On October 6, actress Eva Marie Saint, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in On the Waterfront, died at the age of 102. She had a long acting career although perhaps not as extensive as some because she did scale it back when she had kids, a common occurrence back in the 1950s and 1960s.
Saint was born in Newark, N.J.; the family later moved to Delmar, N.Y., near Albany. With plans to become a teacher, Saint attended Ohio’s Bowling Green State U., where she became interested in acting. After receiving her B.A., she turned full time to seeking acting work, first in radio. She received her first paycheck, $10, as an off-camera applauder on “The Borden Show.” To make ends meet, she did some modeling and then landed roles in radio serials such as “Rosemary” and “Young Doctor Malone.”
In 1947 she was cast in “Mister Roberts” only to be reduced to an understudy when director Joshua Logan didn’t think she had enough experience. Jocelyn Brando played the roles. A year later she began studying at the Actors Studio.
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I remember when she talked about how much she enjoyed working with Cary Grant when they made North by Northwest, still my favorite Hitchcock film.
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One-time Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, 84, who also ended up in prison thanks to covering up sexual abuse allegations stemming from his time as a high school teacher, died. He was a member of the Republican Party.
Snip:
Born in 1942 in Aurora, Illinois, Hastert grew up in afarming community. He went on to graduate from Wheaton College, where he received a degree in economics, before earning a teaching degree from Northern Illinois University. Hastert married Jean Kahl in 1973. The couple had two sons.
Hastert worked as a teacher in Illinois for 16 years while coaching wrestling. In 1976, he was named Illinois Coach of the Year. Four decades later, he would admit to sexually abusing boys during his time as a coach.
Hastert then served in the Illinois legislature, before going on to be elected to represent Illinois' 14th district in the U.S. House in 1986.
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Famed Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka, 86, died. He won titles both as a player and a coach.
After retiring as a coach, Ditka became a restaurateur, pitchman and TV personality, as well as an advocate for improved medical and retirement benefits for former players.
Ditka was tough and gruff, the quintessential Chicago Bear nicknamed “Da Coach”. He did everything from order off the menu to knock defensive backs on their butts with a growl, and his adopted home town reveled in every minute. He was enshrined in the College and Pro Football Halls of Fame, and the Bears said during a ceremony in 2013 that his “No 89” jersey will be the last one retired by the team.
In the past hour or so, Lori Bakker, married to infamous or famous televangelist pioneer Jim Bakker since around 1998, announced her husband, 86, has died. No doubt other media will pick it up because of his prominence. Jim's sister died just five days ago.
Jim was among the last of the "old guard" of televangelists, having outlived Jimmy Swaggart, who gave him a lot of grief by helping to precipitate the scandal that ruined his theme park, Heritage U.S.A., back around 1987 and landed Jim in prison, James Robison, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and so on down the line. Oral Roberts, Rex Humbard, and Billy Graham died further back.
Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on January 2, 1940, and he graduated from Muskegon High School in 1958. A look at his senior yearbook via Classmates reveals Bakker had a strong interest in broadcasting. Following graduation, he attended what was then called North Central Bible College, now called North Central University, affiliated with the Assemblies of God. It was there he met Tammy Faye LaValley (1942-2007), and after they married in 1961, they dropped out of college to become traveling evangelists. Truthfully, neither of them needed college. Both of them were very smart, and Tammy Faye herself always called Jim a genius, which is entirely believable.
