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[Photo of Luciano Pavarotti, Budapest Information Services]

Tramontate, stelle. Tramontate, stelle.
All'alba vincerò! Vincero! Vincero!

"Nessun Dorma", from Turandot by Puccini

I am sure there are folks who will be looking for something more political this morning, but I couldn't help but note the passing of the great Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, who died at five o'clock this morning, in his native town of Modena, Italy.

One of the reasons that movies have music in them, is that music has the power to evoke, establish, or even embellish our experience of living.

Each of our lives have some sort of soundtrack or another. Luciano Pavarotti has benn an important part in the soundtrack of mine.

My father and I would listen to opera together when I was growing up, and go to operas together in my adult years. At first, I didn't really like it. The women sounded screechy, and there seemed to be an excessive amount of unnecessary pageantry. I hate pageants, parades and the circus. Always have, always will. But opera was a way to get some coveted "alone time" with my father in a sea of competing children, so I endured.

Then one day I remember hearing Pavarotti. It was Sunday, and I had stayed home from church to keep my Dad company. He quit going to church when the Catholic church started letting the John Birch Society hand out pamphlets on the front steps after Mass. I had no idea who John Birch was, but if my father could get out of going to Mass every Sunday because of it, by God, so could I.

I was lying on my stomach reading something or other, probably an Archie and Veronica comic book, and my Dad was listening to some soprano, screeching her way through some song in a language I didn't understand. Not that it mattered. I had my Dad to myself and everyone else was sitting in cold pews, bored to death, with stomachs growling, because you can't have breakfast before Mass or you can't receive communion. I had my Dad and snacks and books and haha on them.

Dad put on the next record, and the room filled with the rich sound of a man singing. I noticed. I rolled over on my back and listened. And listened. The man singing was Pavarotti, and my love of opera, all kinds, began in earnest.

I was lucky enough to have a chance to hear, Pavarotti, the "King of the high C's", sing in California after the World Cup soccer matches in Pasadena. The Rose Bowl seats 100,000 people, which is a ridiculous venue to hear any sort of music, but I was lucky. My friend was dating Pavorotti's sound man, and that who we got to sit with. Tucked on the floor under the sound table, dressed all in in black and silent as the grave, I could close my eyes on a breezy summer night and float across the sky on that rich and magnificent voice. Even now, I can put on a CD and feel myself dissolve into the music and my spirit is lifted out of my body and beyond.

Pavarotti's voice had diminished greatly by the end of the last century. Such is the fate of aging singers who specialize in the hitting the high notes. But the high notes in Pavarotti's career, for me, will always remain in tact, as they are intertwined the experiences of a lifetime with my loving father, sharing Pavarotti's great gift of music.

With the death of noted mezzo soprano Beverly Sills earlier this summer, and Luciano Pavorotti this morning, the choir in heaven is lush with music.

I hope my Dad has his favorite seat in the front row, balcony, for every performance.

You know, I try not to let these DCP threaders get too personal. I've said before that this is your blog, not mine, and I sincerely mean that. But tonight I'm going to interrupt the normal flow of DCP discourse for something that is rather personal for me. I hope that's okay with you. I'll try to connect it to a broader and even a more politically-connected context by the time we're done here, really I will. But for right now those aren't the terms I'm thinking of. So please bear with me while I break my own rules and let things get personal for me here tonight, too.

I've done a whole lot of things over the years, you know. It's been a pretty complicated and pretty darn interesting life. Or lives, rather; I often refer back to something that happened in "one of my previous lives," because at times they seem so odd and unconnected even to me, in the glare of 20/20 hindsight and all. But what's making me post this threader tonight is closely connected to one of my previous lives, and at the risk of misusing this bully pulpit I'm temporarily occupying, I need to write about this stuff or I will never get to sleep tonight for all the thoughts and memories and wishes colliding around inside my head.

As some of you know, I lived in Atlanta for the last two decades or so of the 20th century. Most of you don't know that I spent a significant chunk of those two decades on call waiting for bad stuff to happen while hoping like hell that it never did. I haven't shucked on a set of turnouts and stepped into fire boots since, oh, I think maybe 1988 or so. It's certainly been a lot of years since the last time I stood up and accepted my certification docs from the Georgia Fire Academy.

