Thank you for the compliment, TheraP. I always appreciate your contributions as well. I never spent much time at the old cafe, but I've been commenting regularly at election central and muckraker for a while. For all the problems with the new site, I think that the integration of the main news blogs with the reader posts is huge improvement. I'm a newshound, so I'm always checking the news blogs, but the cafe was so isolated previously, that I rarely checked it unless Josh referred to a post there, and it never even occurred to me to post by own blog. Now, it's easy to jump back and forth between the news and reader posts. I love it.

I know some of the old cafe regulars complain that the quality of the comments has gone down, but I think that, though there's still plenty of crap, the quality of the election central comments has gone up because people can no longer post anonymously.

It's funny that Josh still doesn't allow comments on the TPM main page. (I've previously accused him of being an anti-commentist.) I've notice that some readers have been posting references to his posts in order to create a discussion thread around them.