TalkLeft had its best day every yesterday, 9,760 visitors and 16,500 page views. Lots of folks are coming over from warblogs.cc, and we welcome them. It's very gratifying to be so widely read. We're also dreading the bill for the increased bandwidth, so if you can help us out with a few bucks, please click on one of the donation links on the left.

There's lots of news today on Monday's Supreme Court arguments in the Texas Sodomy law case, Lawrence v. Texas. Dahlia Lithwick has great details of the exchanges between the Justices and the lawyers here. The New York Timess' Linda Greenhouse says it looks like the Justices will overturn the law. You can read excerpts of the legal arguments here. Tom at SCOTUSblog says the prosecutor gave the worst oral argument he's ever heard.

If you are into legal news headlines-- we certainly are-- check out The Daily Whirl, a news aggregator with fast loading headlines from legal news and information sites. You can hand-pick the sources you want to include--TalkLeft is one of the choices.

The Guardian has a good analysis of all the disputed claims to date made by the U.S. military and various media outlets. (Thanks to Untelevised for the link)

We wanted to write World-War-III to tell them we really like their warblog, but it seems to be not only anonymous, we couldn't find an email address.

Mac Diva, a frequent and articulate commenter on many blogs, has finally gotten her own. Silver Rights will concentrate on civil rights issues.

Lisa English of Ruminate This congratulates the new links at Altercation, which, yes, we compiled for Eric. The new additions are CalPundit, Digby, Junius, Orcinus, Pandagon, Road to Surfdom, Seeing the Forest and The Agonist.

We just finished reading Jeanne D'Arc at Body and Soul, and all we can say is she's done it again. Don't miss this one.

Update: The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article about Salem Pax (Where-Is-Raed) today.

There are a myriad of crime-related political and injustice issues related to the War in Iraq. We feel we would be remiss if we didn't cover them. Towards this end, we have teamed up with Warblogs:cc , a one stop source for what we think is the best warblog news and commentary.

This means that what we post on TalkLeft about the War in Iraq, War on Terror, Civil Liberties, individual terror cases and the detainees will automatically appear on Warblogs:cc.

Warblogs:cc is the brainchild of Christopher Allbritton, George Paine, Sean-Paul Kelley and Mike Hudack. It is designed to provide you with a birds-eye, up to the minute view of the War in Iraq, the American government and civil liberties issues in the United States.

We won't be posting here less--we're not doing double duty. But Warblogs.cc provides the advantage of reading these terrific war bloggers, as well as us, all in one place:

— The Agonist

— Back to Iraq

— Warblogging

— Stand Down

— Daily Kos

— Tacitus

We'll continue to provide news and analysis of domestic criminal justice issues, including the death penalty, legislation, Supreme Court cases, wrongful convictions and more as we've always done. These posts will not appear on Warblogs:cc, only here.

TalkLeft has substantially increased in popularity the past few months. We passed 500,000 page views over the weekend and have steadily been receiving 3-5,000 visitors a day. If you appreciate our efforts and can spare a few dollars, please hit one of our donation buttons--it sure will help with the increased costs of bandwidth--and make us feel good. The Amazon (chip in) link is for anonymous donations. The Paypal (make donation) link will let us know who sent the money. Thanks to all of you.

A big thanks to ReachM High Cowboy Network Noose for his salute to women bloggers Saturday, as part of women's history month. Go on over and read what these impressive women have to say. (Thanks to Jeanne at Body and Soul for tipping us off to it. We do read the Cowboy every day but missed that one somehow.)

Let us know in the comments if you have some more links to women bloggers covering politics and current events--but please, put them in html format so the site doesn't get skewed.

Technorati bring us the news bloggers have written about in the last two hours. It's a new feature called Current Events .

Here's how its creator describes it:

It is a list of the top links to "professional" news sites by bloggers in the last two hours, along with comments and analysis. I created it because, like most people, I've been following the progress of the war, watching and reading the mass media, and I wanted to know what people out there were saying about the news. What are the most important stories? What is real, and what is propaganda? What is not being reported, or is being underreported? These were the questions on my mind when I created Technorati's Current Events.

Very cool.

For those of you trolling TalkLeft, please be aware we will do an instant deletion and ip banning so you can't come back, as soon as we become aware of it. Thanks to Patrick A. who just advised us of one such attempt on our Shock and Awe Post--the troller was upset he couldn't leave his messages at Atrios.

Initially we thought our comments took too long to register, and people were just clicking more than once thinking their comment hadn't gone through. But it's clear to us there is also some trolling going on.

