RIP Mary.

I am so sad. I will miss her comments so, so much! I couldn’t understand all her law points, but I understood enough of what she said to recognize the times that her arguments were profound. Ugh. So sad.

It won’t be the same without Mary. She was one of the few people who could post a massive respone and I’d still read it. You HAD to read everything she posted, even when it was longer than all the other comments put together.

Four large bags of Iams will be donated to the local animal shelter in her name this evening when I get off work. Seems like too little, but then I could never match her contributions with just commodities.

Boxturtle (God has Himself a new prosecutor. I’d worry, if I were Cheney or Yu)

@Jim White:

beautiful!

Mary, a true friend. I’ll treasure the memories.

This is awful news. There are too few voices like Mary’s and losing hers is a real blow to those of us railing against the collapse of the rule of law in the United States.

It is an enormous loss to the national conversation, such as it is, as you noted bmaz, but it is also an enormous personal loss for me. I simply cannot convey the depth of my gratitude for a place like Emptywheel, where an ordinary person like me who knows nothing of the law could ask questions and learn so much from Mary and bmaz and LHP and other lawyers who were willing to explain relevant cases and precedents and procedures. Mary was in rarefied company and even there she was in a class by herself. This is heartbreaking news. I will greatly miss her.

What phred said…

Dang!

Mary’s eloquence and expertise will be greatly missed. And it is wonderful to learn a bit about the person behind the posts. It would not have been surprising to learn that Mary was a Senior Fellow at some Hoo-Hah Think Tank — but it is very reassuring to learn that she was not. A quintessential “engaged citizen” and the world needs more like her. Thank you, Mary, for sharing your insights and RIP.

I don’t comment often here, but I do read regularly. Let me echo the others here when I say that I will miss Mary’s voice.

Very sad day.

My condolences to everyone here.

RIP, Mary. Thanks, Bmaz for the heartfelt post.

RIP Mary. Thanks for the kind words BMAZ. Darn. I loved Mary’s posts. Wish I could think/write 10% as well. She was as good as it gets.

I’m so sorry to hear this. I always watched for Mary’s comments especially on all things Guantanamo/detainee related as she just seemed to have everything at her fingertips.
I too will send something in Mary’s name to the organization that rescued my dog.
RIP Mary.

This is such sad news. I had missed Mary just lately, but having been rather busy with other things myself had not noticed how long it had been since one of her signal, always bracing contributions. I will remember her to one of the fine animal causes around here soon.

And Godspeed.

my condolences to M’s family.

i always thought her quantifiably centrist, other people up thread expressed thayt in several ways, too.

at first it felt nearly difficult to draw M into the conversation. as the years morphed and moved, as bmaz alluded, some acuities of insight and grasp of standards of civil conduct, as well as of government and business, began to emerge as some of her strongest voices.

she was principled. there is a sort of unknown branch of my family from M’s part of the countryside, and I believe she supplied at EW’s place some of that bluegrass conscience in many of her long writings online.

i am sorry she passed so early in our time and hers.

And here is a taste of her humor. Fatster sent her virtual hugs for her comment that day.

Well, this sucks. Mary was a major force in spurring me to look deeper into legalities and politics of the law as a matter of citizenship. A real loss, though I’m glad she was around while she was.

This is such sad news. I always looked for Mary’s comments. She taught me so much.

Mary, I wondered where you were. Now I know that you are at peace. You will be missed.

Bmaz, thank you for this beautiful post. And thank you for linking to Mary’s diary where she put in The Ox-Bow Incident clip. That’s the one.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/09/11/a-way-towards-the-rule-of-law-%E2%80%93-an-answer-to-cap%E2%80%99n-jack/

And everybody else here — what you said.

@thatvisionthing:

“whispering hope”, beautful choice.

“whispers of hope” are what weblog commentary, like mary’s commentary, are.

i sang that song in church as a child; i’d bet it’s in the methodist hymnal, maybe presbyterian, too.

mary was also a business woman.

she made the following comment, in which her both her businesswoman side and an acerbic sense of humor were evident, in response to a myfiredoglake post about the desireability of farmers adverting in newspapers for american workers. it tells us a bit about her day-to-day life.

this comment was made about this time last year; who could have guessed…?

” Mary February 14th, 2011 at 2:50 pm «

As someone who actually lives in Kentucky and who actually has been involved in the horse industry since I worked on the backside as a mucker at Kentucky’s dogfood track, Ellis – I have to say that despite my sympathy with the point you are trying to make, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

There are a lot of minimum wage types of jobs which go unadvertised because they are low paying and the employers are not mega corporations hiring a slew, but instead are a entities hiring a few – often part time. It’s like saying that “it can’t be true” that it’s hard to find someone to come and cut your grass if you can’t point to where you spent the equivalent amount of money that you would pay for the jobs in running the ads.

The truth of the matter is that the work is seasonal, tends to be parttime, and tends to be very hard and dirty work; however, it not only doesn’t need a lot of upper education to perform, it operates in an environment where the work almost has to be low paying because there are only so many costs you can bump onto the monthly cost of keeping a horse that don’t make it cost prohibitive except for the very wealthy.

I do my own stall work and work part time, but whether it’s someone like me with 10 horses in mostly pasture retirement, or someone like any number of my friends who have 1-4 horses or my stableowning friends who board or do layups for 20 and upwards – I can tell you for a fact that it is incredibly difficult to get help for the low paying, very hard work, part time and seasonal type of work that is involved.

