Kos of Daily Kos, exhausted from the debut of the wonderful Political State Report this week, has "Billmon" subbing for him tonight. Billmon has a brilliant and very, very funny post called The Shape of Things to Come looking back at 2003. Yes, 2003. Go read and enjoy.

Welcome to Digby, who started the new year with his new left blog Hullabaloo. Digby isn't starting from scratch, he's been posting in the comments section of other big bloggers for months, and won the Koufax award this week for "Best Commentor."

Another liberal blog we just came across that we like a lot is The ReachM High Cowboy Network Noose (The Noose, for short) based in Oregon.

We also want to extend a special thanks to Patrick Nielsen-Hayden of Electrolite, Jay Caruso of the Daily Rant , Lisa English of Ruminate This, and Toby Sackton of Let It Begin Here. They have been extremely supportive of us in recent weeks, and we very much appreciate their comments. They also have great blogs, and if you are not already regular readers of them, you should be.

Hamster's back after his holiday vacation, he's a must-read every day for both news and views.

And congratulations to Skippy who reached 50,000 visitors today and always makes us smile.

Filter, the Tech News Column of the Washington Post reports today on their Readers' Favorite Blogs (TechNews.com). Thanks to Mad Kane , who nominated us, TalkLeft was listed as one the readers favorites. So was Jim Cappozola's Rittenhouse Review. We're very flattered, thanks, Madeleine!

From Howard Bashman at How Appealing today:

"And, just when I've finally come to accept that my law firm uses Internet filtering software that makes it impossible for me to receive any emails that contain foul language, my firm's version of Websense decides to block my access to the blog TalkLeft. Hmm, what's up with that!"

We have no idea, and while the anti-authoritarian in us is tempted to be flattered, we'd rather Howard was able to read us--and link to us--considering how huge his readership has become. Plus, we can't remember ever using a four letter word or other foul language on TalkLeft.

After months of hard work, Daily Kos' new blog, Political State Report made its debut today. It has state-level political reports directly from the trenches, with volunteers from each state offering their time as a state coordinator/reporter. What an effort-- but what a great result--go read and comment and keep it active. Congratulations, Kos...and thanks for adding this valuable service to the internet.

PLA has announced the winners of the first annual Koufax Awards for liberal blogging excellence. TalkLeft is the proud recipient of the award for "Best Single Issue Blog." Thank you to all who voted for us--it feels great to be recognized for our efforts.

Voting in our category resulted in a close race between us and three excellent blogs we read every day: Daily Kos (our good friend as well as the designer of TalkLeft's blog and our guru on all things technical) and MY DD are unsurpassed when it comes to election coverage; and Ignatz, is a terrific law-and-politics blog written by Alabama labor lawyer Sam Heldman.

Our congrats to the other winners, including Atrios (best blog and best writing series), Jim Cappozola of Rittenhouse Review (best single entry), Jeanne of Body and Soul (best writing) and Alas a Blog (best design).

Thanks to Skippy, for his several congratulatory posts to us-- he was nominated for both best humorous blog and best special effects.

We're proud just to be in the company of the other nominees and winners. And we agree with the award host (Dwight of PLA) and others that many great blogs also warranted nomination --such as Lisa English of Ruminate This; Avedon Carol of Sideshow and Liberal Oasis, to name just a few.

Update: Next up are the Bloggie Awards. Nominations Due by January 12--and there are prizes and a real winners' ceremony in Austin, Texas on March 9.

We're taking our New Year's break now and will be mostly silent until January 1. We won't be updating the newsfeed before then, but you can access the news sites we frequent the most by clicking on the "media" link on the top right.

We've done a lot of posting this week, including this morning, so we encourage you to hang around, read some of what we have to say, and also visit the links on the right.

Happy New Year to all, we hope it rings in justice and peace.

How Appealing, the top-rated appellate law blog by Howard Bashman, got a bloglift - go take a look. Nice job, Howard, we love the new color scheme.

Update: Political Wire by Taegan Goddard got one too. Very clean looking and sharper color scheme.

We wish all celebrants a great holiday--and non-celibrants a wonderful respite.

LiberalOasis has an excellent wrap-up of concerns about Bill Frist that neither the Democrats nor talk show hosts addressed on the Sunday news shows yesterday.

Don't miss Lisa English of Ruminate This on the Black Hole of Guantanamo. The Toronto Star has even more.

Kevin over at Lean Left reports on the backlash against the Patriot Act.

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on charity drives: "The one donation to clothing drives that sends me round the bend is torn underwear. What kind of people think the poor are so desperate they'd wear someone else's old underwear? And are they sitting at home basking in the warm glow of their generosity?"

Real or imagined, however, the question matters. If you accept the notion that there is no such thing as a "good" war or a "bad" war, but that there can be a "right" war and a "wrong" war for a country to fight, the president has the obligation to show that a war is "right" enough for mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters to believe that if their loved one comes home in a box, the sacrifice will have been worth it.

Patrick and Theresa Nielsen-Hayden post some informative and revealing comments about the difference between those taking prescribed amphetamines and drug abusers in the comments section to our post on the USAF pilots who were directed to take amphetamines, did so, and ended up crashing and causing a fatality.

Via Sideshow, who we don't mention as often as we should, check out Blah 3's video on the year with Bush.

We've modified our blogrolls to separate out the strictly legal blogs and move the alternative news sites into their own space. We've also added a few blogs, including Sisyphus Shrugged, LawSites, and in our "other side" category, we've actually added a law enforcement blog, The Guardroom.

For left-oriented news, we like What Really Happened and Take Back the Media.

A new blog we really like is Randy Paul's Beautiful Horizons, about the cultures and politics of Latin America. It's just a few weeks old, so it's not on our blogroll yet, but we do highly recommend it--both for Randy's writing style and the content.

If you used to be on our blogroll and got deleted, it's probably an accident so send us an e-mail.

Vodkapundit sends us to Tim Blair's unique request for donations. While his pitch is not our style, we don't mind saying to our loyal and frequent readers that we gratefully accept tips. They make us feel good about the hours we spend reading, searching and writing. So if you think we're worth it, please hit either of the two tip links on the left. With Amazon you are anonymous, with Paypal we know who you are.

We may be one of the only people in the blogosphere not familiar with the content of the writings of Andrew Sullivan, but our hat is off to him for his pledge drive last week that earned him $80k. That's not a typo. We wonder how much came from Richard Mellon Scaife, though.

We have some holiday and family stuff to attend to today, so we thought we'd throw the blog open to readers for the rest of the day (we'll be back tonight). Post what you want, start a discussion, argue or agree with each other, just don't kill each other. As my grandmother used to say, you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.