Say hello to Texas Prison Bid'ness... a blog about the private prison industry in Texas.

Their post today:

Willacy County Commissioners approved an additional $50.1 million in revenue bonds to expand the notorious MTC Tent City detention center. According to the Valley Morning News, the detention center, a series of tent-like structures made of windowless Kevlar pods that already has capacity to hold 2,000 ICE detainees, will expand by 1,000 beds.

What's it mean? The county will troll for inmates.

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Labor Day weekend is fast approaching. Blog traffic will be down with so many people taking advantage of the outdoors and symbolic end of summer.

I'll be blogging on a curtailed basis, and I'm not sure about Big Tent. TChris is on vacation. LNILR is free to chime in as always, but I don't know his plans either.

I'd like to see if diaries can fill the void. The problem is that they don't get enough attention. To correct that, what I'll do starting tonight (if there are any) is a "Diary Rescue" post like Daily Kos does. I'll read the diaries and then, in a blog post every night through Sunday, post links to those I think TalkLeft readers would enjoy reading.

If you blog elsewhere, you're welcome to cross-post here in a diary. Just note that it's been cross-posted at your site and hot-link your site. Hopefully, you'll get some extra traffic.

On diary topics, please make them relevant to the issues on TalkLeft -- elections, politics of crime, crime in politics, war, civil liberties, etc. The economy and environment, while important, are not TalkLeft topics. Yes, they should represent a progressive point of view. Conservatives have their own sites to post on.

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It's time for the Tuesday open thread. You're on your own here this afternoon.

Some things I'm following:

• The only officer to be charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal has been acquitted of all charges except failing to comply with a directive not to talk about the matter.

• ABC News reports Sen. Larry Craig will hold a presser this afternoon. My prediction: He won't run for re-election.

• MSNBC names some replacements for Gonzales, quoting a source close to the White House source as saying George J. Terwilliger III is looking good.

• Texas plans to execute Kenneth Foster Thursday even though he didn't kill anyone. The Dallas Morning News explains. Visit FreeKenneth and the NCADP action alert page and try to stop this wrongful execution.

I'm up in Vail, about to head out the door for an invigorating hike. It's gorgeous outside.

For those of you inside, here's an open thread.

Peter Beinart questions the Netroots' commitment to issues. He asks why so much loathing for Gravel?

What does Markos Moulitsas have against Mike Gravel? The über-blogger recently called for exiling the longshot presidential candidate from future Democratic debates. "Mike Gravel is a waste of our time," he wrote in an August 7 post. "[He's] a running joke." That's an odd assessment coming from the founder of Daily Kos. Every time Gravel gets behind a lectern, he flays the Democratic Party for knuckling under to militarists and corporations. In other words, he sounds just like Markos Moulitsas. . . .

Actually he doesn't. And in my drive to be the most loathed person on the blogs, in a new piece at the Guardian website, I again flay the Netroots for caring more about horseraces than issues:

What we do not see from MoveOn or any of the leading left blogs are any attempts to pressure Democrats into taking action immediately to end the Iraq war. Every plan, every project, seemingly every post, is focused on how to exploit Iraq as a political weapon against Republicans in the 2008 elections. Very little thought is brought to bear on how to pressure Democrats to use the power of congress to end the Iraq war now.

My question is diffferent than Beinart's. It is not why the Netroots loathes Gravel. Rather why does the Netroots not fight for the issues that they are supposed to care about?

Last night, as I was walking into a local tv studio to do Dan Abram's MSNBC show, I tripped on an uneven sidewalk and splattered myself on the concrete. I'm nursing a swollen wrist and bloody cuts on both knees and palms. Whose responsibility is it anyway to keep sidewalks in good repair? Or are we just supposed to walk with our heads down all the time looking for danger spots?

I'm also writing an op-ed for tomorrow's Washington Examiner on the myth of the immigrant crime wave (the topic of my MSNBC segment last night, which you can view here, but you'll need to turn the sound up on your computer to hear it. My YouTube-ing skills apparently don't include the ability to make the sound on the video match that on the tape I'm recording from.)[Update: MSNBC now has a better version here.]