Where once the teenage country boys would work for a few hours a day doing things like putting up hay, mucking stalls, nailing fencing back up, cloroxing stalls of sick horses, carrying water buckets from frozen handpumps back and forth, etc. – it’s the kind of work that you have a hard time finding anyone to do now.

You can rail and rant that this is because people have to be able to make lots of money if they are going to do such hard work, but the truth is that, but for a very small sliver of the horse industry – most horses are supported by people who work very hard themselves and live on the constant edge of how to pay the next big vet bill and they just don’t have an extra 25,000 out of their own gross 50,000 to pay.

So they do for themselves a lot or the other common outcome (and just as illegal) is that they have someone who is also collecting some kind of disability who does the work on the side without any reporting.

It is very much like fruit picking and other industries where illegal immigrants are very much abused, except that almost all of the horse industry is mom and pop, struggling to get by themselves, almost no one does anything but lose money – employers. There’s a reason you get extra years under the tax code to show a profit if you are in the horse business. There’s a reason that bumperstickers saying, “The way to make a small fortune in the horse industry is to start with a large one” are so popular.

Sure there are some very wealthy people who may take advantage. But you’ve really targeted an indsutry that you don’t know anything about and where a hell of a lot of the “employers” dip below povertyline themselves if their horse colics and has to have surgery.

And all horse people – “Caucasian or African American” or other – know that a newpaper classifieds is where you look for hay for sale, but not job postings. They know that for jobs, you go where the horses and horse people are and ask. You might have tried getting some info from someone in the industry before you went on the tangents but even from the time I was 16 and on the backside (several decades back) and you did see a lot of African Americans (and horsecrazy young girls) and toothless middlaged men who looked very old and not nearly as many hispanics, no one ran “ads” in a classifieds for stablehand jobs. Feed stores, tack stores, riding organization newletters, travelling to the barns and farms knocking on the doors – those have ALWAYS been the way to get stablehand jobs. Or at least, for the four decades I can speak to specifically.

And here’s the other thing – working with horses is dangerous. Extremely so – even though it is low paying. So if someone doesn’t know enough about horses to be looking for their jobs through those avenues, they aren’t likely to be someone with enough horse sense to turn loose working with your animals without having them get hurt.

If you wanted to dig in and chew on something, the way KY makes getting workers comp for banr help almost impossibly might have been a good topic – but what the heck – a clueless rant about missing classified ads is probably more satisfying…”

if you know anything about small-time farming (or husbandry), you hear the ring of truth in mary’s comment.

Safe journey Mary :(

This is a terrible loss. Mary was sharp as they come. What I came to appreciate at The Next Hurrah and later incarnations of this blog was her unparalleled ability to unpack complex legal issues for the laity. She will be sorely missed.

I just left this in the Guestbook, recalling Mary talk about her little brother play against the Yankees’ future star and current Dodgers’ manager, Don Mattingly. Mattingly was from Evansville, IN, so it was probably in high school. Mary thought her brother was better than “Donnie Baseball.” If it were anyone other than Mary, I would have thought “sis,” was just looking out for her brother. Knowing Mary’s unquenchable passion for fairness and honesty, her brother was pretty damn good.

Another memory, one I did not leave in the guestbook, when he was very young, her brother got a hold of a loaded gun and took a shot at her. Fortunately for all of us, he missed.

Oh my goodness. I thought she was a spry 52, say, from her descriptions of her activities. But her intelligence was ageless. What a huge contribution she made to this blog.

@thatvisionthing: There must be more than one Whispering Hope. This is the one I grew up with:

Soft as the voice of an angel,
Breathing a lesson unheard,
Hope with a gentle persuasion
Whispers her comforting word:
Wait till the darkness is over,
Wait till the tempest is done,
Hope for the sunshine tomorrow,
After the shower is gone.

Refrain:
Whispering hope, oh, how welcome thy voice,
Making my heart in its sorrow rejoice.

If, in the dusk of the twilight,
Dim be the region afar,
Will not the deepening darkness
Brighten the glimmering star?
Then when the night is upon us,
Why should the heart sink away?
When the dark midnight is over,
Watch for the breaking of day.

Hope, as an anchor so steadfast,
Rends the dark veil for the soul,
Whither the Master has entered,
Robbing the grave of its goal;
Come then, oh, come, glad fruition,
Come to my sad weary heart;
Come, O Thou blest hope of glory,
Never, oh, never depart.

Source: http://library.timelesstruths.org/music/Whispering_Hope/
Written in 1868 by Septimus Winner.

Bob in AZ

I think I would have very much enjoyed having tea with kindly and brilliant Mary. It was generous of her to give her thoughts and spend her time with us. May she rest in peace.

This is awful news. Her comments here were like finding easter eggs. I remember EmptyWheel warning: “Don’t tell Mary!” The world is lesser for the loss.

@thatvisionthing: Check it out, there was a thoroughbred named Whispering Hope, born 1958, the year before Mary; his dad was Dawn Opeace (O’Peace?). Nice. (But I think it’s a good name for a filly…)

http://www.allbreedpedigree.com/whispering+hope

It took me a moment to realize *The* Mary. I am going to miss reading her commentaries.
Rest in Peace.

Oooow. Bye.