Eventually, they came into contact with Pat Robertson, son of a U.S. Senator, who owned a television station in Virginia, and they helped start the 700 Club with Bakker as the original host. Bakker got the idea that the late night television talk show format ala Johnny Carson or Jack Paar would be a good format to spread the gospel. It was highly successful. They also had a puppet show that included Tammy. Robertson, though, was always secretly envious of Bakker because Bakker did not have the pedigree of hoity-toity private schools and an Ivy League education like he did, yet Bakker was way smarter than Robertson ever was. Robertson wanted to be in front of the camera himself. The Bakkers eventually left Robertson and came upon Paul Crouch, who with his wife founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The Bakkers were involved in programming there, but Crouch, like Robertson, was envious of the Bakkers and wanted to appear in front of the camera himself. The Bakkers left there and decided to form their own network, PTL, which stood for "Praise the Lord" (or, as cynics called "Pass the Loot") and started their own flagship show, The PTL Club. Bakker took advantage of satellite technology and became hugely successful in that field. He and Tammy Faye became quite wealthy. On PTL, he and Tammy Faye--the REAL draw of the show, who had real charisma, real talent, and was the real deal as millions of people both religious and secular would pleasantly discover--had many people who were prominent in the "evangelical" field, including religious figures, as well as celebrities like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and Col. Sanders. Here is a video of Bakker interviewing the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken from around 1979:
The money flowed in, and Bakker got the idea for a theme park near the border of both Carolinas and named it Heritage U.S.A. It eventually became one of the leading theme parks in the country. Tammy Faye didn't have much to do with that end of the business but focused on music and raising their two children, Tammy Sue and Jamie Charles (now known as Jay). It expanded rapidly, and eventually Jim and his team got involved in constructing a hotel and selling timeshares. Tammy, in her book, Telling It My Way, was concerned Jim was getting way in over his head.
Bakker's television network hosted a variety of programs from televangelists including John Ankerberg, Marvin Gorman, and Jimmy Swaggart. Swaggart, however, got it in his head Catholics were somehow the enemy of the world and went on anti-Catholic rants on his own show, which did NOT please Jim at all. Jim was not a bigot. His network reached many Catholic-dominated countries, especially those in Latin America, and he wasn't going to tolerate Swaggart's bullshit. He removed Swaggart's program from the PTL Network lineup. At the same time, Tammy was feeling the pressure and was having problems psychologically and with presciprtion drugs. She had taken some time off from hosting duties on PTL, and had done so a couple of times. The last time was in 1987, when she left for their home in southern California to be near the Betty Ford Clinic, and Jim decided to take leave so he could care for her. This left a big opening for the unscrupulous televangelists to take over the network. Bakker had people who were a bit shady like Richard Dortch, who helped mismanage the business, while Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, who was NEVER a friend of the Bakkers but who lusted after the satellite facilities, were plotting a takeover. Along the line, they and the media found out about the Jessica Hahn payoffs after he reportedly sexually assaulted her in around 1980 and paid her hush money. Bakker found himself ousted from PTL, and Falwell installed himself as running the business, which he deliberately bankrupted to get the satellite facilities. While Falwell succeeded in bankrupting PTL, he never did get the satellite facilities, which was poetic justice.
As we all know, Bakker was charged with fraud over the timeshares and such and was sentenced to 45 years in prison, which was overkill. Eventually, Bakker served five years in prison. Tammy Faye divorced him while he was in prison and married Roe Messner, who himself was sentenced to 27 months in prison for bankruptcy fraud. Tammy battled cancer for years, dying of the disease in 2007. Jim married Lori Graham, who lived in Arizona, and they adopted five children. They started up a ministry based near Branson, Missouri, with a television show on a much smaller scale than the original PTL network series. Bakker was opening himself for ridicule for peddling survivalist nonsense including those disgusting food buckets. In his youth, he looked way younger than his age; in his senior years, he grew a moustache and beard and lost almost all his hair, which made him look his age, but he likely would have still had the baby face had he not had those.
Myself, I don't think the ministry will long survive his demise. None of those children he adopted with Lori have what it takes to run a televangelist organization. Jay, Jim's son with Tammy, would have had the goods with a measure of charisma inherited from his mother, but he and his dad were polar opposites religiously and politically, plus he lives in another part of the country. Daughter Tammy Sue embarked on a career change and has been out of the limelight for years.
From the Jim Bakker Show Facebook page:
It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening.
For 66 years, Jim gave his life to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was a pioneer of Christian television, but to me, he was my husband, my best friend, and the man I was honored to walk beside through so many seasons of life and ministry.
Jim loved people deeply. He loved this ministry, and he loved the friends and partners who stood with him throughout the years. Even in his final days, his heart was still for the work of God and for the Gospel to continue reaching the world.
Our family is grieving and we ask for your prayers and privacy during this time.
