Some news stories just get better with each paragraph. In this case we’re faced with a Russian doomsday cult.
Several of its members had been hiding out in a cave, but the last of them finally came out due to the two rotting corpses in there with them.
They were in there to begin with because the cult leader told them to be in there. He tells his followers that when they die, they will get to decide who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.
Said cult leader himself was not in the cave, preferring instead to hide out in a house somewhere nearby.
He recently was hospitalized “after he beat himself over the head repeatedly with a wooden stick” in an alleged suicide attempt.
Honestly, I’m fairly certain I could read and re-read this story all night and not become tired of it.
“Before dropping out of the presidential race, John Edwards secured a private commitment from Barack Obama … that [he’d] undertake a poverty tour during the general election as the Democratic nominee,” reports TPM Election Central. “An actual poverty tour … would be a specific, protracted undertaking, possibly with Edwards himself, … [and] could be a major media event.”
Normally, I include the photographs themselves when I post items from my Flickr photostream. In this particular case, however, perhaps it’s best instead simply to link to the one called Deathbed and let the reader decide for themselves whether or not they wish to see it.
It is precisely what the title says, and of the person whose deathbed photograph you might expect me to have taken.
Early on the evening of April 10, before we all left the hospital for the final time, I insisted on taking a moment alone in the room specifically to take this photo. I’ve waited until today, what would have been his birthday, to upload it.
I won’t even try to link to everything. Trust that all the relevant bits will be linked off WHEDONesque. But the two I’ll mention now: The official trailer is up (also via YouTube). And FOX will be airing the show with half the commercials typically shown during an hour-long show. Around five minutes of them instead of the usual ten or more. That’s a seriously big deal.
Seventy-one years ago today — on May 15 in 1937 — my Dad was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Obviously, given the events of this past April 10, he didn’t quite make it to his birthday this year. Of course, I inevitably just would have forgotten it completely, until some number of days afterward.
It happened in August of 2006, and according to Blogtown (although they don’t describe it this way), it’s happened again. The right of anyone to request that items be pulled off the Consent Agenda is enshrined in both the City Code and the City Charter.
As I asked back then: Does no one actually care that both the Code (3.02.036) and the Charter (Section 2-127) specifically preclude preventing someone from pulling items off the Consent Agenda? Was the City Attorney asleep when this happened? Or does City Council — and those in its employ — simply not give a shit about the City’s highest law?
Addendum: WWire details the incident. Nowhere does Potter or anyone else ask Seaton why he wants to pull every item off the Consent Agenda. And there’s no basis under the law for Potter saying that Seaton had “to name one” — the premise there, I assume, being that Potter was trying to say that Seaton could only pull a single item.
Now, I have little doubt that the point was to disrupt the proceedings. It’s unlikely that Seaton or anyone else wanted to testify about each and every item on the Consent Agenda in turn, one by one.
But no one asked him.
Until and unless Potter — or anyone else — asked him about it, there’s no basis under Code or Charter for simply telling City Hall security to remove Seaton for requesting that every item be removed from the Consent Agenda. And given the previous instance of Potter blatantly violating these provisions, it would have been nice if someone had called him on it here.
More’s the shame that Leonard — who was amongst the people during the Joint Terrorism Task Force debate who pointed out that we’re meant to be a nation of laws, not a nation of men, with rules in place to prevent abuse of power — sided with Potter on violating City law.
“For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families,” reports Politico. “He has given up golf.”
For those who have been following along and calling their local shops to see if one could be tracked down: I’ve located the hat in Chicago. It’s been ordered and is shipping out to me tomorrow.