But, yeah, anyway, been there and done that. And even when you don't do that no more, some of it stays with you no matter what. So no matter how many years have gone by and no matter how thin the link may get stretched by time, even after all this time and all this space those who are bold enough and brave enough to do what has to be done in the face of the evil dragon that is Fire are still, at some level, my brothers in arms.

And when they fall I mourn them, every one. Tonight, though, I mourn nine of them in particular:

This is not exactly breaking news in the blogosphere by now -- the word went out early last Saturday, and dwahzon mentioned it in passing earlier in the previous thread -- but the DCP gets a lot of readers that don't always follow the other progressive blogs. So I thought I'd go ahead and make sure this community was aware of it, too.

That, and also because I already miss a guy who was a huge influence on the progressive blogosphere and who, though I never had the chance to tell him so, had an influence on my own writing and my own involvement in said progressive blogosphere.

His name was Steve Gilliard, and he was an amazing guy and a force to be reckoned with. And he died this past weekend after a hard-fought struggle for life against nearly impossible odds. He was 41 years old. He had an amazing zest for life, an outstandingly sharp mind, and a heart as big as the sky.

It was that heart that finally gave out on him, but only in a physical sense -- he had more life and more spirit in him than most of us can ever lay claim to, and that spirit still lives on in the hearts and minds of many, many people whose lives he touched through his words and his presence.

I'm not going to write a eulogy for Steve here. Many people who knew him far better than me and who are far better writers than I am have already done that over the course of these last sad days. You can see that for yourself just by checking out this Google blog search link.

I will post a few links to some of the many blog posts in memory of Steve that I think give a particularly good sense of who he was. After that, I'm going to post just one of his many outstanding pieces of online writing, one he wrote for his blog in December of 2003 -- and one that is still all the more powerful for us to read here in the spring of 2007 for what it says about the things we believe in here at the DCP.

I encourage you all to follow up on these and the other related links to find out more about the man and all the things he had to say, especially the rich flow of comments and links in the Daily Kos threads that noted his passing over the weekend. No, wait, strike that -- I'm not going to encourage you to spend some quality time getting to know the amazing cornerstone of progressive blogwriting that was the late Steve Gilliard.

I'm going to humbly ask you to do so instead. Please. His words and his spirit live on, and if you haven't gotten to read his writings yet, then it's still not too late to do so. You -- and the rest of the world we live in -- will be much the better for it if you get to know Steve Gilliard, the iconic progressive blogger, and take his words to heart. Trust me on that.

Requiscat en pace, Steve. You left some mighty big shoes for the rest of us to fill. We'll do our best to fill them, I promise.

One of the joys of working in politics is that sometimes you are lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time when something very special happens.

So it was that I found myself standing high in the sweaty, steamy rafters of the convention center in Atlanta in 1988 when Ann Richards delivered her immortal line about George H.W. Bush being born with a "silver foot in his mouth". The line's still funny today, but nothing like how it felt to hear it the first time in her droll, laconic Texas-inflected story-teller voice. You hear people talk about "bringing the house down"; well in this case, it's lucky the laughter didn't blow the roof off the place.

Her loss to George W. Bush was an incomprehensible outrage, at least for those of us outside Texas who just assumed that no one with her gifts could succumb to such an obviously inferior candidate; another one of those bitter lessons in politics about never underestimating the most improbable of opponents.

But look at what she did do, first to get to the place where she could win the governor's office in Texas, and how much good she accomplished as governor. Here's an excerpt from an appreciation in the New York Times, which shows her blasting through one barrier to women in politics after another until she made it to the governorship, where she then used her power to bring thousands of formerly unempowered citizens into positions of power themselves within the state government.

Dorothy Ann Willis was born Sept. 1, 1933, in Lakeview, Tex. She graduated in 1950 from Waco High school, where she showed a special facility for debate and met her future husband, In her junior year, she attended the Girl’s State mock government program in Austin and was one of two delegates chosen to attend Girl’s Nation in Washington.

Ms. Richards went on to enroll at Baylor University in Waco on a debate scholarship. After graduating, she and Mr. Richards moved to Austin, where she earned a teaching certificate at the University of Texas in 1955 and taught social studies for several years at Fulmore Middle School....

As a young woman, Ann Richards volunteered in several gubernatorial campaigns, in 1958 for Henry Gonzalez and in 1952, 1954 and 1956 for Ralph Yarborough. She then helped Yarborough’s senatorial campaign in 1957.

