? Surely a Democrat...

I hope we can revert to an open policy in a time-frame of weeks, not months, but for now, I'm requiring administrative approval before posting.

Probably I'm too paranoid and cynical_{MR SUBLIMINAL Never cynical enough} but....

As administrator, I've temporarily called a halt to our open comments policy for unregistered users; they will no longer be able to post comments.

I'll see how the registered users do.

With rare exceptions -- anti-Semitic ranting, calls for the assassination of public figures -- I prefer to let comments speak for themselves, or to use mockery and derision to contextualize them. Like Digby, I no longer have the time or the energy to watch everybody's back, and the blog's back, by spending my waking hours wading through the droppings of dull-eyed zombies:

Big Tent Democrat is a lying whore and so are you.

Hillary is toast. You two are either to [sic] stupid to notice. Or you are lying sack of chit.

Either way, you are both laughingstocks.

or to be fair, this:

A new post for discussion of markup issues in feeds.

Yet another female Bush enabler, Dana "Lucretia" Perino, on Pelosi's comment that Bush was rushing the surge to avoid oversight:

"Those particular comments were poisonous," Perino said. "I think questioning the president's motivations [Oh my goodness!] and suggesting that he, for some political reason [Shocked! Shocked!], is rushing troops into harm's way, is not appropriate, it is not correct, and it is unfortunate because we do have did put troops in harm's way."

And without any armor, either.

Dana, it's the poison you mixed and forced down our throats. It's already killed 3000 American troops, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a little thing called our Constitution.

You mixed the poison when you said of Iraq that you don't "introduce new products in August".

This one's a neo-Nazi. But he's not into teen pages; he's into little girls. Southern Poverty Law Center:

Kevin Alfred Strom, a major American neo-Nazi leader for almost 20 years, was arrested by federal agents in Virginia Thursday night and charged with possession of child pornography and witness tampering.

Court records indicate federal agents found pornographic pictures had been on Strom's computer hard drive between October 2005 and last August. Strom was also charged with trying to intimidate an unnamed witness against him.

Always with the violence. What a Moran.

[Xan: If you arrive at this post before checking your mail, please try Preview/Post with this post. thanks...] 

We promptly judged antique ivory ^buckle_s for the next prize. Centrist is a glossary term. And do two dashes (--) turn into an em dash? Single quotes ('', ' ' )? Why not double ("", " ")? New text to defeat cache.

sdfsdfds

The nice thing about Thanksgiving is that it hasn't been corporatized. Halloween, yes; Xma$, yes--in fact, they've already been playing Xma$ music for weeks--but Thanskgiving remains blessedly uncontaminated by corporate marketroids trying to sell their shit. (OK, OK, butterball turkeys are way corporatized, but compared to Xma$? A bagatelle.)

At any rate, we are thankful for you, alert Corrente readers, so here are these changes:

1. If you can log in, you can now blog here (in Drupal-ese, "authenticated users" now get blogs. A decision taken back at our last LA meeting, but it took awhile to get to. Sorry.) Click the "Post of my blog" link in the sidebar.
1. Feel free to cross post and link back to your home blogs.
1. Front paging is at the discretion of the Fellows of The Mighty Corrente Building.
2. Decisions by the judges are arbitrary and final.
1. In case of ties, a Republican will be tossed
2. We also added a "buddy list." Except that, after lengthy and prayerful consideration, not, we used the word "moonbat" instead of the word "buddy." ("Buddy" makes me think of, erm, being invited out for ice cream. Ick.) So, if you make somebody your moonbat, their posts will get listed in a sidebar block. These are social networking/community building tools, or so I'm told.
3. To make blogging easier, we added a WYSIWYG toolbar, so you can click on the B button, and get bold, and so on. (The one thing you can't to is paste HTML angle brackets into the new editor. It won't understand them, and they will show up as angle brackets. Sorry.)

To add someone to your moonbat list:

1. Find the link in one of their posts that says "click to add to your moonbat list" and click it.
2. The profile page of the the post's author will appear.
3. Scroll down to "Moonbat actions" and click the link that says "Add..."
4. A confirmation page will appear. Click OK.

To remove someone from your moonbat list:

1. Click on the expanding "Fellow moonbats" link in your sidebar.
2. Your moonbat list will appear.
3. Click one of the links. That moonbat's profile page will appear.
4. Scroll down to "Moonbat actions" and click the remove link.
5. A confirmation page will appear. Click OK.

Support? Ask the bartender. Tell him the guy under the stairs sent you. And so to bed.

Yeah, that's almost what He said. "Official" White House transcript (via Daou Report):

One freedom that defines our way of life is the freedom to choose our leaders at the ballot box. We saw that freedom earlier this week, when millions of Americans went to the polls to cast their votes for a new Congress. Whatever your opinion of the outcome, all Americans can take pride in the example our democracy sets for the world by holding elections even in a time of war.

Some of us have long memories, of course:

They're shutting down EPA's technical libraries.

Oh, gosh. Did I say "stupid"?

Little white pills? What're they? And who threw all those bottles under the stairs?

Je regrette rien... But I wish we hadn't been down so long, because it seems that in our absence, the Republicans have regrouped themselves and become even more shameless. (I listened to the Hayden hearings, but yelling and throwing things and pounding my fists on the table aren't conducive to working on the site, so I had to give that up.)

We outgrew our old ISP, and so we had to move. As long as we had the patient open, we did as much surgery as possible, which included upgrading to Drupal 4.7 (which is why it is now possible to hear MJS read the Times, for example). Security, features, the hip factor of podcasting... All the usual reasons.

There are also a lot of nice new little fit-and-finish features--assuming you have JavaScript--like the dragger bar at the bottom of comment boxes. Now you can drag to make the box bigger, instead of scrolling.

But now the patient is closed. We hope.

PLEASE report any issues or concerns either by using the Contact form at top right, or by emailing me directly at lambert_strether1 AT yahoo DOT com.

Thanks again for your patience, and we're very glad to be back online.

UPDATE ON COMMENTS
One of the issues we were having was a LOT of spam, because we had open comments. Even though our filters caught 99.9% of it, still every comment was a hit on the server and the load added up. So now, you must register/log in to comment. Think of it as a matter of informational hygiene.

And please, if you aren't logged in, don't submit the comment twice. All that means is that there's an extra in the approval queue we then have to delete.

UPDATE ON IE
For the IE users who experienced problems before--Are you experiencing them now? (And if you are, why not just upgrade to FireFox... Unless you're at work, of course...)

I'm experimenting with the templates.

I should put this in documentation, I'll go do that now.

On the Edit page for the post:

1. In the options box, make sure "publish" is NOT checked (nothing else should be checked, but that is the default).

Here's an interesting link from alert reader jack. Emily Gertz writes at WorldChanging:

The internet's been great for helping me make new friends in San Francisco and Toronto... all from my home office chair in Brooklyn.

Surveys can be created with checkboxes, etc., and then mailed to the survey creator. See example.