The newest version of MT (2.63) allows us to close the comments to a particular post at any time, while choosing to delete or leave previous comments. We are vigorously making use of this feature.

We're getting upwards of 150 comments and emails a day, just on talkleft (we also get that amount on our work email), so we may miss some. Please send us an email if you spot one we've missed.

We know emotions run high on the war, and there are conservatives who read and post here. All are welcome to engage is dialogue here, even heated debate. But foul language, gratuitous slams, anti-semitism and trolling is not tolerated. So fair warning.

Also, while we're on the topic of comments, please put any url's in html format or we will delete them because they skew the comment box and sometimes the whole site. Instructions are available in the comment box itself.

And for readers who are also writers, please don't put the entire text of long articles in the comments. We can't afford the bandwith and they discourage readers from scrolling down to later comments. Thanks.

Mother Jones has a good article today called Roundups and Rights --we're quoted on the roundup of Iraqis.

Law Tech columnist Robert Ambroggi does a wrap-up of legal blogs today in Blawgs: More Than Just Fluff. We're pleased to be included --and described as "An unabashedly left-leaning look at the law and politics of crime." Robert has a blog himself, Lawsites, which tracks new legal resources available on the web. Robert calls Howard Bashman's "How Appealing" "one of the best resources on the Web for tracking appellate litigation throughout the United States. " He's right, we read Howard at least once a day.

We need to start making our way back to snowed-in Denver today so this is it for us for now. Please give the blogs and news sources listed on the right a read and leave some comments if you feel like it.

Tonight is Texas' 300th Execution. We can't allow ourselves to become desensitized to it because of the war. Our friend Reverand George of Kolbe House in Chicago tells us, regarding the Emery University study on the death penalty (finding that the death penalty deters murders)

Again an article cites the deeply flawed Emory University study, which does not support the conclusion below and it is based on several erroneous assuptions, like prospective murders are aware of crime/punishment data and twice when they applied their "formula", they excluded a calcualtion because it was ZERO and if they had multiplied their data, ZERO time ZERO is ZERO.I believe I may be the only person who has read and studied the entire report--the authors did NOT. [ed. note: edited to reflect Rev. Georges comment was about the Emory University Study, not the California prosecutor's study as we orignally wrote]

One last note for now: We are not criticizing the anti-war movement as some have written us in response to our post last night. We support the anti-war movement. We consider ourselves a vocal part of it. But we and the anti-war movement didn't prevent the war, which was our principal goal. We believe we--TalkLeft--can be the most effective right now covering the legal and political and civil liberties aspects of the war. We recognize here (which we are sorry we neglected to do last night) that the anti-war movement has far-ranging, important goals that reach past the prevention of war. So, rest assured, we'll continue to link to protest sites and report favorably on their news and views.

Peace soon.

We're on the road today, we hope you will scroll down to read our weekend posts and also visit the sites on the right. We'll be back posting tonight.

Feel free to hit the paypal and "chip in" buttons --your contributions are very much appreciated.

We can't believe we have to go through this again, but our hosting company says it has to move TalkLeft to another server. The move is set for Saturday night, and the company assures us they have done everything they can to make a smooth transition with no down time.

However, we all know there are glitches with moves, so if we are down, or you can't comment, or find some other problem, send us an email at talkleft@aol.com.

We will be in Washington with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers for the 40th Anniversary of Gideon commemoration and to do some lobbying with some Republican members of Congress on the Innocence Protection Act on Tuesday and Wednesday, and picked the weekend to do the switch so we'd be around if there are any crises. We will be blogging evenings and early mornings from D.C.

If you're in Washington, come to the Gideon Symposium. It is free and open to the public. You can download the brochure here. Details:

March 18, 2003, 9:30 am - 5:00 pm
Georgetown University Law Center
600 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC

We won't have time to post until much later today, so if you have something you want to discuss or rant about, you can do it here.

Atrios gets a blogging gig--way cool. We know he won't forget his roots though.

We've been asked to supply an open thread where readers can talk and debate their own topics, be it the war, elections, crime, whatever. Since we've got court most of the day, and won't be posting till later this afternoon, we're going to give it a try.

We only ask that you not list urls without the appropriate coding because they skew the size of the comments box and sometimes the whole site, and not use obscenities because censor software will block us to many law firms and businesses that read us, and it's difficult to reverse. Other than that, TalkLeft is your's today.

We had over 4,000 daily visitors for the first time Friday. Over 6,500 page views. Thanks, everyone, especially (in alphabetical order) Atrios, Cursor and Instapundit.