Welcome Inkblot, Domino, and Kevin Drum

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Remember 2002? There was no war, house prices could never go down, and the Olsen twins had a kids’ show. That’s when a recovering marketing executive in Orange County opened a Blogspot account, dubbed himself Calpundit, and began posting daily political commentary, often interspersed with his own data-crunching and graphs. He soon drew a following, and within a couple of years was widely known as one of the pioneers of the political blogosphere (and also the inventor of Friday catblogging). That guy, of course, was Kevin Drum, and this Friday, August 22, marks both his sixth anniversary as a blogger and his first day at motherjones.com. For almost as long as he’s been blogging, Clara and I have been fans of Kevin’s; since we took the helm of Mother Jones, we’ve been fortunate to have him contribute to the magazine fairly regularly, and we always thought that he’d be a great complement to our growing investigative reporting team. So we’re thrilled to welcome him.

Kevin’s coming over from Washington Monthly, where he’ll be replaced by Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report and Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. He’ll have his own blog at motherjones.com while MoJoBlog will remain a group effort powered by the entire MoJo team, including Washington bureau chief David Corn and the prolific Jonathan Stein.

Kevin comes on board as our web team is busy completely overhauling the site. Before the election, you’ll see a whole new motherjones.com—a new look, a much improved community commenting system. Kevin’s gotten a sneak peek at the design-in-progress and says it “should look great”—which, coming from a guy not known for hyperbole, is pretty close to unbridled enthusiasm.

Click below to hear Kevin talk about his cats, blog trends, and why he’s not going to the conventions:

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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