What do you think? Who do you expect President Obama will put in there? We don't know a lot yet, but never too soon to start talking!

To make this case (and in light of the timeless practice of end-of-the-year list-making), I've put together a list of 10 young (under 40) intellectuals who I believe to be shaping a progressive future that is forward-looking, effortlessly intersectional, technologically sophisticated and engaged in not just the world of ideas but the world as it is lived. In other words, they're of the left, they're brilliant and they're helping to get shit done.

These are the ten young progressives who make me hopeful for the future. (I've included a video of each in case you're meeting them for the first time).

1. Rachel Maddow - Might as well get the obvious out of the way. Rachel Maddow is the breakout success in progressive media in 2008. Her show on MSNBC doubled the ratings in that time slot. As Rebecca Traister put it, "Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist." Maddow has done the unthinkable, she's made being sophisticated and liberal a good thing.

2. Jay Smooth - Jay is my favorite video blogger (outside of TPM, of course). Like Maddow, he's been able to accomplish a difficult thing in a medium that lends itself to outrage and anger: make compassion and thoughtfulness entertaining. And he does it while engaging hip hop culture and acting as a cultural translator for it.

3. Samantha Power - Power would be on any list of intellectuals left or right at any age. By 38, she's managed to get tenure at Harvard, win a Pulitzer Prize, and be a close advisor to the next leader of the free world. Frankly, just thinking about everything that she does makes me exhausted and slightly disappointed in myself.

4. Jacob Hacker - Speaking of politically influential academics, when Obama takes up health care reform in the next year or two, he'll almost certainly propose a plan designed by a 37-year-old Cal professor named Jacob Hacker. "Health care for America," published by The Economic Policy Institute, then championed by Campaign for America's Future, then taken up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, is a textbook example of new progressive infrastructure bringing brilliant ideas into the political mainstream. He may be an academic, but he's managed to push his work out of the ivory tower straight into the White House.

5. Van Jones - Van Jones was talking about "Green Jobs" before they were cool. Heck, more than anyone he made them cool. The brilliance of Jones' argument - that we can solve economic problems and environmental problems simultaneously by employing the least prosperous among us in the work of "greening" our economy - is that it creates its own political coalition. Green Jobs is a project environmental activists, labor unions and advocates of ending urban poverty can all agree on. That's no small feat.

I've also never seen a movement leader/thinker so effectively and subtly slip so many radical ideas into a project that is so readily embraced by the mainstream.

6. Rebecca Traister - Rebecca Traister has repeatedly been the source of the best final word on the fraught debates in the last year over gender and American politics. She mainstreams gender analysis and justifies it to an often resistant public. Her analysis of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and the new women of the news has been essential.

7. Rinku Sen - Rinku Sen somehow manages to simultaneously run a think tank that works with community organizers, publish a magazine and blog, chair the board of the Media Consortium, and write books. She's able to bridge movement politics and media, and brings pointed criticism to bear on politically sensitive topics like race and immigration.

8. Chris Hayes - As Ezra Klein wrote (paraphrasing from memory cause search on his site sucks), "sometimes I think Chris Hayes exists simply to write pieces I wish I'd written." As the DC editor of the Nation, Chris has managed to make topics as seemingly dry as heterodox economics as interesting as they are important, and written brilliant profiles of MoveOn, Larry Lessig, and Obama. All of this while established a mild-mannered lefty presence as a regular on Keith Olbermann's Countdown. All before the age of 30.

9. danah boyd - I'm sure most readers will have never heard of danah boyd. She's not a traditional political journalist, activist or pundit like the others on this list. But her sociological work on the impact of online communities on youth culture and development is central to understanding our digital future. Most importantly, her ability to apply cultural, gender, racial and class analysis to that projects makes her work explicitly, and essentially political.

10. Rick Perlstein - Perlstein's Nixonland, about not just Richard Nixon but the divisive conservative populism he mainstreamed, came at an interesting time. It arrived just as McCain/Palin picked up the mantle of Nixonian politics and Obama seemed to vanquish it to the wilderness. Perlstein's histories (his first was on Barry Goldwater) are central to the political analysis of a lot of young progressives and he already has a New York Times Best seller before the age of 40.

SO, there you have it. I'm sure there are folks I missed, who would you have added? Let me know in the comments. I probably would have included Jessica Valenti and Josh Marshall if not for the painfully obvious conflicts of interest (fiancee and boss). I might also have included a few more bloggers (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Atrios) but for a desire to not overwhelm things with whiteboysblogging.

Who else am I forgetting?

[Special thanks to Tracy Van Slyke for brainstorming help!]

We're doing all the testing we can (and Google built it and they're pretty good at this), but I was hoping I could convince a few dozen of you to help me out by clicking over to our test site (repeat: test site, the news there is fake/old) and having a look.

Could you do me that favor?  A picture of what it's supposed to look like and some questions after the break.

Are you able to click down into states and then pull back to the national level?  Are you able to mouse over each state and see the percent each candidate has and the percent reporting? (zero for all at the moment).  Can you see House and Senate races?  Are you seeing any glitches?

Let us know.  We're extremely excited about the beautiful map Google made and want to make sure it's perfect before we put it up.

Update: In case you didn't see, it's live on the front page now. Check it out and let us know if you're seeing problems. Email talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com.

The media sphere proving them wrong would be a victory not just for the Obama campaign, but for society as a whole and the forces of tolerance and rationality broadly. And some people are making an effort.

You can turn the issue of McCarthyism upside down: when as the meaning of civil liberties been more ardently understood than now? A dialectic process is at work, evil eliciting the challenge of a conscious good, so that in difficult moments progress is made. The outcome of the battle between intensified "Americanism" and new enlightenment is still an open question.

The battle between "intensified 'Americanism'," by which Hartz means the kind of rabid nationalism McCain and Palin are now stoking and McCarthy stoked before them, is not a battle between liberals and conservatives. It is instead a battle between demagogues and rationalists, those who would rule through fear and division and those who believe in an enlightened progress.

That's why Colin Powell's direct assault on the McCain campaign was so important. Playing his role as statesman, Powell endorsed Obama and highlighted the valour and sacrifice of a Muslim-American soldier, to push back against the forces of "intensified 'Americanism'."

So did Campbell Brown last week when she did the same thing by calling bullshit on the same "Muslim" as smear campaign. Brown is insisting that media elites do have a roll in distinguishing between demagoguery and argument regardless of ideology.

WIll there be more Powells and Browns? Moderate conservatives who will push back against demagogues despite their ideological leanings? Media elites who are willing to take the heat for engaging because they believe rising to the challenge of evil is more important?

That strikes me as the question of the next two weeks.