Atrios is posting from his undisclosed location in Europe today, go read.

Bad Attitudes speaks our mind on Ashcroft's push for more death penalty prosecutions.

Don't miss The Dark Side of Innocence in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Welcome back to Mad Kane's Dubya's Dayly Diary , and her new song, 'Democrats' Anthem: Election 2004':

(to be sung to "Blowin' In The Wind")

How many wars must a President start
Without any reason at all?
How much ill will must a President cause
Until he at last takes the fall?
How many wars must a President launch
Because he is greedy for oil?
The answer my friend is dump Republicans.
The answer is dump Republicans.

Here's the rest. Mad Kane's blog is here.

Sunday is the first anniversary of the conversion of TalkLeft to a blog. Here is our first post.

Thanks to all of you who have read TalkLeft this year and written about it. We've had 625,000 visitors, and 1 million page views.

Just today we were notified by our hosting company that our bandwidth must be increased to 5 GB a month and our server space to 300 mg. We're not sure what those numbers mean (only what they cost)-- but we take it as a sign our popularity is increasing. So we're glad.

We also have some special thanks to extend: Daily Kos for the site design of TalkLeft--Kos spent an untold number of hours creating the site in MT so we could leave blogger behind; Eric Alterman of Altercation and Instapundit for mentioning us very early on and frequently enough to get noticed; Atrios for sending loads of hits our way.

And Cursor, Media Horse, Buzzflash, Tapped and Common Dreams for linking to us on their excellent sites.

Don't miss Jim Capozzola of Rittenhouse Review on women bloggers. Every one he mentions is top notch.

As to his comments and praise for Lisa English of Ruminate This, we couldn't agree more. She is one special person and blogger. We e-mail with her frequently and put her at the very top of our list of bloggers for warmth, generosity of spirit and commitment to liberal values. (We also have nothing but compliments for Wampum Blog, we just haven't had occasion, as Jim has, to personally interact with Mary Beth Williams, its author. Now that we've read his remarks, we'll look for one.)

And a special thanks to Jim for including us in his list of favorite women bloggers. Here is his list--we recommend you read them all--in addition to Lisa and Mary Beth, whom Jim lists separately because they are so special to him:

Jeanne d’Arc of Body and Soul, Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, Avendon Carol of The Sideshow, Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane’s Notables and her other sites (be sure to visit ALL of them), Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged, Jane Finch of the Daily Rant, Susan Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla, Ann Salisbury of Two Tears in a Bucket, Devra of Blue Streak, Janet Petrik of Beyond Corporate, Susan of Easy Bake Coven, Kim Osterwalder of Free Pie, Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light, Vanessa Gatsch of Plucky Punk’s Happy Land, Amy Carlton of RubberNun, the anonymous female writer of Doxagora, Elayne Riggs of Pen-Elayne, and Maru Suze of WTF Is It Now?, among others.

No, not an organized one. I'm on my way to meet Calpundit and his mother, who are in Denver doing geneological research. We've never met, so this will be fun. More later.

Update: Kevin Drum, aka Calpundit, is personable, handsome and very smart. He looks exactly like his picture on his blog, only happier. Since we read his blog every day, we've seen that picture about 300 times, so seeing him in person for the first time is like seeing an old friend. His mother is delightful as well. We chatted for a little over an hour--about blogs, individual bloggers (anyone's ears burning yet?), politics, our real lives and more. We think he's a little more liberal than his blog makes him out to be--by design. If you aren't already a steady reader of Calpundit, you should be.

After leaving Kevin and his mom, we had the opportunity to meet Colorado's Governor Bill Owens for the first time. He was doing the Fox segment after our's. Owens is a staunch Republican, and very tough on crime. He has a well-known, purposeful habit of appointing ex-prosecutors to the bench. Apparently, he doesn't trust us defense attorneys. Still, it was fun to meet him and he couldn't have been nicer (although we were on good behavior as well.) He told us he saw our tv segment and that we did a good job, especially when we mentioned that a gag order in the Peterson case would be beneficial in stemming police leaks. (Owens knows all about police leaks from the JonBenet Ramsey investigation.) We told him he was doing a good job as governor but we'd like to see him move a little to the left on crime issues.

Gov. Owens looked very healthy and happy too--maybe its the moon or something in the Colorado air, but all the men we've seen today, from our client at court this morning to Calpundit and the Governor all seemed to radiate good health and good feelings.

