Margaret was a Culture Kitchen blogger for awhile and, while there, was one of our best bloggers. She moved on long ago, and I always missed her presence at CK. But she went on to what she considered bigger and better things. In her 80's she discovered her public voice and I am proud I was one of the people who encouraged and helped her find that voice.

This comes late because I mainly interacted with Margaret Bassett by email. So if I didn't hear from her, I didn't think much about it. But I knew she was over 80. She was a subscriber to my Progressive Democrat Newsletter from the beginning soon after the 2004 election. She had seen me as something of a hope for the future in messaging, something I think she overrated me on, but I was flattered and tried to live up to.

Today I sent out a message to my subscribers that my writing of the Progressive Democrat Newsletter had clearly been on hold for over a month and I wasn't sure if/when it would come back.

One email bounced. It was the first time Margaret's email bounced in all the time she read my stuff. So it caught my attention immediately. It sent a shiver down my spine. So I did a quick google search and discovered what I feared...Margaret had died, back in August, at the age of 89. I cried.  read more »

The lights will go out on Broadway at 8:00pm for one minute in memory of Natasha Richardson.

Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson were one of my all time favorite Hollywood couples. I briefly met Liam Neeson some eons ago and even though I never met Natasha I knew people who had worked for her and they said pretty much the same thing everybody is saying about her: that she was one of the most down to earth people you could ever meet. As a couple, they were not just nice, they really enjoyed being normal.

Yet what really impressed me of these two was that they really, truly seemed in love --even after all these years. I remember the "scandal" around them when they starred in Anna Christie. The photograph that was most circulated about these two was the one in which Liam is on his knees, holding on to a barely clothed Natasha as a drowning man would hold onto a rock in the middle of the ocean. It was touching, erotic and romantic all at the same time. A true Broadway love affair and romance.

Her death is such a tragedy. She died at 45 leaving behind two boys about the age of my kids. I can't imagine the pain and the anguish. What most breaks my heart is that she was known to be such a no nonsense person that her effort not to inconvenience others might had killed her.

It wasn't just that she had an accident skiing without a helmet. The worse thing is that she turned away an ambulance an EMT personnel because she insisted that she was fine.

Within the hour she was gone.

RIP Natasha Richardon.

My heart goes out to Liam and the family.  read more »

After conflicting media reports, The New York Times, citing a Cleveland Clinic spokesman, confirms the passing of Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio, at 6:12 PM today.

The Congresswoman was most recently a startlingly effective advocate for the Presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton, though she endorsed Democratic nominee Barack Obama in June.

Tubbs Jones was one of those rare figures that combine instinctively compelling leadership abilities with the grace of true humility. She will be sorely missed, and the nation is poorer for her passing.

The New York Times:

Tim Russert, the host of “Meet the Press,” and NBC’s Washington bureau chief, has died. He was 58.

Mr. Russert was a towering figure in American journalism and moderated several debates during the recent presidential primary season.

Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on the air at 3:39 p.m. and reported that Mr. Russert had collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work. He had just returned from Italy with his family.

“Our beloved colleague,” a grave Mr. Brokaw called him, one of the premier journalists of our time. He said this was one of the most important years in his life, with his deep engagement in the network’s political coverage, and that he “worked to the point of exhaustion.” Mr. Brokaw said Mr. Russert was a true child of Buffalo and always stayed in touch with his blue collar roots and “the ethos of that community.”

Our thoughts are with Mr. Russert's family.

Another great American story draws to a close with the passing today in the City of New York of Norman Mailer.

The New York Times:

Mr. Mailer burst on the scene in 1948 with “The Naked and the Dead,” a partly autobiographical novel about World War II, and for the next six decades he was rarely far from the center stage. He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979).

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Finis.