Atrios has a post up detailing the woes over at that fine example of upstanding people across the aisle who we need to bipartisanly reach out to, RedState .com.* They’re begging for money to do a site rebuild, and they can’t do it with Scoop because

The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us.

Okay, if you weren’t already, you may start to giggle now. And we have only started on the voyage of hilarity here. Step right this way…

So they were shut out, banned I tell you, treated worse than mangy dogs and redheaded stepchildren and other despised groups, by the Commie Scoop Alliance. So what was the next desperation move?

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

I should really leave the rest of the story to Lambert, but here’s the gist.

When the old Corrente.blogspot gang decided—well, most of us (waves over the fence to The Farmer and Pansypoo)—that Blogger was a pain in the ass up with which we would not put, we went looking for a new setup to switch to. The criteria were:

—we control/own content (content on a Blogger site is owned by, you guessed it, Blogger/GoogleInc)

—we control design. Which is where we have a big advantage over the Reddies as they couldn’t find their Perl from a hole in the ground, since Lambert happens to know this shit.

—we could find a host, cheap. We are none of us wealthy and the evil postman keeps swiping our Soros checks. Blogger at least is “free” if you accept the limitations noted above.

So we all went galloping off in all directions looking for a replacement. This search, at least on my part, consisted of going down blogrolls wherever I could find them and making note, at the ones I liked, of what their joint was built with. Anything ending in “.blogspot.com” could obviously be skipped; likewise Scoop since nobody here wanted to be mistaken for the Great Orange Satan. (just kidding Lord K! I grovel in your direction.)

It’s been so long I don’t remember where I ran across it but there was somplace whose logo said at the bottom “Built with Drupal.” I thought it was kewl and banged around the place as much as a user can without breaking any furnishings or irritating the management, and it seemed functional in operation as well as sleek in appearance.

Sent the link to Lambert, he looked it over (peering under the hood to a much greater extent than I could on account of he knew what to look for) too, and pronounced it Good. Oh, I forgot one other criteria on the list: it had to be open source cuz we were (are) in no position to buy proprietary software, beside which it is Eeevil. Drupal is OS so all was set.

A few months later, which probably only trimmed a couple of decades off Lambert’s expected lifespan what with wear, tear, hair replacement treatments, drink and other essential components of writing a website from scratch with software you had to learn on the fly, here we were, even as you see us today, in business. The fancy rotating masthead and other tweaks excepted.

Lambert, I’m afraid i have to say that if RedState goes out of business, it is your fault. You anti-First Amendment, selfish anti-American liberal discriminatory swine you. I hope you are suitably ashamed.

I’d send ’em a donation but I just did a sweep for spare change under all the couch cushions and even the car seats and sent the whole kit and kaboodle (what is a kaboodle anyway? I either never knew or forgot) to John Edwards. I’m sure the RedStaters will understand, proponents of Letting Every Voice Be Heard as they are.

*yeah, space put in there intentionally to keep it from turning into a clickable link. It shouldn’t on any browser I know of, but why take chances?