Jay Caruso at Daily Rant says blogger Andrew Sullivan, who raised $80,000. in his last pledge drive has another funds solicitation in the works.

For readers who don't know who Sullivan is (there are a lot of liberal non-bloggers who read TalkLeft who won't have a clue,) Sullivan is a conservative, gay blogger-journalist who seems to make a lot of people angry. We've only read his blog two or three times, so we won't criticize or praise him. But we didn't know until reading Jay's post at Daily Rant that Sullivan is HIV-positive. We have a hard time getting angry at anyone facing a life-threatening disease.

Sullivan is asking for $20 a year if you read his page more than a couple of times a week, and more if you can afford it. We'll probably be 90 years old before we fit in that category, but we don't begrudge him being paid for his work.

We have a tip jar too if anyone's interested in contributing - $20 isn't necessary, but even a few dollars helps with hosting costs and the cost of the commercial news and research services we subscribe to. Contributions also make us feel appreciated--and remind us that some of you count on TalkLeft to be here day after day, looking at crime and politics through the lens of the Constitution.

If you're one of the conservatives who read this site, we have no problem with you giving to Andrew instead of us. And if you're a reader who wants to keep reading for free, be our guest. This is a free site and will stay that way--as will our other site CrimeLynx --unless some media giant comes along and buys one or the other or both.

Hey, how about this! We were just notified by True Majority.Org, run by Ben and Jerry's ice cream co-founder Ben Cohen, that TalkLeft has won a blogging award for being one of their top 25 favorite blogs. They are sending us a case of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

"Your blogging rocks! We've been reading your stuff (and the work of others) and would like to give you a special treat from TrueMajority -- a case of tasty Ben & Jerry's ice cream. We were founded by Ben Cohen, the ice cream guy, and to recognize the work of our 25 favorite bloggers, Ben thought we should send out five pints of his best stuff to each of them. (via email)

Update: Congrats to our pal Eric over at Hamster who also was named in the top 25.

Law Professor Eric Muller has moved his blog off of blogspot. Its new home is www.isthatlegal.org. Update your bookmarks, and if you haven't been reading it before now, this is a good time to start. We don't always see eye to eye with Eric, but we respect and appreciate his point of view -and we do agree with him a lot. His coverage of the Japanese internment camps and Howard Coble's prejudicial comments is top-notch.

Emma of Notes on the Atrocities has two new terrific, detailed posts up--one on Bush's attempted takeover of the judiciary and Frist's attempt to limit filibustering on the nominees--and one on Ashcroft's testimony claiming victory in the legal war on terror and the Inspector General's report showing his department's abuse of many of those detained.

Bump and Update: Well, it didn't go too smoothly, we're rebuilding all our 3,000+ posts now. If you can't post comments or access anything on the site, please email us at talkleft@aol.com.

******

Well, we're doing it again--changing servers. Hopefully it will go smoother this time and there shouldn't be any down time. But if you have trouble accessing TalkLeft tomorrow, at least you'll know why.

Hosting Matters seems to be back on track after the fire today: Instapundit and Matt Yglesias are back up.

We haven't been able to access Instapundit or Matt Yglesias all day. We remembered that Instapundit is hosted by Hosting Matters, so we logged on to its site, and sure enough, there was a fire at "NOC" (whatever that is, some kind of command center we think) and workers was evacuated and the sites they host are down. But they promise to be back up shortly. We don't know if that's where Matt is hosting, but it's a good bet.

Emma over at Notes On the Atrocities analyzes the prose of various blogs. First there is the "ur-blog/news-digest model"--efficiency and economy--think Atrios:

Atrios is to blogging what haiku is to poetry--economy and efficiency...The style accentuates immediacy....It’s quick and pithy. The speed of news and communication is palpable on Eschaton, and he treats his readers with a prose style that underscores this ethos.

Then there are the essayist blogs. Go read which ones Emma selects to dissect. And then there are the activist blogs. Emma says TalkLeft, like Tom Tomorrow, is an activist blog.

Tom and Jeralyn might make some changes if their blogs were going into the New Yorker. But that’s not really the point. Their directness and candor speak volumes. The posts are more like personal emails mailed out to friends than official publications. We understand that it’s more important for the posts to get posted than it is for them to be posted error-free.

Thanks, Emma!