Orange County-based Kevin Drum moved his Calpundit blog persona over to Washington Monthly as Political Animal and began getting paid for his politics blogging four years ago. Now he's been hired away to do the same for Mother Jones.

“We got him, really, the old fashioned way, with a long and persistent courtship,” says Monika Bauerlein, who along with her Mother Jones co-editor, Clara Jeffery, has published several print pieces by Drum. “We never thought of Kevin’s work being very different from what we do. Quite the reverse.” “He’s a very research-based blogger, he’s into finding facts and being in a fact-based conversation,” she says, noting that she think that approach fits about as well as a blogger can with the magazine’s investigative ken.

Drum assures his readers that, while MoJo is "leftier" than WaMo, he will continue to include posts about his cats. Last year, you might remember, I linked to Drum's sad post about his cat dying in front of him. Here is my 2004 post about Drum turning pro.