There's a "single payer healthcare" trend these last couple days, and I was absolutely alarmed when I read that under such a system, Doctors and other health providers would not be able to charge a premium for their services beyond the gov't-mandated fee.

Proposal dead on arrival.

That's fucking communism! It's not even socialism. It's specifically spurning the single greatest engine of improvement in the human condition in history: the profit motive. The profit motive actually does serve broader markets better than any other. It needs to be constrained and supplemented in certain situations (and that's where socialism comes in). But banned altogether? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Recently, there have been a spate of diaries and front-page stories here that attack people like me. The comments posted to them have been even worse...truly inflammatory. They have questioned the fitness of people like myself to not only govern, but vote!

There are millions of people like me, and it's not a laughing matter. Maybe you don't suffer from my problem, but that doesn't mean you can go ahead and make fun of me, and rule me a second class citizen.

I am a hypocrite. And I have been all of my adult life.

People suffering from hypocrisy generally display a syndrome of problems. The classic "saying one thing and doing another" is just a superficial trivialization of this serious psychological condition. The need to control oneself is so searing that the verbalizations are, like every obnoxious act, a cry for help. And the involvement in politics is simply an attempt to enlist the world's most powerful force, the United States Government, and the social power of the media, to that end.

Please understand me and respect me. Take away those criticisms. I am fit to not only vote, but to lead this great nation, and take care of your children as well. With children, when they ask about drinking, smoking, and having sex, I simply say, "Do as I say, not as I do." And I can say the same things to adults about using gay prostitutes, managing Congressional Pages, and showing compassion to the needy in this country.

Happy Thanksgiving! Today I'm giving thanks that we're just about wrapping up the Ajax Diary Editor, after only a few days out in the field. We don't have a massive budget for user and beta testing, so we rely on you guys to help us make this work for you. Since 200 diaries were successfully posted in the first 24 hours of going live, and hundreds more since, I think we can call this an unqualified success.

But we still want to hear about any problems you're having! The code had a major update yesterday that might have fixed your problems.

Please click There's More... for more details, and to add your comments and reports...

[editor's note, by ct] At long last, the new story editor. Here's an explanation from the guy who designed the ajaxy part of it. -ct

Following up the tremendous success of the Ajax Comments System that is unique to Daily Kos, we're happy to introduce new tools for diary authors here that offer the same leaps in performance, ease, and fluidity that you've been enjoying for comments. In fact, writing and editing diaries now looks and works just like posting comments—so you'll feel right at home.

We've also added some powerful new features just for diaries, which unlike comments, are editable. There's an automatic draft saving system, for instance, to prevent you from losing your work by accident. And with nifty new Ajax polls, visible directly on the front page, and an in-place Tag Editor for trusted users on all pages, Daily Kos is set to be more vibrant and fun than ever!

A few highlights:

• Looks and works just like the comment editor, with all the great formatting buttons and tools included, free of charge!
• Edits the page directly with WYSIWYG, rather than filling out some clunky form for a database.
• Fast, client-side autoformatted preview of both intro and body sections, with a rapid edit-test-debug cycle.
• Editor is always at the ready and doesn't require visiting another page.
• Autorefresh updates diary text, titles, poll results and tags, instantly with no need to press reload!
• The notifier tab in the lower right corner reports when the story is updated just as it reports new comments.
• When you edit the diary, you edit what you originally typed in, not some HTML garbled version of it.
• Diary Drafts menu keeps convenient track of drafts you are working on; you have three weeks to publish them.
• Drafts are automatically saved several times a minute; there is a Save as Draft button to be sure.
• Ajax Tag Editor provided to TU's makes tag editing easy on all diaries.
• Ajax polls, embedded right on the front page or diaries page, with nifty animations and no need to visit some other page and find your way back.

First thing to do, hold down the shift key and press your browser's reload button! That'll make everything work...please do that for both the front page and one story or diary page .

Read on (clicking There's more...) for all the great new features!

I think our Congress could pull off a simple change in election law that would both prevent annoying (and often deceptive) political Robocalls and possibly even provide lots of new jobs at the same time. How?

Simply make a clarification in the Do Not Call statute: Political speech is protected from this restriction currently, which is correct. However, it can be argued that robocalls take the definition of "speech" too far, to the point of automatically intruding upon our homes and persons. You can't disturb the peace even though you have freedom of speech: there are limits. The Do Not Call registry was formed within this context.

Here's a challenge for the Daily Kos readership: Now that the Dems have power, they also have responsibility. And that means responsibility for not making mistakes that could come back to bite us in 2008. The Repubs will try to find anything they can to run against us on, and it behooves us to see if we can't apply some foresight and think about how to minimze the risk.

I say this with some trepidation that we may become too afraid to act: inaction is a mistake in itself. So I'm not trying to provoke paranoia about the Big Bad Rethug Attack Machine. Just to make sure everyone has an idea what might be coming down the pike, and to act and advocate with consequences foreseen.

I have a few ideas of categories of mistakes we could make to get us started...

EVRYTHING HEYTHEREITSERIC SAY IS BULLSHIT. 100% ONE. HUNDERD. PEWRCENT!

We never repeat ourselvs here. Evrything we write is 130$% AUTHENTIC FROM THE HEART.

HEYTHEREITSERIC IS A TROLL. TROLL TROLL TROLL!!!!!!111

Anyopne who recomands that diery should bne banned. if there not then markos has no ball's.

'nuf sed.