In the early 1960’s, she and a handful of other young Democrats founded North Dallas Democratic Women in an effort to give more power to women in the party. “The regular Democratic Party and its organization was run by men who looked on women as little more than machine parts,” she said later.

In 1972, she ran her first campaign, helping elect to the Texas Legislature Sarah Weddington, who had successfully argued Roe v. Wade before the United States Supreme Court.

In 1976, Ms. Richards defeated a three-term incumbent to become a commissioner in Travis County, which includes Austin. She held the job for four years. She also began drinking heavily, becoming alcoholic and putting great strain on her marriage, she said later. It ended in divorce. After going into rehabilitation, she stopped drinking in 1980 and later said that the decision to seek help had saved her life and salvaged her political career.

“I have seen the very bottom of life,” she said. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I just knew that I would lose my zaniness and my sense of humor. But I didn’t. Recovery turned out to be a wonderful thing.”

In 1982, she ran for state treasurer and received the most votes of any statewide candidate, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in 50 years. She was re-elected in 1986.

In 1990, when Gov. William P. Clements Jr., the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, decided not to run for re-election, Ms. Richards challenged a former Democratic governor, Mark White, in a primary and won. She went on to defeat the Republican candidate, Clayton Williams, a wealthy rancher, in the general election after a brutal campaign.

As governor, among other achievements, she fulfilled her campaign promise to bring more blacks, Hispanics and women into public office. She appointed the first black regent to the University of Texas and installed the first blacks and women on the state’s legendary police force, the Texas Rangers. She also pushed for harsher penalties for polluters and gained control of the state’s insurance board in a drive to reduce the industry’s influence over state government.

Ms. Richards oversaw an expansion of the state’s prison system, increasing the space for prisoners by a third, and cracked down on the number of prisoners being paroled. She also instituted a major substance abuse program for prisoners. And she championed the creation of the Texas lottery as a source of public school financing. She bought the first scratch-off ticket herself on May 29, 1992.

The same year, she was named chairwoman of the Democratic National Convention, which went on to nominate Bill Clinton for the first time....

Molly Ivins, a long-time friend of Ann Richards and a writer whose Texas wit is at least on a par with Richards, offers her thoughts about Richards. See especially the comment about all the whores in El Paso flushing their toilets.

Julia Stimson Thorne, an author and the former wife of U.S. Sen. John Kerry, died from cancer yesterday afternoon. She was 61.

Julia Thorne raised two courageous and immensely talanted daughters, while tackling life's challenges with an unflinching honesty and a willingness to share her private sorrow so that others could learn and grow.

After a difficult and painful divorce, she crafted a mature and respectful relationship with John Kerry that gave security and stability to their children.

Through her books (You Are Not Alone: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey through Depression," with Larry Rothstein. She also wrote, "A Change of Heart: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey through Divorce," published in 1996), she was enable to enrich the lives of people she would never meet, and a public whose accolades she did not need.

She will be missed by those that loved her, those that knew her and many more who admired her quiet fortitude and grace.

The world is a little less today without her.

God bless her spirit and give comfort to her family at this difficult and private time.

All is not well within the political community of the (allegedly) monolithic religious right. Heads up to Bill Berkowitz over at Media Transparency for spotting yet another fault line in this community, as some religious conservatives recoil at their fellow travelers’ embrace of the defrocked former House whip, Tom Delay.

After watching Delay get a wonderful reception at the recent "War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006" conference, Ken Connor, currently founder and president of the Center for a Just Society (“where faith, law and policy meet”) posted this blast on the front page of his website under the bracing headline: “A Double Standard for Delay.”

Connor used to be head of the Family Research Council, one of the most important theocratic organizations, so there’s little question about his conservative bona fides. Here are some excerpts from Connors’ piece:

What is most troubling to us, at the Center for a Just Society, has been the willingness of far too many Christian conservatives to cast a deaf ear and a blind eye toward DeLay's misdeeds….

Connor provides a link to a long piece from U.S. News & World Report with even more detail about DeLay and the internal struggle within the theocratic right.

DeLay’s troubles are only beginning, and if enough conservatives have the moral strength to be what Connor calls “equal opportunity critics,” the split in the Republican ranks could rock the polls this fall. Few of these fallen-away conservatives are likely to cross over and vote for Democratic candidates. But their disillusionment with what is now the mainstream Republican Party may lead enough of them to stay home to tip elections in close races.

