Happy Second Blogiversary (ywctp) to Instapundit.com. From his latest post critical of Attorney General Ashcroft.

NICE TO SEE that the Justice Department has plenty of resources for the terror war and can even spare the time and money for, ahem, lower-priority cases like this one:

"Federal prosecutors said today they have charged a North Hollywood wholesaler of adult films with violating federal obscenity laws as the government steps up a campaign against the major distributors of adult entertainment."

"The U.S. Justice Department said that its 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates and the husband-and-wife team that owns it is part of a renewed enforcement of federal obscenity laws after more than a decade in which they were rarely imposed."

Obviously, there's no need for a budget increase this year. Coming soon: a crackdown on interstate parking-ticket scofflaws, and a multi-agent, years-long investigation into New Orleans bordellos. Oh, wait. . . .

Glenn finishes with this prediction which is music to our ears.....

Ashcroft is becoming a liability. I doubt he'll survive past this term....

The excellent Beautiful Horizons, concentrating on Latin American and Human Rights, has moved to Typepad, so update your bookmarks. The always eloquent Jeanne D'Arc over at Body and Soul is moving there too.

Say hello to Kimberly of Brief Intelligence --and thanks to Lisa English of Ruminate This for bringing her to our attention. As Lisa says,

This particular blog is so well-written and In Your Face. Kimberley holds nothing back and I'll tell ya, if you're sick and tired of reading mainstream milquetoast reviews of this ongoing American political debacle, Brief Intelligence is the place to be.

Lisa's all over the smear on Rev. Canon Gene Robinson.

Hessiod at Counterspin thinks the new Al Qaeda warnings mean we can say goodbye to taking cell phones, pagers and laptops on airplanes. We never had a pager, and the cell phone wouldn't bother us, but take away our laptop? Please, say it isn't so.

Skippy is talking about Gephardt--not as a supporter, just as an observer of his union support--and says we're in for a long campaign.

Oliver Willis posts his list of the ten greatest Americans.

Natasha over at Pacific Views (used to be The Watch, so change your bookmarks if you haven't already) is impressed with the Coalition Casualty Count by Pat K with help from Elvis56. A lot of work went into this site, and we're impressed too.

Long Story, Short Pier isn't sold on Dean yet.

Lilith of A Rational Animal is headed out to San Francisco for the annual ABA meeting from Thursday to Sunday. She's wondering if any other bloggers are going and would like to get together. Go over and email her if you are. (We'll be there Friday for two days for the Criminal Justice Section Council meeting, and don't know if we'll be able to do a bloggermeet, but keep us posted if there is one, we'd try.)

How Appealing has the latest news on the Ten Commandments monument and the federal court order to the Alabama Supreme Court to remove it. The Order spells out to the State Court what will happen if they don't comply. It'll be expensive, for one thing.

We'll be on Kobe-TV duty all day tomorrow, sticking up for the presumption of innocence, starting at 7am, going until 10 pm (MST), all around the cable dial. So please read the blogs above and those listed on the right, and we'll be back Thursday.

Say hello to the The American Constitution Society Weblog. The ACS is a new organization that just had its first convention in Washington.

Started in 1999 under another name, the Constitution Society says it's trying to raise an army to challenge what it calls the dominance of conservative thought over U.S. courthouse decisions.

What the liberals need, founders argue, is a network for progressive law students, professors, lawyers and policymakers to battle -- and outthink -- the political right. They want to counter the passion and power of the Federalist Society, a two-decades-old group with 25,000 members, many of them with influential jobs in the Bush administration and on his list of nominees for the federal bench.

The work, they told convention participants over and over, could range from organizing to block Bush judicial nominees to writing law review articles. The goal, organizers say, is to ensure U.S. courts observe legal decisions that protect individuals' rights to a safe workplace and a fair trial, and freedom from abuse and discrimination.

Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno were in attendance. Bookmark the blog and support the ACS any way you can. We need them to fight the right and win for all of us.

We also thank them for linking to TalkLeft.

Happy second blogiversary (ywctp) to The Hamster. Eric has one of the most up-to-date, liberal sites around. We were astonished last year to find out that he was 19 and a freshman at GW. This year he'll be a sophomore. We used to think Matt Yglesias was the youngest, most politically aware blogger we knew (along with Jesse of Pandagon and Andrew Northrup of Poor Man , who vascillate between politics, humor and satire, with a smattering of issues of import mostly to those in their age group,) but Eric has proved himself to be right in their league. If these young men are in any way representative of their peers, and we believe they are, the future is beginning to look a lot brighter to us.

Does this sound familiar? Here's some advice from Instapundit: break the work into small chunks. Another tack: Turn off the computer or disable the internet connection for an hour, use it to return phone calls and get focused on work. Often the hour will turn into three or four hours, and you'll get caught up. Blogging and surfing are tremendously addictive activities...among our favorite descriptions of blogging are it's like the internet on speed or the difference between skiing and snowboarding. Everyone should take time to crash now and then. If only we would follow our own advice more often.

Bump and Update: Welcome 5280 Readers! Enjoy the site, and yes, we accept donations . If you're an advertiser, we consider small, tasteful ads that do not detract from our message.

