Right Wing News emailed more than 150 left-of-center bloggers and asked them to send us a list of who they considered to be their "favorite columnists" (*** The original deadline for getting in entries was extended and extra bloggers were emailed to get a higher response rate ***). Representatives from the following 37 blogs responded...

The Agonist, AMERICAblog, The American Street, Beyond Corporate, The Blue Bus, The Brad Blog, Burnt Orange Report, CathiefromCanada, Culturekitchen, Dada Head, DC Media Girl, The Decembrist, Dohiyi Mir, Eduwonk, firedoglake, The Grumpy Forester, The Hamster, Informed Comment, Just A Bump In The Beltway, Left I on the News, Jesus' General, The Liquid List, Mad Kane, The Mahablog, MaxSpeak Weblog, normblog, Politics From Left To Right, PRESSthink, The Rational Radical Weblog, Roger Ailes, Seeing The Forest, Smythe's World, Strange Doctrines, Scoobie Davis Online, The Talking Dog, Michael Totten, Tom Watson

All bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-15 ranked selections. The selections were scored based on a weighted scale. A rank of 1-5 was worth (3) points, 6-10 was worth (2) points, & 11-15 was worth (1) point.

So for example, a 1st (3) & 13th (1) place selection would be worth 4 points wheras having three bloggers rank a columnist at 11th (1), 12th (1), and 15th (1) place would be worth 3 points total. Got it? Good.

Also, as an added bonus, I included the number of first place selections each columnist had. The columnists who were picked first on someone's list have the number of #1 votes they received following a "--". Note that some of the columnists who received a #1 vote did not get enough other votes to qualify.

Without further ado, the "favorite columnists" of left-of-center bloggers are as follows:

14) Gene Lyons (10)
12) David Broder (11)
12) Arianna Huffington (11) -- 1
10) David Corn (13)
10) Eric Alterman (13)
9) Christopher Hitchens (16) -- 2
8) Bob Herbert (17) -- 1
7) Maureen Dowd (23)
6) Michael Kinsley (24) -- 3
5) Frank Rich (31) -- 2
4) E.J. Dionne Jr. (33) -- 1
3) Molly Ivins (36) -- 3
2) Joe Conason (38) -- 2
1) Paul Krugman (65) -- 12

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