The Carnival of Divided Government Triginta Septendecim (XXXVII) Special 4 Year Blogiversary Edition

Welcome to the 37th edition of the Carnival of Divided Government - The Special Four Year Blogiversary Edition.

Happy Birthday to me!

Four years ago, I started this blog by asking the question "Is this blog for you?", then offering the answer "Probably not." Well, I got that part right. 380 posts and 400,000 words later, uncountable throngs of blog readers reached the same conclusion and have flocked from this blog. In the meantime, the country has moved from disastrous Single Party Republican Rule to disastrous Single Party Democratic Rule. I think the country has a a collective learning disability. Nevertheless, we shoulder on - pushing that divided government rock up the mountain every election cycle.

A blogiversary is a time for reflection. Looking back on my first three posts from April, 2006 I take a certain perverse pride in offering a coherent and consistent thematic content from then until now. Then, we were advocating a straight Democratic vote in the 2006 mid-terms in order to break the hegemony and consequent bad governance of Single Party Republican Rule. Four years and two elections later, it's deja vu all over again. Now we are advocating a straight Republican vote in the 2010 mid-terms to break the hegemony and consequent bad governance of Single Party Democratic Rule. With a little luck, we'll have a similar result in 2010.

A blogiversary is also a time for presents. We like presents. It has been a while since we've spruced the place up. Since Blogger is finally getting around to updating their templates, we are giving ourselves a blog makeover for our birthday. Look for changes over the next few days or weeks. We've also giving ourself Twitter and Facebook accounts. We will be introducing them into our blogging process, just as soon a we figure out WTF to do with them. Everybody tells us we need then, so we must need them, but we really don't know why. For right now, we are content to see how many twitter followers we can accumulate without ever sending a single tweet.

In the meantime, the concept of and prospect for divided government is ramping up into the election season, so without further ado...
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New Blogger and the end of the world as we know it.

I am going to push the button.
I cannot put this off any longer. I am going to upgrade this blog from "old" blogger to "new" blogger. I have no confidence that this will go well. This blog began with a "standard" two column template nine months ago, and I've been hacking the crap out of it ever since. I don't even know what is in the template anymore. Blogger claims that everything will be fine and everything will work the same in New Blogger with the same template. It is only if and when I want to take advantage of the new features that I will have to convert to a new template and redo all customizations. So I am told. Why don't I believe it? I guess I am just not a very trusting soul.

Bloogle has been warning for a few weeks now that they have started forcing the upgrade. I've decided to do this on my timetable, rather than be surprised by theirs, so this weekend I push the button. No telling what will happen, but one undeniable possibility is that the whole blog gets lost or so screwed up that it becomes unusable. I don't know what I will do if that happens.

I'll see if I can figure out a way to back-up the blog first, but just in case these are the End Times for DWSUWF...

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.

UPDATE: February 26, 2007
Nevermind. Everything seemed to go just fine. It only took about 10 minutes once I pushed the button and it does look like everything is working the same. I'll be spending a few days poking around with the template and experimenting with new features, so there probably will be a content lull while I check things out. I will also be republishing recent posts in order to utilize the new blogger "labels" (tags?) feature for those posts.

Divided and Balanced.™ Now that is fair.