****************

A big thanks to journalist Dave Cullen of Conclusive Evidence whose article on Colorado bloggers comes out tomorrow in Denver's upscale magazine, 5280. TalkLeft is one of the featured blogs, along with Stephen Green of VodkaPundit, Walter of WalterinDenver and Andy O'Reilly of World Wide Rant. We haven't read the whole thing yet, just the quotes Dave put on his site. Here's one of our's:

"When I'm on [FoxNews'] Hannity & Colmes, a milllion people may see me," she says. "But how many of those people are really interested in what I have to say? But when I blog, people are reading me because they're interested in the liberal viewpoint."

[Then later in the piece:]

"It's the response that keeps you going," she says. "People are really reading. And through the comments, you can see they're thinking and discussing. You know you've hit a chord, and it pumps you up."

The Boston Globe has a front page article today on how blogs are shaking the political discourse. Our blogging pal Oliver Willis is front and center. We highly recommend both the article and Oliver's blog.

Think there aren't enough women bloggers? Check out the blogroll at MS. Magazine....thanks to Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged for the link.

BushWars has the latest in "Plame Gate." Here's today's news on an upcoming probe. Mark Kleiman has a string of posts about it. [link via Democratic Veteran] Calpundit has been writing about it for a week. [link via SKBubba]

Hessiod at Counterspin writes about Turkish analysts who say Turkey's relationship with the U.S. may be damaged beyond repair.

Gary of Statutory Construction Zone and Stephanie Tai of Blue Bonnett Blog have written the first law review article about legal weblogs, published in Volume 5, number 1 of the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process (Spring 2003). You can read the article here.

Lisa English of Ruminate This says " Welcome to the GOP Police State."

Wampum covers Democratic hopeful John Edwards.

Liberal Oasis has the latest Bush poll results in one place.

Kevin Drum at Calpundit has a uranium wrapup.

Hessiod at Counterspin tells what Ashcroft has in common with the Communist Vietnamese Government.

Matt Yglesias is back from Italy, and apparently well-rested, as he's blogging up a storm.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light has this astute observation:

At what point did the Bush administration know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? When Rumsfeld started cutting troop allocations from the war plan. The administration may have known earlier, but they surely knew by then.

Cutting the troop allocations was crazy enough if Rumsfeld assumed US troops would be going up against conventional weapons; but even he wouldn’t have done that if he honestly thought they’d face WMDs.

Max Sawicky writes Congressman John Conyers about his insane plan to make downloading a single file from the internet a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

More to come tomorrow, we've been very negligent in writing about what other bloggers are covering the past few weeks as crime news and issues have been flying so fast and furious. But as Skippy points out on the Kobe Bryant case (not too delicately, either) there's a lot more going on in the world.

We're off to Durango, Colorado early this morning to view physical evidence in one of our cases, so we won't be posting, or appearing on any cable tv shows. It's an 8 hour drive, or a very bumpy 1 hour flight, and we've trepidatiously chosen the flight. We say trepidatiously, because 99% of the time we have no fear of flying but this flight is different.

The last time we flew to Durango was for a court appearance 22 years ago --we remember because we were 7 months pregnant. We were so freaked out by the flight (air pockets due to the summer heat make these tiny planes swerve and drop mercilessly, so they later told us) that we rented a car one-way for the drive back. Aside from the cost, the driving was not a problem--we would have driven for 3 days to avoid a repeat of that flight. We have no problem flying to Aspen, Grand Junction or Casper (Wyoming) --or even taking a puddle jumper to Kalispell, Montana, but Durango is scary.

Wednesday may be the day the Eagle County DA decides whether to charge Kobe Bryant with sexual assault or some other crime or no crime at all, so we recommend you check news updates frequently. We'll be back here late Wednesday night or Thursday, as soon as we've recovered from our most harrowing adventure.

Update: We're back, safe and sound, thanks for the comments. The plane ride was fine... but someday when this case is over, we'll tell the story of the conditions under which we were forced to view the physical evidence. It's one for the books, for sure. Suffice it to say, too many law enforcement agents in rural counties think they can operate under their own rules--and that they make the rules. At least we're in federal court on this case, where hopefully the Judge won't view it that way.

We were out of town and missed our good pal Skippy's first anniversary. He's taking comments, so go over and wish him many more. Skippy is one of the most generous linkers out there, and has a unique, extremely upbeat blogging voice. We bet if you submitted five blog entries to us, we could pick Skippy's out every time. (no money on the bet though.) Anyway, congrats, Skippy, and thank you for your many kind words about TalkLeft during the past year.

Our hosting company is upgrading our server, should be any minute now, and we will be down for up to one half hour. We haven't written anything today since we are having cable internet access installed and it's more complicated than they thought. We still have dsl, but we're anxious to try cable. We'll try to catch up on the news in the meantime.

Welcome back to Media Horse. They've got some great stuff up, as always. Instapundit is back and posting after his week of scuba-diving in the Grand Caymans.

Atrios and Matt Yglesias are still in Europe (not together) and contributing occasional posts. Lisa English of Ruminate This will be back next week, after a long and probably not-much-fun house move.