From: mongo@bitme.com   
      
   https://outsidethebeltway.com/kevin-drum-1958-2025/   
      
   Kevin Drum, 1958-2025   
   One of the OG political bloggers is gone.   
   James Joyner · Monday, March 10, 2025   
      
   Kevin’s wife, Marian, posted this at 8:52 Pacific Time:   
      
   With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with   
   cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.   
      
   No public memorial services are planned.   
      
   In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of   
   your choice.   
      
   A Facebook page, ‘In Memory of Kevin Drum’, has been created as a place   
   for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post   
   your thoughts and memories there.   
      
   Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and   
   challenged him through the years.   
      
   He will be greatly missed.   
      
   He will, indeed.   
      
   I haven’t been reading him or other bloggers a lot the last few weeks, as   
   I’ve tried to keep up with the avalanche of news and personal fallout of   
   the new administration’s attack on the civil service and upheaval of   
   longstanding foreign policy traditions and just stumbled on this by   
   accident as I was catching up.   
      
   Kevin had been running the Calpundit site on the old Blogspot service for   
   just a few months when I started OTB in January 2003, but a few months was   
   an eternity in blog time in those days. I followed him almost from the   
   beginning as I built my blogroll and we had many excellent back-and-forths   
   over the years.   
      
   Given that he was on the West Coast and I on the East, we only met once,   
   at a New Years Eve party hosted by one of the “Juice Box Mafia” gang,   
   likely Matt Yglesias or Julian Sanchez, almost twenty years ago. He always   
   struck me as a decent, thoughtful guy.   
      
   He’d been battling multiple myeloma since 2014, with many ups and downs   
   over the years, so his passing isn’t a complete shock. Still, a loss to   
   the blogosphere. My deepest condolences to Marian and all who knew, loved,   
   and read him.   
      
   UPDATE: Josh Marshall has a thoughtful tribute. The nut ‘graph:   
      
   I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution.   
   Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness   
   are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin – who had a   
   whole career in the normal person rat race before he started this –   
   sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he   
   knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers   
   and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my   
   brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something   
   you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you you knew it was   
   time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little   
   noise. That was his defining mark.   
      
   That’s high tribute, indeed.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)