A week ago we brought you word of our end of the year Muck-O-Rama contest. Now you've given us your category suggestions and we're ready to announce those and move on to the next stage of the contest where you, the vast TPM readership, can submit nominations for excellence in muck, scandal and corruption and compete for your own prizes (quality TPM swag) for best nominations.

We'll be announcing the categories and rules later today.

But for now we wanted to let you know about the great panel of distinguished judges we've assembled who will sit in judgment on the year in muck that was 2007.

In choosing them, we were careful not only to pick potential muck jurists with the requisite wit, discernment and analytic heft to properly judge the muck. But we also wanted to assemble a panel with a diverse range of expertise suited to that range of muck (legal, literary, psycho-sexual, political, purely ridiculous) that came down the pike in 2007.

So without further ado, our panel is ...

Susie Bright, author, sexologist, analyst of erotic endeavors

John Dean, former Nixon White House Counsel, author, critic, columnist, muckster-turned-muckraker

Hendrik Hertzberg, essayist, political reporter, general TPM hero

Matthew Yglesias, blogger, representative of the rising generation, advocate of the typo-challenged

Dahlia Lithwick, law and legal affairs writer

We will be bringing you more exciting updates shortly. So get your nomination pens ready.