By now, of course, you've all heard the sad news:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An aid worker from Virginia taken hostage with three other peace activists was found dead near a railroad line in Baghdad with gunshots to his head and chest and signs of torture on his body, Iraqi police said Saturday.

Tom Fox, a 54-year-old member of Christian Peacemaker Teams from Clear Brook, Va., was the fifth American hostage killed in Iraq. There was no immediate word on his fellow captives, a Briton and two Canadians.

(You can find a more complete news report on the death and the life of Tom Fox here, learn more about his work with the CPT organization here, and read more about him in his own words on his personal blogsite here.)

Requiescent in pace, Tom Fox. You gave up your life in service to poor, hungry, desperate persons who were, and still are, in need. In full accordance with the tenets of your Quaker faith and your own sincere humanity, you chose to travel halfway around the world from your comfortable Virginia home in order to help hundreds of people you never even knew.

I am sure the self-appointed funeral police will be all over the poetic remarks by the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowrey, just as they were about the scandalous mention of politics at Senator Paul Wellstone's funeral.

Coretta Scott King and Paul Wellstone spent their lives in the pursuit of racial equality, economic justice and giving political voice to the rights of those who had none. I cannot imagine a funeral without their work and beliefs being at the center of the proceedings. For what purpose would her friends and family come to grieve and to celebrate, if the truth of the person being honored, remembered, raised up in tribute and memorialized, is obscured?

Go watch.

Last week, civil rights icon Coretta Scott King quietly slipped from the bonds of this life. Today is her funeral which will be attended by current and past Presidents of the United States in acknowledgement of her role along that of her husband, civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

She was mother, wife, partner, civil rights and women's rights movement leader and a widely admired public icon in her own right.

Mrs. King had many rich and wonderful qualities, and I don't know how she fit them all in that small frame and deceptively delicate body. A true steel magnolia, long before the phrase was first spoke, and the play ever written.

Former United States Senator William Proxmire died on Thursday, December 15, 2005, at a care facility in Maryland. He had Alzheimer's disease. He served in the United States Senate from 1957-1989. He was 90 years old.

How I Knew About William Proxmire

Growing up in a family where "spending money" was something other families had, I knew of Senator William Proxmire from the time I was a little girl.

While other people would joke that my Dad had eight children so he could have his own baseball team, and my sister swore it was so he could control a block of votes, I think we all really knew that it was so he could have an audience. Just about every night my father would use that audience, reading to us from the newspaper at the dinner table.

Each night, armed with knives and forks, all the kids would engage in the Darwinian-ritual of getting to the bowls of food for our rightful share before the contents disappeared. My father was stern and clear on the morality of each child's serving size- you were only entitled one-eighth of whatever was being served. But some people weren't very good at math, and it generally turned into something of a free-for-all. My mother would despair of the civility of her household, sigh and look to the heavens in an unspoken, and largely ungranted, appeal for help.

Once the food had been disbursed, my father would clear his throat loudly and announce in faux stentorian tones, "A Reading From The Newspaper." This was our cue to sit up a little straighter and fein rapt interest in whatever had interested my father that night. Except on the nights when he would read, "The Golden Fleece Award." On those nights, we were always quiet and paid attention, waiting for the punchline.

"The Golden Fleece Award" was started by Senator William Proxmire in 1975, to highlight "the biggest or most ridiculous or most ironic example of government waste." It came in the form of a speech on the Senate floor that was reprinted in newspapers across America.

I remember being amazed at ways that money could be so wasted by our government. I knew that we weren't the only family struggling. Everyone's Dad worked hard for thier families. Why was the government wasting money?

It's interesting to notice all of the little things that contribute to the adult you become. William Proxmire's consciousness-raising Golden Fleece Awards was one of the things that contributed to my lifelong fascination with how government spends the money we send it. I imagine it helped along my adult view that how our government chooses to spend our money, is actually a manifestation of the moral choices we make as a country.

William Proxmire did many things that helped shape the lives of both individuals and families in America.

He was a Democratic fiscal hawk who thought that credit card companies should behave differently than loan sharks.

He stood in the well of the United States Senate over the course of his near 32-year career there and gave over three thousand speeches to support the ratification of an international treaty outlawing genocide before the US passed a bill in 1986.

