Ohio's Kucinich: Signs Petition To Put Rival Edwards On March Primary Ballot

CLEVELAND (TDB) -- Bill Callahan snagged a political morsel from Anastasia Pantsios' diary at DailyKos. She asked Dennis Kucinich to sign her Edwards for president petition. He blinked, then agreed.

"I handed him my petition and asked if he would sign to put John Edwards on the [Ohio] ballot. He hesitated a moment and I mentioned that I had signed his petition last Thursday at the Cuyahoga County Democratic Christmas party. He took the clipboard and quickly signed it."

Check out her entire post, and note she praised Kucinich as "truly a good sport" for helping another Democratic candidate. Anastasia is a talented writer in Cleveland. Her work has appeared in The Plain Dealer, Free Times and Cincinnati City Beat.

Ohioans Who Gave Their Lives: All Served The Nation Post 9/11

CINCINNATI (TDB) -- The names and faces are memorialized online, and by typing the word Ohio in the hometown line you can see them all. Somebody once wrote that soldiers at war "learn of death and maiming when most are concerned with marriage and mortgages." The list presents the reality of war. The call. The bravery. The sacrifice. The loss.

Who remembers now the early days after the World Trade Center's fall into heaps of rubble, when Americans in uniform were first sent to The Philippines? But the faces of those who died in 2001 -- long before Iraq -- begin the list. Then we took the news quietly. It was just the beginning.

H/T to Bill Callahan, who has memorialized the Cleveland area's fatalities. He made me think about the things men do in war, and the things war does to us. And how little we think about it at all, how we barely dare to think. As the poet Wilfred Owen put it:

"Let the boy try along this bayonet blade
How cold steel is, and keen with the hunger of blood . . .