Some people may have appreciated my insights and links on the subject of Israel/Lebanon recently, and some have not. But regardless, I am done discussing the issue. And I frankly feel like taking a vacation from Daily Kos until we're all done discussing it.

And I scarcely think I'm alone in feeling this way. In fact, I'm going to suggest that we classify diaries on Israel/Lebanon in the same bin as electoral fraud and conspiracy theories, and recommend debate take place elsewhere.

Why? Because this is not a winning issue for the Democrats. Whatever criticisms you can make about Bush admin policy on this issue can and already have been made 1,000 times stronger against what we have done in Iraq. And that is where we can all be united on the topic, and focus on helping Democrats win.

There will never be consensus within this site or the Democratic party on Israeli policy. Markos and the front pagers have already banned declined to include the topic from the front page. I would be very happy to see that extended across to the diaries.

So what really is the core of the issue with Palestine and Israel and Lebanon and Hezbollah? For some reason, this understanding has escaped most public discourse, and I guess no one talks about it because it's rather unfortunate and ugly.

The core of the issue isn't Jerusalem or religion. Certainly, Jerusalem has been the "flag" in a huge game of capture the flag that has been played between various tribes for millenia. But that's just the cover story, the sort of thing that inspires microscopic minds but is mere symbolism when it comes to virtually all action.

No, the core of the problem is that everyone...yes, Arabs and Jews alike...treat the Palestinian people as unwanted trash.

Our Trusted Users now have a limit of two troll ratings per day per user. We have code in place now that enforces that, and should make accidental troll ratings a thing of the past as well.

Hovering your mouse over the troll button now pops up a little notice of how many troll ratings you have left for the day. If you are out of troll ratings, the troll button will be grayed out. When you click on the troll button, a dialog pops up notifying you of how many troll ratings you have left, and asks you to confirm that you do indeed wish to troll rate the comment. You may cancel at that time if it was an accident or you decide your troll rating would be best applied elsewhere.

You may still un-trollrate a comment (either clicking the troll button to uncheck it or clicking recommend instead), up until the time you manually reload that page with no troll ratings left. At that point all your troll buttons will be grayed, and you won't be able to un-trollrate.

A buglist/compatibility chart is below. Please use this thread to report any technical problems you have with Daily Kos.

Much analysis of the immigration kerfuffle has centered on its racist underpinnings. Indeed, it seems that with polls now displaying that Americans have no more faith in the GOP--even on its bread-and-butter, terrorism--that the Republicans have conjured this issue up for lack of anything better to motivate their "base" with. Their own Wannsee conference, if you can bear the analogy.

Our impulse in the blogosphere, since we are all, at heart, conspiracy theorists (some of us just have better evidence, is all), is to immediately ask cui bono: who benefits?

However, an equally valid question in politics is who suffers?

The answers in this case are more complex than meets the eye. And the GOP is going to pay dearly for it.

With all the discussion of energy this week I thought I'd sidestep the gasoline/oil brouhaha today and sketch out a positive vision of our sustainable future. Some of these ideas have been brewing in my head for years and they're starting to come together now. Perhaps the Energize America contingent would like to consider these ideas, and other groups might be interested.

One of the things many people don't understand is that the power grid is capable of carrying data as well as raw electricity. And it can do so at quite high bandwidth.

A factor holding back sustainable energy production methods such as wind and solar is they are of variable availability. Another problem is the ability to meet peak demand that we often see on hot days when everyone cranks their AC to max.

Let's see if we can't solve those problems by making our power supply "smart"...

Without citing any recent examples (ahem!) of the more than one bloggers who have appeared in high-profile press coverage recently, I thought I would share my own opinions about how I see the blogosphere working, and how it should remain true to its essence in confronting its own public image.

With the crushage of the last remaining serious bug (in Konqueror on Linux) we can now announce that we support the current (and known future) releases of all significant desktop browsers on all major platforms.

The complete browser support chart is below, along with lists of known bugs (all apparently in the browsers or on the server), and an opportunity to report any further troubles you are having on Daily Kos.

After some recuperation I was able to track down the problem with Linux Firefox, and clean out the rest of the known bugs on the Daily Kos Ajax client.

Animation is now enabled on Internet Explorer 5.5 and later, fewer comments will be lost when the server blinks at the wrong moment, and there are improvements to how ratings update.

Continue below for the list of bug fixes, and browser compatibility charts.

A new day, a new haul of bugfixes reeled in to smooth your Daily Kos experience.

Most notably, a comprehensive QA run on Linux, with important results and a conclusion for Linux users.

As always, please use this thread to report problems you are having once you reload in the new code.

The fix list, known bug list, compatibility chart and Linux results can be accessed by pressing There's More:

Gentle Kossians,

Just a week has passed with the new Ajax Comments system in place on Daily Kos. And we haven't forgotten you and any of your travails with this site. Now in place are numerous bugfixes which will make your enjoyment of the new Ajax comments system all the more rewarding.

Continue overleaf for the list, and please use this thread to report ongoing problems.

After pulling every hair out of my head I finally found what was bugging Mac Firefox in large threads.

Turns out to be those nifty scrollbars on large comments.

So we had to remove them (deleting a single crushing line of CSS code) for the time being. Some people disliked them anyway, and all Mozilla browsers were having some problems displaying them.

Mac Firefox now works, and Camino scrolls the pages quickly too, even in vast threads that are expanded. Still, you'll have the best performance with an updated Safari on Mac OS 10.3 or 10.4.