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?"

Sisyphyus Shrugged on the war on Iraq (quoting from a Palm Beach Post Editorial):

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.

After four days of on again off again server problems due to a system wide upgrade performed by our hosting company, which we weren't aware of until after they had moved our site to their new servers, it has been universally agreed that TalkLeft doesn't want to change. It doesn't work on their new system, so they have moved us back to their "old server." Hopefully, you are no longer seeing a page that says "December 17" at the top.

Please let us know if you still get any error messages when you click on any of the permalinks, comments, "recent entries" section on the right, or if anything else doesn't work.

And a huge thanks to Kos of DailyKos and Ben at Movable Type for trying to work their way through this maze. Also, we're not mad at our hosting company, they had pleasant, dedicated live people available by phone and email and were just as perplexed as the rest of us.

Enough said.

We had some major problems yesterday while our hosting company was upgrading itself to provide additional services--our newsfeed went down, we couldn't publish new entries and the comments and permalinks got messed up. All appears to be fixed. If you notice anything amiss, please send us an email.

It was terrible timing, as we were just named one of the top web sites of 2002 by Law Technology News, published at Law.com.

A special thanks today to libertarian Radley Balko, a columnist for Fox News , a contributor to TechCentral Station, whose real job is with The Cato Institute, who wrote this about us today in his blog, TheAgitator:

"Talk Left.

While I'm jocking leftist bloggers, let me give some much-due praise to Talk Left, who will make the leap to "Blood on the Tracks" next time I update my blogroll.

Reasoned, unzealous, and always insightful. Unlike most leftist ranters, these guys almost always back up agument with evidence.

I of course don't agree with them on everything, but their civil liberties stuff is dead-on..... "

Thanks, Radley.

Dwight Meredith is taking nominations for the "Koufax Award" for best left of center blogging in various categories. Check out Body and Soul's nominations, they are top notch. And we'd say that even if we weren't on Jeanne's list.

Cursor is back from hiatus, and we are glad. It's a great source of progressive news written blog-style. It's also got a very readable format.

A big thanks to Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul and Lisa English of Ruminate This for their praise today. What a way to start the day!

skippy and Lisa of Ruminate this do their usual bang-up job of blogging around this weekend so that those who were off-line the past few days know where to go to catch up. Thanks to both of them.

Through Jim Cappozola at Rittenhouse Review, we learned that Ms. magazine is assembling a roster of women bloggers. Here are the details, and they are seeking recommendations.

Thanks to Jim for recommending us. He too is seeking the names and blog addresses of other women bloggers, both to recommend to Ms. and to add to his blogroll. So please send your favorites to him at rittenreview@earthlink.net.

Also thanks to Sisyphus Shrugged for recommending us.

Here are some of our favorites:

Lisa English of Ruminate This
Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul
Avedon Carol of Sideshow
Gail Davis of GailOnline
MadKane
Sisyphus Shrugged
Beyond Corporate
Kim at Free Pie
Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light
Ann Salisbury of Two Tears in a Bucket
Talkabluestreak
Eve Tushnet

Please give them a read and send your favorites to Ms. Magazine and Jim. We're know we've missed a bunch, so feel free to add them in the comments section here as well.