For more than two years, Marla Ruzicka worked to get help for innocent civilians caught in cross-fires here. A 28-year-old Californian with blond hair and an electric smile, she ran a one-woman aid group.

On Saturday afternoon, Ms. Ruzicka became a casualty herself. A suicide bomber attacked a convoy of security contractors that was passing near her car on the airport road in Baghdad, killing her and her Iraqi driver, United States Embassy officials in Baghdad said...read on

What a sad, sad story. Of course the right wing blog machine will remain silent on this courageous lady's passing. They will not mourn her, or even bother to mention her in the slightest. She doesn't further their agenda. She didn't go over to paint a happy face on Iraqi and worry about whether the AP photographers took pro-American pictures. She went to help the Iraqi people. She talked about Iraqi civilian casualties, which is not a very popular issue to discuss. On a day when we learn that she has been murdered, the Right Wing blog machine would rather print stories about how the LA Times circulation is going down or how Air America sucks. We like to think that we help the political discourse in the country for what we do, but this women actually did something remarkable. Her life though cut short, will remain powerful in the eyes of the Iraqi people.

Thanks to Steve Gilliard's blog for the photo. He has more.

(Update)-Ezra Klein has some touching words about Marla

It didn't take long LGF's to attack her here.

See... its that she's not "the right kind" of American that matters to these people.

Update-Steve Gilliard: Don't help anyone: The cowards at LGF certainly aren't in Iraq, or doing anything useful, but they love war. The fact that even basement dwelling losers can become 11B's, but they have no plans on doing that. Instead, they go after a dead woman who mitigated some of the suffering we caused.

Update-Tbogg: Ugly on the inside and the outside The other day I posted about Charles Johnson of LGF who is the Head Jerkoff of the Little Green Floggers. It seems that Chuck, who has the delicate sensibilities of a thirteen year-old girl (and I do apologize to all thirteen year-old girls), was headed for a lie-down and a dose of laudanum after being offended by "...a revealing demonstration of the mean-spirited, foul-mouthed, debased state of the modern left."