So, here's an open thread for you.

It never made any sense to me that Matt Bai was chosen as the moderator of the Yearly Kos Presidential Forum. Bai has a long track record of hostility towards Left blogs and the views espoused by them. Joan Walsh reviews his new book and finds, surprise! - that Bai is very hostile to the goals of the Left blogs. Kevin Drum, in a strange reaction, ignores this and likes the book very much:

As near as I can tell, she and I had an almost (though not quite) identical reaction to Bai on substantive grounds, but despite that I loved the book and she hated it. Basically, I thought it was a terrific and insightful piece of reporting even though I thought Bai's basic theme failed to hold water, while Walsh was exasperated by the cluelessness of the book's basic theme but allowed that it also had some colorful and interesting reporting.

So Kevin likes clueless and inaccurate books apparently. Good to know.

This post, ostensibly about economic efficiency, is just used as an excuse by me to post this:

Just click on "How Long" to play. Despite what I said earlier about it being "so.... Eagles. Really, like 1973 Eagles" it's really catchy. I like it more each time I hear it.

Or you can visit the Eagles My Space page.

I'm still in court mode today, happily back in Denver, so I've only got highlights for you until tonight.

• No plea yet from Michael Vick, but very bad allegations from his two co-defendants who got cooperation deals:

The court papers, filed as Quanis Phillips, 28, and Purnell Peace, 35, pleaded guilty to dogfighting charges Friday, said all three men "executed approximately eight dogs that did not perform well in testing sessions" in April of this year by methods such as hanging and drowning.

Peace, of Virginia Beach, and Phillips, of Atlanta, said the money behind the Bad Newz Kennels dogfighting operation, based on property Vick owns in Virginia, came "almost exclusively" from the Atlanta Falcons star. And they confirmed to prosecutors that all the accusations in the 18-page indictment are true.

• Rudy's 29 hours at Ground Zero. More from Barb at Daily Kos and Atrios and other bloggers.

• The Eagles are releasing their first new album in 28 years, Long Road Out of Eden. I heard the single, Long Road, on the radio this morning. It's so.... Eagles. Really, like 1973 Eagles. There's no mistaking them for anyone else and I love the Eagles, particularly Don Henley, but still, it's like going back in time. Then I read it's not a new song:

How Long' is sung by Don Henley and Glenn Frey and was written by J.D. Souther. How Long' is one of Souther's earliest songs. It first appeared on his 1972 debut 'John David Souther'.

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It's court in the mountains for me today. I've got an early flight there and a late flight back so that means an open thread day for you.

Here's the tiny plane I'll be flying on. No bathroom, no flight attendant. Even with the constant turbulance caused by the heat of summer it beats driving seven hours each way.

What it doesn't beat is getting up at 5am to arrive at the airport an hour and a half before the flight and on the other end, having to worry about whether the flight will be cancelled due to wind conditions or whether weight restrictions will make them bump some passengers. The worst part, of course, is that I like my client and I'll be very sad when for the first time after months of doing court hearings, I leave to go home while he stays in the custody of the Town Marshals.

I hope you all have a better day planned.

I used to think I was a liberal hawk. After all, I considered the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, believe that the US involvement in Vietnam was defensible though ultimately a strategic mistake, strongly supported Desert Storm and the war against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Aghanistan and agree with Barack Obama that if the US has actionable intelligence about Al Qaida in Pakistan, the US should strike if Pakistan will not. That's pretty hawkish you must admit.

But Glenn Greenwald disabuses me of this notion:

[T]here is virtually no debate within the foreign policy establishment about whether the U.S. has the right to continue to intervene and attack and invade and occupy other countries in the absence of those countries attacking us. . . . [I]t is an implicit, unexamined belief among our foreign policy elites that the U.S. is entitled, more or less, to use military force even in the absence of being attacked or threatened with attack.

When the heck did this happen? Even Iraq was sold as a "growing and gathering threat." And that was the big debate about preventive vs. preemptive war. The idea of preemptive war is one launched in the face of an imminent threat. General Wes Clark explained it well in 2002: