Pacific Views

Moral Clarity

Many of you know of PatK's work on the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. I first ran into Pat at dKos's place and found her posts always interesting, thoughtful and insightful.

When the war started, Pat started a new mission: keeping track of the soldiers who lost their lives in the Iraq deployment. Pat is an engineer and as such brings a very methodical and effective approach to apply to this problem. You can see her approach here where she talks about the methodology she uses.

She hooked up with Elvis56 who provided her a site, some excellent web support to keep this data up-to-date and a friendship to mitigate the pain and sorrow of tracking and reporting on such a sad subject. Today, the Coalition Casualty Count website looks like it is the best place to go to on the web for reliable and accurate information.

It is a shame that our government does not report this information as clearly and forthrightly. Both Elvis and Pat are to be commended for the work they are doing.

These days Pat and Elvis find that their work is being spend far and wide. It was picked up by the Guardian today and Pat tells me she recently finished an interview with a station in Seattle. And now they have been contacted by the BBC for another interview.

One thing you can do to help with this project is to contribute something to keep their site going. (When you make the bigtime, the costs definitely go up!)

We at Pacific Views are really pleased to say that Pat has said she would be willing to join us as an author on this site. I'm really looking forward to having Pat tell us what it is like to get interviewed by the BBC.

Welcome, PatK! And good luck on that BBC interview.