Via Agonist: Charm school time for U.S. soldiers:

At the Camp War Horse detention centre in Baguba, north of Baghdad, it is a surreal scene: US soldiers handing out cash to freed prisoners along with a note saying "You have not been mistreated."

Happy birthday to Matthew Yglesias who turns 23 tomorrow and describes his eventful year:

It's been a pretty eventful twelve months, from the Spurs heroic victory over the Lakers in the Conference Finals right after I turned 22 to their tragic defeat in the Conference Semis right before I turned 23. Perhaps more importantly, I graduated from college, saw a good swath of Italy, moved to a new city, acquired some new friends, and started a new job. More thoughts later.

Patrick at Electrolite explains why "Senator Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America."

Kevin Drum at Political Animal wants to know more about Joseph Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle on the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

TomPaine.com has a great quote today:

"I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." President George W. Bush, Sept. 11, 2001 (quoted by Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies) .

Someone at Google apparently has a sense of humor. We received this by email, try it soon, before someone at Google fixes it:

1) Go to www.Google.com

2) Type in (but don't hit enter): "weapons of mass destruction"

3) Hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button instead of the normal "Google search" button.

4) READ CAREFULLY what appears to be a normal ERROR message.
MAKE SURE YOU READ THE WHOLE ERROR MESSAGE!!!.

TalkLeft received over 25,000 unique visitors Wednesday. That's a new record for us. Thanks to all for stopping by.

We're on the road today. The TL kid is in New York, studying for law school finals, so we'll be spending much of Mother's Day with Markos of Daily Kos, his wife Elisa and baby Ari in Berkeley, who are just back from a trip to El Salvador. Monday we're giving a lecture to habeas (death penaltyappeals) lawyers in San Francisco on how to challenge eyewitness identification evidence, and then we'll be back. TChris will be around some while we're gone, as his schedule permits, and we'll post a bit from the road, just not at our usual pace.

We hope all you readers (including the TL kid) will remember to call your mothers today....and we wish all the mothers reading this a happy and relaxing day Mother's Day.

P.S. Check out this picture of Ari in Wired News, part of an article Elisa wrote about the environmental dilemma of diapers.

Update: What a great day. We're now Tia Jeralyn. The cutest baby we've seen in 20 years.

Comment spamming by those promoting websites selling controlled substances and anatomical enhancements is getting out of control here at TalkLeft. We spend hours manually deleting them. The more time we spend deleting spam, the less time we have to blog. We have downloaded various scripts and read the instructions for closing comments on Movable Type blogs on posts older than 21 days and for installing MT Blacklist and we might as well be reading Greek. We've e-mailed a few web designers seeking to pay them to install both on TalkLeft, and gotten no response. So, we're putting out a call. We'll pay you through paypal. Just tell us how much and what info you need.

Say hello to Moving Ideas. Org, formerly known as the Electronic Policy Network. It is a project of American Prospect. From its "about page":

Our goal is to improve collaboration and dialogue between policy and grassroots organizations, and to promote their work to journalists and legislators. Moving Ideas posts the best ideas and resources from leading progressive research and advocacy institutions, as well as promotes high-quality websites and publishes original content. We hope to strengthen democratic participation by providing a more inclusive and intelligible debate about the issues that shape our world.

Here's one article of particular interest to us:

Congrats to Jesse of Pandagon who has gotten a job blogging for Ohio Senatorial Candidate Jerry Springer.

Oliver of Liquid List has an analysis of the Colorado redistricting case. He reminds us not to lose sight of the importance of our courts.

David Neiwert of Orcinus writes on Iraqi prisoners and war crimes.

Skippy reports on a New York Times poll that is not favorable to Bush.

Say hello to Memeorandum, which tracks the most popular news topics covered by bloggers, and links to the blogger's posts about them. Liberal bloggers are well-represented on the site.

Memeorandum presents a distinctly readable and relevant hourly synopsis of the latest online news and opinion, combining weblog commentary with traditional news reports.

For the second month in a row, we've exceeded our very generous 24,000 MB a month bandwidth allotment and there are two days left in the month. If any of you are able to chip in, we'd really appreciate it. Just click on one of the buttons below. Amazon is anonymous, paypal is not. Many thanks.

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Say hello to Volconvo, "a socially conscious group that wants to promote intelligent debate and activism."

Our sitemeter has been down almost all day. It's a pain, because TalkLeft takes forever to load when Sitemeter is not working. There's one way we can always tell if it's us or Sitemeter....We check Instapundit whose sitemeter is on the same server. His sitemeter is down now too. [This has nothing to do with our hosting company which is the great Hosting Matters--only with Sitemeter which uses its own servers to compute site stats.]

Thanks to Zombyboy at Resurrection Song , the 7th edition of the Rocky Mountain Blogger Roundup is up. There is some fine writing and humor in this edition, so go check it out.

Don't forget the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash is May 28 at the Denver Press Club. We hear liberal Colorado bloggers will be in short supply, so if you are one, or support one, please come on down.