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The New York Times’ Portraits of Grief remind us, with photos and short biographies, just how much we lost.

From Daily Kos, absolutely wrenching, THIS is What 9/11 Felt Like:

Suddenly, we are watching the first tower collapse upon itself. I used to work Downtown, and I know lower Manhattan like the back of my hand. I try to imagine what could be happening to the people who are outside the towers, and how far the collapsed tower would have fallen on the city blocks around it. Then, I get a call from a neighbor who tells me not to worry about my husband, who is at the ferry on lower Manhattan, trying to get to his car on the New Jersey side.  I continue to watch the television, as the second tower collapses. My babysitter’s daughter calls now, crying; she doesn’t know where her husband is, so I tell my babysitter to go home. She leaves, and suddenly, I hear jets scrambling directly over my house. For a moment, I think it may be a nuclear attack, because they are so fast, and so loud. I grab my two-year-old, and rush for the basement, thinking about my other two children just two blocks away. I sit under a doorway downstairs, try to calm my child, and pray.

Via Crooks and Liars: I don’t know how much confidence I have in Andrew Sullivan, a conservative columnist with a blog at time.com.

Next week, I’m informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11 families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies. This is his “Hail Mary” move for November; it’s brutally exploitative of 9/11; it’s pure partisanship; and it’s designed to enable an untrammeled executive.

Hail Mary and to hell with America? That sounds just like Karl Rove. It sounds just like Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest of that rotten bunch.

Is it true? We shall see.

I suppose this has become a 9/11 tradition here.

Back in 2001, I enjoyed visiting a light-hearted Macintosh news and rumor parody site called As the Apple Turns. Sadly, the site was last updated in October of last year, and the search engine and some of the links there don’t seem to be working now. So this link, from September 12, 2001, comes by way of the WayBack Machine:

This, Too, Shall Pass? (9/12/01).

I can’t give you a brief excerpt. You have to go read the whole thing.

It’s a 9/11 tradition.