Atrios and Eschaton turn three years old today. Here is Atrios' first day of posting. Who would have thought in that time he would receive more than 50 million visitors. He's now averaging 100,000 visitors a day. Congratulations, A, and many happy returns.

On another blogging note, check out this article today on Markos of the Daily Kos.

Atrios and Daily Kos are the two most widely read liberal bloggers anywhere. All you need to do is read their blogs (and in Daily Kos's case, some of the diaries) and you'll see why. As to the time that goes into it,

Thanks to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and AOL News' Blog Zone for mentioning TalkLeft today.

First, Howard:

Attorney Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft doesn't think much of DeLay saying he had made "inartful" remarks on targeting judges:

"If one of my clients gave this kind of apology at a sentencing, the judge would throw the book at him. . . . "He's not sorry for the content of his intemperate remarks, only for the way he phrased them. That's like saying he isn't sorry for the crime, only that he got caught."

AOL BlogNews picked up on blog coverage of Sen. Bill Frist's threat to go nuclear:

Daily Kos outlines some news stories about Frist. And Rightsided takes exception to those news reports. Captain wonders what GOP "milquetoasts" are waiting for.

Frist has backed himself into a corner, says Talk Left. And Blue Vertical Studio reports on the makeup of American federal courts.

Construction at the new bank site looked pretty ugly today, but since I've had some requests, here's week two of what will be a new bank outside my window.

Thanks to The Gap, the parking meters in downtown Denver were free today.

Did anyone notice this in other cities?

Henry Copeland of Blogads tells Volvo what a raw deal it got buying ad space from Microsoft's "Spaces" blogging environment instead of from brand-name bloggers:

As Steve Hall of Adrants notes that most of Spaces blogs are "empty, useless, pointless weblogs." "A quick review of weblogs listed as recently updated on MSN Spaces revealed few, if any, containing more than a post or two. Many simply state, 'There are no entries in this blog.'"

....To expand on Steve's point, Volvo is, at best, paying to appear above MSNSpaces bloggers who are writing about random stuff, blogospheric noise. Spaces bloggers are newbies on the fringes of the blogosphere. MSN may well have promised Volvo 100 million page impressions a month, but these are impression seen by nobody -- or more exactly "nobodies" -- people who are viewed as influentials only by their moms and ex-girlfriends.

We haven't had one of these in a while and I'll be off at court and the jail today. The floor is your's.

We're having technical problems with Internet Explorer and the home page. The site shows fine in Firefox. We hope to get it fixed soon.

Update: Mike Ditto says the problem is fixed now. He had the same problem on his site and it had to do with Sitemeter's javascript.

I've been reading through the submissions for Altercation's blogroll contest, over 250 of them. I try to only read a few at a time so I can get a good sense of each one. A blog by Blaghdaddy got a laugh from me tonight Between the time one of his readers submitted it (March 18) and the time I looked at it (April 10), the guy had quit blogging. Go read his reasons. It's enough to make you hang up your keyboard. Here are some snippets:

There's cat-blogging (see here, here and here), basset blogging, orchid blogging and all sorts of off-topic blogging in the blogosphere on Fridays. Yesterday, a local bank decided to build its new building outside one of my windows. Since I've never watched a building be constructed at such close range, and because I'm trying not to think about how loud or dirty my airspace will become in the next several months, I'm going to focus on the positive. Somewhere, some construction company is taking pride in this four story project.

I will catalog the progress in photos each Friday so you too can watch a building be constructed at close range.

Here's day one, Wednesday, the day the tractor arrived. At 7 am.

bigger version

Atrios explains the importance of tipping continuously updated bloggers . Here's a few snippets:

Look, blogging takes time. And, doing the kind of blog which tries to stay 5 seconds ahead of the news cycle on a consistent basis takes a lot of time.... every moment spent blogging is a moment not spent trying to get work/earn money. Over the long run there may be some self-promotion benefit to blogging, but a very small one.

There's lots of writing going on in the blogosphere.

• Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on Our Pet Afghans

• Grits for Breakfast just got back from Washington where the right and left joined forces to bash "Byrne grant" programs which finance multijurisdictional drug task forces like the ones in Tulia, Hearne and Palestine, Texas.

• Liberty Street says terrorists likely will be the only ones not deterred by the Administrations' new passport requirements (via Sideshow.)

Say hello to The Grist, a new and free environmental newsletter with a cool design and very progressive content. Grist has taken out an ad on TalkLeft, so I leafed through it and have to say I'm very impressed. Here's an article advising enviromentalists to take a page from civil liberties activists and suffragettes, and never give up.