As many of you know, Firedoglake has been on hiatus for eight months while I recovered from hip replacement surgery. During that time I’ve been contemplating what the next chapter should be for the website. After some personal reflection, I have decided to pass the torch on to Kevin Gosztola

The Firedoglake archive has over 10,000 posts and more than 4.6 million comments — but without your help, it might disappear from the Internet.

Intense attacks and hacking incidents over the past few months have crippled our website. Some parts have been offline for weeks and the tech bills are starting to crush us.

Can you please donate $25 or more to fight the people that want to take us offline?

Over the past 10 years, Firedoglake has played a major role in the progressive movement.

We fought hard for a public option in the Affordable Care Act and exposed the backroom corporate deal-making and deception at its foundation. We exposed the mistreatment and abuse of imprisoned whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou. On multiple occasions, our community rallied substantial support for civil disobedience movements like Occupy and the Tar Sands tree-sitters.

And we’re not finished. I started FDL as a place for no-nonsense reporting and activism you can’t find elsewhere, and there’s so much more work to do. But the attacks on our site have made it increasingly difficult to continue our work.

I would have voted an emphatic ‘yes’ until seven minutes ago when a late-breaking story appeared citing very specific and damning Grand Jury testimony from witnesses leaked by unnamed ‘multiple sources’. More on that after some history.

During President Barack Obama’s presidency, a record number of government employees have been prosecuted for leaking or blowing the whistle. Several of them have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that was intended to be used against spies and not for punishing people who disclose information without authorization. Simultaneously, the amount of information being kept secret by the government has increased exponentially while the United States expands the reach of its global security state.

Silenced immerses viewers in this world.

The United States was criticized by the United Nations Committee Against Torture in its recently released report for failing to provide redress for Chicago Police Department torture survivors. The Committee expressed concern that CPD Commander Jon Burge and other officer had engaged in torture between 1972 and 1991, however, no officer had been convicted for torture, particularly because the statute of limitations expired and victims have received zero compensation.

This Thanksgiving what I’m thankful for is the recent marijuana legalization victories in D.C., Oregon, and Alaska.

It wasn’t just a business, it was a way of life– what residents of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania referred to simply as “The Steel”– a mill once America’s second largest steel producer with 31,500 souls working in a single facility.

It seems that once again I’m having health challenges, and I am staying here with my sister having hip replacement surgery.

I had the brilliant idea that I could work full time during all of this, but I’ve come to understand that the recovery process is going to be more lengthy and involved than I thought it was going to be. And that getting better is going to be something I need to devote all my energy to.

In the mean time, FDL doesn’t have the resources to hire someone to run the shop, so we are going to be stripping back to basics for the near future.

The racist police in St.Louis are whining about five St.Louis Rams receivers who protested the Michael Brown shooting by raising their hands during the pregame introductions. I use the word ‘racist’ deliberately because Jeff Roorda, the spokesperson for the St.Louis Police Officers’s Association called the protesters in Ferguson ‘thugs’ when he threatened reprisals against the team, if it does not discipline the players or they do not apologize.

In what is becoming a tradition, Walmart workers and labor activists are planning protests for Black Friday. This will be the third time in a row that Black Friday protests have drawn attention to Walmart’s poor treatment of its workers. Black Friday is generally considered to be one of the most important shopping days of the year and one where special deals draw shoppers in large numbers to retail outlets such as Walmart.