Julia Carson
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Rep. Julia Carson (D-IN)

Floyd Westerman
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Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman

We are off to the races, one week before Christmas ... trying to maintain that balance between acknowledging the season and ignoring the news, or following the news — of which there is a LOT — and ignoring the emotional temperature. As always, we take responsibility for thinking things through, but are interested in your views about how we're balancing things.

Today, I won't lie to you, we scrambled. That's because we had a show we were quite happy with, but we found out over the weekend that both Rep. Julia Carson (D-IN) and actor/activist Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman had died.

Rep. Carson was (how else to put it?) a pistol. If you never heard her speak anywhere else, you may remember her at the Washington, D.C. memorial service for Rosa Parks. She brought down the house.

Carson had it honest — her mother dropped out of school in the second grade and she, herself, raised children on her own and somehow managed to turn that experience into one of passion, purpose and conviction. Before being elected to Congress she had run a social service organization. In an interview with NPR when she was elected to Congress in 1996, this is what she said about what it meant to her to become a member of Congress.

My mother dropped out of school when she was in the second grade. She lost her own mother when she was only four years of age, and for someone like me to be able to walk life's journey into the halls of the United States Congress, as an elected member of that body, it's most overwhelming. And that's the point that we have to get around to more politicians in this country who are sitting on a throne believing that they are the hierarchy, and that anybody that didn't walk the same road that they have walked, live in the same neighborhood that they'd lived in, has no business in society, in terms of a contributing way, and that is a point that is very personal to me.

(I would love to have linked to the clip for you to hear, or played it on the air. Sadly, it was recorded on a format different than what we are using today and we couldn't find a copy in time, but you get the drift.)

Rep. Julia Carson. she died of lung cancer at the age of 69. You can listen to our remembrance of Carson here.

And we also wanted to acknowledge the death of Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman. You probably know him from Dances with Wolves — he played Ren bears, a Sioux Leader who befriends Kevin Costner's character. He conveyed warmth and dignity and strength. Here's what one friend of mine had to say about him:

He was the closest thing to a 'holy man' since Frank Fools Crow, a traditionalist. He could straddle both worlds and still get the message across.

And you can hear more about Westerman from Kevin Gover. He is the just-installed head of the National Museum of the American Indian.

And then, a conversation with A. Scott Bolden. If you've ever lived in D.C., then you understand what I'm about to say: Washington, D.C. is an international capitol, the center of the national government, but it is also a small town, actually. In my view, D.C. is a couple of small towns that overlap. One of the small towns is made up of many of the people who run things here — the lawyers, the judges, the business people, the trade association folks — the the so-called local "movers and shakers." Scott Bolden is one of them. And when I tell you my jaw dropped when I read his piece in this Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, you can believe it. We go to the Post magazine just about every week to sample some great writing and interesting stories. It turns out that Bolden, a very prominent D.C. lawyer, former head of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce and city council candidate, fathered a child out of wedlock and did not acknowledge her for 18 years ... and, then, she came back into his life, and he into hers. Bolden writes about it in this week's magazine. We talked about it.

It's a very personal piece. Totally unexpected. This is one of those subjects ... I really want you to read the piece, listen to the interview ... and tell me what you think.

Tomorrow, we hope to have a conversation about New Jersey's decision to abolish the death penalty ... and reflections on Christmas — Mocha Moms style.