He had run for office many times before he was elected in 1957.

He never forgot what it was like to lose and even ran on that as a platform, saying in one of his stump speeches, "My opponent doesn't know what it is to lose. I do. And I'll welcome the support of voters who do, too. I'll take the losers. I'll take the debtors. I'll take those who've lost in love, or baseball, or in business. I'll take the Milwaukee Braves."

He finally won in 1957 in a special election, held to fill the seat vacated by the death of a Wisconsin senator. The seat he took over when he was elected to the Senate, was Joe McCarthy's seat.

He thought government had a duty to equality, however that concept manifested itself. Moreover, he thought government had a duty to make sure everyone had an equal shot at the American dream.

William Proxmire, R.I.P. America sure misses you.

----------

From CNN:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The war in Iraq saw two milestones Tuesday that reflect the country's path to democracy and its human toll as officials said the referendum on a draft constitution passed and the U.S. military's death toll reached 2,000.

CNN's count of U.S. fatalities reflects reports from military sources and includes deaths in Iraq, Kuwait and other units assigned to the Iraq campaign.

I don't know why we mark these things in nice round numbers. Somehow that seems just slightly obsene to me. I don't think the families of these people think of their loved ones in nice round numbers.

I don't think God works in base ten. I wonder, why do we?

[Editor's Note: This piece comes to us from Fe. I put it up ( in addition to the NYT obituary of Parks on the thread below) because it includes a personal remembrance of how Parks affected the life of its writer, who is a person of color.]

It was like any other day, in Montgomery, Alabama, when a white man approached a black woman who had taken a seat on the bus, asking her to move to the back. She refused.

"Are you going to stand up?" the bus driver asked.

"No," she answered.

"Well, by God, I'm going to have you arrested," the driver said.

"You may do that," she responded.

And they promptly arrested her.

That woman was Rosa Parks. By refusing to give up her seat, she became the catalyzing agent that set off the 381-day Montgomery Bus boycott, and the blossoming of the civil rights movement in America.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."

I was almost a year old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Because of her, I grew up in a world where I never had to bow, scrape, or imagine myself less than. It was through people like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and later, Cesar Chavez, Bobby Kennedy that an America that lived up to its highest, most fearless ideals came to full flower.

"I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die — the dream of freedom and peace."

For Rosa Parks, from all of us who work for justice and peace, we hold you in our hearts like a poem and a prayer.

From the New York Times:

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.

"Mrs. Parks's arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest," Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, "Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."

Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.

"She sat down in order that we might stand up," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from South Africa. "Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom."

Please take the time to go here and read the whole obituary.

God bless Rosa Parks, and may she rest in peace.

Pulitzer-prize winning playwright August Wilson Died on October 2, 2005.

Usually, I post the notice of someone's passing with their obituary and little personal comment. Somehow, this time, that didn't seem fitting. A dry recitation of August Wilson's life, a life spent contributing so much to the understanding of the experience of life itself, was somehow, not enough. Not nearly enough.

I found this eulogy written by and posted over at the blog of my friend Driftglass. Driftglass loved the work of Mr. Wilson, and it shows in this loving and beautifully written tribute to him.

He begins his memoriam quoting from the Ebony article describing the event at which he got to meet his hero, August Wilson.

Via Daily Kos:

Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights lawyer who fought nearly every important civil rights case for two decades and then became the first black woman to serve as a federal judge, died yesterday at NYU Downtown Hospital in Manhattan. She was 84.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Isolde Motley, her daughter-in-law.

Judge Motley was the first black woman to serve in the New York State Senate, as well as the first woman to be Manhattan borough president, a position that guaranteed her a voice in running the entire city under an earlier system of local government called the Board of Estimate.

Judge Motley was at the center of the firestorm that raged through the South in the two decades after World War II, as blacks and their white allies pressed to end the segregation that had gripped the region since Reconstruction. She visited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail, sang freedom songs in churches that had been bombed, and spent a night under armed guard with Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was later murdered.

But her métier was in the quieter, painstaking preparation and presentation of lawsuits that paved the way to fuller societal participation by blacks. She dressed elegantly, spoke in a low, lilting voice and, in case after case, earned a reputation as the chief courtroom tactician of the civil rights movement.

Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama and other staunch segregationists yielded, kicking and screaming, to the verdicts of courts ruling against racial segregation. These huge victories were led by the N.A.A.C.P.'s Legal Defense and Education Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, for which Judge Motley, Jack Greenberg, Robert Carter and a handful of other underpaid, overworked lawyers labored.

In particular, she directed the legal campaign that resulted in the admission of James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962. She argued 10 cases before the United States Supreme Court and won nine of them.

Judge Motley won cases that ended segregation in Memphis restaurants and at whites-only lunch counters in Birmingham, Ala. She fought for King's right to march in Albany, Ga. She played an important role in representing blacks seeking admission to the Universities of Florida, Georgia Alabama and Mississippi and Clemson College in South Carolina.

Rest in peace.

By now, I imagine many of you know of the Bush Administration's cuts to the levee project in New Orleans. If not, here's Will Bunch's take on it.

Frankly, I don't have the heart to talk about this in terms of politics, and I don't imagine many of you do either. Right now, we have our own refugee crisis on our hands. There will be plenty of time for the anger that is due those who would chose to feather their own political nests, rather than spend money to avert what was clearly a predicted crisis sans date.

For now, help is needed and alot of it. This link over at DKos provides an excellent list of organizations which are ramped up, on site and providing assistance.

Speaking for myself, I don't know what I expected prior to the storm hitting, but I am absolutely in shock over what is easily the worst natural disaster of our time. New Orlean is under 20 feet of water and residents are encourged to stay away for a month. Biloxi is 90% destroyed. Not damaged, destroyed. There are bodies of those too poor or too old to escape the hurricane floating in the river. I don't think the damage can be overstated. I don't think the damage can even yet be understood. This quote from survivor Tonya Rose of Biloxi, Mississippi provides outsiders with a small measure of perspective:

At the Gulf Shores Apartments, Chas Ainsworth and Tonya Rose wiped away tears as they recounted how, at the height of the storm, they had each called their families for what they thought was the last time. "He said to get on the phone and call your mother and tell her goodbye," Ms. Rose said of Mr. Ainsworth, "and then get his daughter on the phone so he could tell her."

The couple had used pieces of a metal bed frame to bar the door to their building, in hopes of keeping the water out. It had not worked. "Thank God - what is today? Tuesday? - thank God it's Tuesday," Ms. Rose said, "and my whole family is alive."

As the days pass and the death toll rises, others will learn they have not been as lucky as Ms. Rose. For them, we can only offer our prayers. But for the millions of other hurricane survivors who need more than our prayers, we can help right now with contributions to relief agencies.

They need us, and we will be there.

As of this posting, the Iraq body count of American soldiers stands at 1647.

The Bush administration accountability count for the war based on a lie, stands at zero.

There is this list of names of those who lost their lives defending the principles of freedom and democracy. They were sent there by people who have no respect for the principles of freedom and democracy.

Each of those listed had a whole community of family and friends, multiplying the loss and grief exponentially.

We don't need any more cold marble walls built to remember our young soldiers who died before they had a chance to live a full life.

Here are their names.

I encourage you to go and read the list. It is breathtakingly long.

We each have our own reasons why we work to restore democracy.

I know that for myself, all the names on this list are a part of the reason I work to restore democracy. The other reason is asleep in his crib upstairs.

Every name on this list was once asleep in a crib upstairs, too.

God bless them all.

Someone has already said it better than I ever will. His name is Christopher Allbritton, and he has written this remembrance of his friend, Marla Ruzicka.

Even now, I have a hard time believing that she’s gone.

Marla Ruzicka died Saturday, April 16 when a suicide car bomber blew up his car next to hers in an apparent attack on a nearby civilian convoy on Airport Road in Baghdad. She was 28.

Marla was a friend of mine here in Baghdad. She was a matchmaker, a social hub and the heart of our journo-tribe, both here and in Afghanistan, although she wasn’t a journalist. She was known and loved—sometimes through gritted teeth, admittedly—by the majority of Baghdad, it seems. Everyone knew Marla.

That’s because Marla made it her business to be known. She was tireless and ubiquitous in her work, which was to get compensation for Iraqi victims of war from the U.S. military. She confronted, cajoled, flirted with and—more often than not—convinced generals, diplomats and politicians that Iraqi civilians were worthy of remembrance and that the U.S. had a responsibility to the families of those killed or injured by American munitions.