It's that time of the year to organize and close up files and work on the books. If there's something going on in the world today, here's a place to discuss it. In the meantime,

• Manassas, VA wants to redefine the family for housing limit purposes, a move many call racist and anti-immigrant. [hat tip Patriot Daily]

• Journalism prof Jay Rosen is back on the case of Bill Keller and the New York Times.

• Crooks and Liars is seeking nominations for the best video clips of the year.

• Roger Ailes has an end of the year quiz.

It's Colorado's warmest holiday on record and not a day to spend inside. For anyone wanting a place to chat, this space is for you.

If you're looking for something new to read, check out the 2005 Blawg Review Awards for the best law blogs. Sentencing Law and Policy wins best blog by a law professor, Scotus Blog is named best blog by a law firm; Howard Bashman of How Appealing is the blog for legal breaking news; I get an Award of Merit for TalkLeft. There's many, many more.

The awards were judged by Themis, and the accompanying artwork of She-Hulk by Greg Horn depicting Lady Justice is very cool.

Here's a little song you can all join in on. Jane at Firedoglake reminds bloggers to give the gift of Christmas traffic: Click through each link and spread some blogger joy.

• Skippy writes a song, Blue Xanax
• Digby writes about the radioactive Muslims
• War and Piece gives no holiday break to the White House
• World O' Crap says Santa was a cokehead.
• Vodkapundit has an awesome picture of Colorado today.
• Athenae's ferrets are the best.
• Mike Ditto has some advice for the Harlem Choir, which is getting kicked out of its rehearsal space
• Heretik has moved, update your bookmarks.
• Public Defender Dude says Death Row Defender is worth reading. Law and Order, watch out.

Now I'm going to download Dear Mr. Fantasy, Paper Sun and the Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. We've made it through another Christmas. On to New Years.

The meme is spreading fast. I got it too. Here's my answers, and I pass it to Avedon Carol at Sideshow.

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: health spa instructor, record store salesclerk , switchboard operator (all in college), lawyer

Four movies you could watch over and over: Who'll Stop the Rain, And Justice for All, Panic in Needle Park, The Wanderers

Four places you’ve lived: New Rochelle, NY; Cleveland, Ohio; Ann Arbor, MI, Denver.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Sex and the City, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Commander in Chief

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Rio and the Amazon; Hong Kong, Bangkok and Phuket, Hawaii and Bora Bora; Italy, France, and London; Shanghai; Mexico and the Caribbean.

Four websites you visit daily: Atrios, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Firedoglake

Four of your favorite foods: Vietnamese pho, soft-shelled crabs, ny strip steaks, coffee gelato

Four places you’d rather be: New York Citry, London, Shanghai, the Golden Door

Feel free to take the test in the comments or pass them around your blog.

Washington Monthly has a long profile of Markos of Daily Kos in its upcoming issue. Writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells traveled to Berkely to do an in-depth article. Is it favorable? Yes and no, but mostly yes. It's more like Wells is still scratching his head, trying to figure out both Markos and bloggers. It's not a puff piece, but it does give Markos his due for being the world's largest political blogger, for being committed and smart and for remaining down to earth. And it does capture that left-right ideology is not his focus. His goal is for the Democrats to win.

There are a few laudable quotes:

The DCCC's executive director, John Lapp, says that Moulitsas's model is “a signal event in political history, like the Kennedy-Nixon debates, in how it gets people involved.” And Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network (NDN), says that “frankly I don't think there's anyone who's had the potential to revolutionize the Democratic Party that Markos does.”

Lots of off-line activity for me today means an open thread for you. In the news today.

• The New York Police Department planted spies at protests and videotaped protesters.

• FISA Court judges will get a briefing on what the Administration has been doing.

Several members of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in interviews that they want to know why the administration believed secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails of U.S. citizens without court authorization was legal. Some of the judges said they are particularly concerned that information gleaned from the president's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to gain authorized wiretaps from their court.

Check out the Martini Republic's Christmas Time Magazine cover, particularly the top right.

Thanks to Jane at Firedoglake for asking bloggers and their readers to go help Digby. Just do it. Jane tells you why she thinks it's important to give bloggers a financial assist. Digby has more. Here are my thoughts on it.

In addition to December being the nominations month for the Koufax Awards for liberal blogging excellence, it is also the month that many bloggers must balance the ledger sheet. How many hours were spent blogging, how much money did it cost in lost income from the day job and how much did the blog make from blogads and/or donations?

College students, wealthy retirees and the independently wealthy can blog for love of their topic. Very few others can, and not suprisingly, a lot of the best bloggers fall within this group. The first year, they don't expect to make money through blogging. The second year, some donations and a few ads come their way and they are thrilled. But when the end of the third year rolls around, and still only peanuts are coming in, bloggers have to do an accounting and re-assess.

Digby writes today:

Yes, this is TalkLeft. It's our new design. We hope you like it.

The new graphic is by Monk of Inflatable Dartboard. I designed the layout (colors, font styles and sizes, columns and content arrangement) based upon a Wordpress theme named Relaxation.

The indefatigable Mike Ditto did the lion's share of the work over the past week. He converted the Wordpress coding to Movable Type, writing approximations where there was no equivalent. He converted and created a total of 17 templates and modules, while I insta-messaged him every 15 seconds over the past 8 hours asking "Can we do this?" and "Can we change that?" Then he made everything work across IE, Firefox and Safari.

Now, there are going to be undocumented features ( "bugs" is a politically incorrect term.) Feel free to point them out in comments. The new design may take some getting used to. But I hope you like it and agree it's an improvement over our previous look.

Webmaster Mike Ditto and I are almost done with TalkLeft's redesign which we have spent dozens of hours on this past week. I'm hoping it will be finished tonight. It really looks good. But, as with any major site overhaul, and this one has turned out to be really major, there are tests and retests and kinks to iron out.

While I continue to work on that, here's an open thread for you.

Update: Webmaster Mike Ditto and I spent 8 hours implementing the new design today. We're not quite done. Hopefully, it will be finished tomorrow night. It's looking really good, but I don't want to republish the 13,000 entries and 180,000 comments until it's close to perfect. We expect that to be tomorrow night.

Update: The upgrade to MT 3.2 is mostly done. There are some kinks in the search results, comment preview layout and a few other pages, which we are working on. But you can go ahead and comment.

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Webmaster Mike Ditto is about to upgrade TalkLeft to MT 3.2. This means comments will not be available for an hour or so.

Sometime tonight, we will be converting to our first new design since June, 2002, with a new graphic by Monk. Every template of TalkLeft needs to be changed over, which Mike is handling.

I'll update here when comments are back and again when the new design is implemented.

If you don't have to go to court or the jail after that, then you can stay here and thread. There's lots going on. You can read the winners of the bipartisan Weblog Awards here, and nominate your favorite blogs for the just liberal blogs' Koufax Awards here.

Then there's torture, spying on Americans, the Patriot Act and the immigration acts now being considered by Congress to rant about.

On a lighter note, a hairstylist in Aspen has been accused of stealing Kevin Costner's laptop. So, whatever strikes your fancy is fine here.

The Koufax Award Nominations are now open. Go on over and nominate your favorite blogs.

The Koufax Awards are named for Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest left handed pitchers of all time. They are intended to honor the best blogs and bloggers of the left. At the core, the Koufax Awards are meant to be an opportunity to say nice things about your favorite bloggers and to provide a bit of recognition for the folks who provide us with daily information, insight, and entertainment. The awards are supposed to be fun for us and fun for you.

Here's how they work.

You can nominate blogs in more than one category. TalkLeft has had the most success in the "Best Single Issues" category.