Kevin Drum Named One of the Most Influential Liberals in US Media

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Forbes has done a round-up of 25 writers, bloggers, and TV personalities it considers to be the elite of the liberal media elite, and our own Kevin Drum made the cut. He clocks in at #23, just ahead of Michael Pollan and Kurt Andersen, just behind Ezra Klein. Like all lists, it is fun to argue with who made the cut, and who fell where. But even more entertaining is how the assemblers—Forbes deputy editor Elisabeth Eaves, reporter Hana R. Alberts, and Tunku Varadarajan, Forbes columnist/Opinions editor and a professor at the Stern Business School at New York University and research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who “canvassed the views of more than 100 academics, politicians and journalists”—defined “liberal”:

Broadly, a “liberal’ subscribes to some or all of the following: progressive income taxation; universal health care of some kind; opposition to the war in Iraq, and a certain queasiness about the war on terror; an instinctive preference for international diplomacy; the right to gay marriage; a woman’s right to an abortion; environmentalism in some Kyoto Protocol-friendly form; and a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket.

I guess that’s as workable a definition as any.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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