Au Revoir, Steve Gilliard

Very sad news: blogger Steve Gilliard, co-founder of the News Blog, has passed away, at the age of 41. Those J's Theater readers who read his blog even periodically will recall how often he succeeded in integrating questions of race, ethnicity and class into left-blogging discussions, how quickly he covered the salient topics of the day, and how persuasive despite their idiosyncracies his commentaries were. I enjoyed his humor and bluntness, particularly in his critiques of Black conservatives, whom he had little taste or tolerance for. On the failure of Republicans to address so many basic issues that most Black Americans deem relevant or important, or the failure of Black Republican adherents to push the GOP and RNC towards real action on these basic issues, he has yet, as far as I know, to be proved wrong. One other element of his blog that I enjoyed was the periodic recipes: I never tried any of the ones that he and Jen posted, but I thought the recipe-posting was an interesting idea. Farewell, and safe journeys to wherever the best bloggers go!