An open thread today. Because everyone needs to take a day to regroup before getting ready for battle. It's going to be a long week. Those of us who are no longer 20 and maintain day jobs, need to pace ourselves.

If you're around, and have something to say, be my guest.

Via Discourse.Net, I found this net blog worth calculator. How much is your blog worth?

TalkLeft is worth $901,570.38. (Yes, I will sell it for $1 million)

That may sound like a lot. But consider:

• Daily Kos: $5,689,434.12
• Atrios: $2,118,154.08
• Crooks and Liars: $2,611,562.04

Welcome to TalkLeft, the on-line source for liberal coverage of crime-related political and injustice news.

TalkLeft was created by Denver-based criminal defense attorney Jeralyn Merritt in 2000 as a companion site to CrimeLynx, the criminal defense practitioner's Guide to the Internet. In June, 2002, TalkLeft was converted into a weblog. Since then, it has received more than 10 million visitors.

TalkLeft is not a neutral site. Our mission is to intelligently and thoroughly examine issues, candidates and legislative initiatives as they pertain to constitutional rights, particularly those of persons accused of crime.

Talkleft is intended for the public, journalists covering crime-based news and politics, policy makers and of course, the criminal defense community.

TalkLeft was a unique voice in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections, as it will be in 2006, concentrating on exposing injustices in the criminal justice system and, in particular, those of the current administration.

TalkLeft is written by Jeralyn Merritt, with frequent contributions by T. Christopher Kelly of Madison, WI and occasional contributions by John Wesley Hall, Jr. of Little Rock, AR, who also writes daily at Fourth Amendment.com.

Your suggestions and comments are always welcome.

This week and next are going to be traffic-busters on liberal weblogs. I can't think of a better time to have your message or product get across to the largest number of blog readers ever.

Here's the link to Advertising Liberally, where you can select the blogs on which to advertise in one fell swoop. If it's law blogs you're looking for, check out the non-partisan Law Blog Ad Network (not to be confused with Progressive Law Blogs which does not have advertising.)

And a note to blog readers: Many of us bloggers are not getting much work done this week with PlameGate. Blogging may become full-time over the next several days. I'm sure your favorite bloggers who accept donations would all appreciate a little help this week.

Here is TalkLeft's donation page:

You don't need a paypal account. Even small contributions are most welcome.

Say hello to the brand new Progressive Law Blogs aggregator site. In one place, you can find the latest posts by:

I suspect Fitzgerald and the RoveGate participants are busy writing plea agreements and making arrangements to surrender to authorities - and that major news won't break until late this afternoon or even later this week. So, I'm heading back to work.

For major newsbreaks, keep checking Huffington Post and Raw Story. For video replays, head over to Crooks and Liars. For a roundup of opinions on both sides, head to Gabe Rivera's Memeorandum, and congrats to Gabe for this very flattering and true Tech Station article about his site. My favorite line, of course, is this one:

Gabe Rivera has built a website seamlessly driven by a proprietary algorithm which fuses blogs and MSM stories into a one page intersection of instant commentary lined up with political news and tech news. This is fresh. The algorithm updates every five minutes. It covers opinion: where else can you see TalkLeft and Powerline on the same page. It's a very quick read. And, amazingly, it is largely automatic.

The New York Times also has a roundup of blogger posts on PlameGate. No need to stick to that topic though, this thread's for you. For an assortment, don't miss Cursor.

I just got back home to Denver and three days of e-mails, snail-mail, voicemail and now laundry. Aside from RoveGate news (Huffington Post has an excellent wrap-up of blogger views) there's an op-ed by the former Seattle police chief, Let Those Dopers Be, and news of the terrible murder of defense attorney Daniel Horwitz's wife and the Susan Polk murder trial he is in the midst of trying.

Until I settle in, I'll just turn it over to the readers for what else I've missed.

I'll be offline today. In case you're not, here's some space to keep a discussion going.

It's the lull before the storm. I'm going to take advantage of it and work. Chatter on.

We haven't had one of these in a while and I need to get back to work. Have fun.

That's Crooks and Liars' John Amato with actor George Clooney. Way to go, John.

A few weeks ago I wrote that my 9 month old Dell desktop's hard drive crashed out of the blue. It had my last 9 months of work on it.

Dell replaced it and then I had to decide whether to try a data recovery service to try and restore the files on the old one. They ran the drive and it had 130,000 errors on it but they could find 20 MG of data, which included some valuable stuff for--like old TalkLeft files that are no longer on the server, my Quicken files, my newer client files and my pictures. So, I told them to go ahead.

It cost $1,250.00 for the restore and another $100 for an 80 GB USB hard drive which I'm about to hook up and see how usable the files are. Bottom line: Back up your stuff. $1,350.00 could have bought me a new laptop or a vacation. Now I'll get neither. It sucks that I had to spend it for this. But, it's my own fault for not taking the time to back up onto a cd-rom or dvd.