Jim finished his race with faith. His voice, his vision, and his legacy will never be forgotten.
Jim Bakker, a television evangelist who lost his popular and prosperous ministry in a 1980s sex scandal and then lost his freedom for five years, imprisoned for having violated federal laws with his conflation of God and mammon, died on Monday. He was 86.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, rode to fame and riches preaching the gospel of prosperity, the notion that those who embraced genuine Christian faith would reap material rewards. Their pulpit was the television ministry PTL, which stood for Praise the Lord and People That Love, and their appeal was a combination of sermons, songs and tears. Both had a penchant for crying in public. Tammy Bakker wept on the air so often that she made sure her thickly applied mascara was waterproof.
The ONLY reason these fools thought Trump and in general the GOP were/are "better" on the economy is because they fell sucker to the promise of tax cuts. This nonsense has been going on since Reagan. There is no evidence Republican administrations are better on the economy; in fact, they are much worse historically. Democratic administrations have ALWAYS had to clean up the mess the Republicans made. Then Democratic administrations get blamed for the economy because it always takes longer to fix something than it does to ruin it. These Republican voters always believe they are going to get something for nothing with the tax cuts. However, the Republicans believe in one issue only, and that is handouts to their rich and corporate backers with the tax cuts (and deregulation). In order to finance these obscene tax cuts, they have to force the federal government to go into further debt or cut programs popular with the public. These idiot voters still haven't figured it out that they have been played for DECADES. I don't trust them to EVER figure it out, especially if or when the Democrats control Congress and the White House and economic recovery takes longer than expected.
Just get rid of the death penalty. Just get rid of it.
What Christa Pike did at 18 was horrific, but my God. The attempted execution is beyond the pale.
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Obituary: Peppino Mazzullo, 100, best remembered for being the voice of puppet Topo Gigio, especially on the numerous appearances that puppet made on the Ed Sullivan Show, has died.
Snip:
Topo Gigio, 10 inches tall and created by Milan native Maria Perego, debuted on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show on Dec. 9, 1962, and he came back often through the legendary program’s conclusion on June 6, 1971.
Mazzullo and Topo Gigio got the famously stiff host to lighten up during their chats, exposing a different side of Sullivan to viewers, and the big-eared mouse closed each of his appearances with the line, “Eddie, kiss me goodnight.”
While Mazzullo did the voice, Perego controlled Topo Gigio’s legs with her fingers on one hand and opened and closed his mouth using rods with the other. Meanwhile, two other puppeteers operated his arms.
Obituary: 2000 Preakness winner Red Bullet, 29, who denied 2000 Kentucky Derby winner Fusaichi Pegasus a chance at a Triple Crown, has died. He died August 7, years after he was pensioned from stud duty in 2011.
Snip:
Red Bullet (Unbridled—Cargo, by Caro) began his racing career as a 3-year-old, winning his first three starts, including the Gotham Stakes (G3). In his fourth start, he ran second to eventual Kentucky Derby winner Fusaichi Pegasus in the Wood Memorial Stakes (G2) before defeating that rival in the Preakness.
Red Bullet was retired from racing with six wins from 14 starts and earnings of $1,161,920...
2000 Preakness:
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My belief is Trump's issue is CHF more than anything. His shortness of breath is a dead giveaway.
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Stephen Miller should have been run out of D.C. a long, long time ago.
Obituary: Prominent thoroughbred breeder Arthur B. Hancock III, owner of Stone Farm, which is adjacent to Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky, has died at the age of 83.
He owned and bred Gato Del Sol, who won the Kentucky Derby in 1982. He became even more famous as the owner of 1989 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Sunday Silence. He had been the owner of Sunday Silence's infamous sire, the ill-named Halo, who was anything but an angel.
His brother, Seth, ran Claiborne Farm for many years after their dad, Arthur "Bull" Hancock, Jr, died in 1972. After Seth retired a few years ago, his son took over the reins of that farm.
Snip:
As his Racing Hall of Fame bio notes, Hancock certainly had the pedigree to become an influential figure in the game simply by following in the family footsteps, but circumstances dictated he journey down a different path. Hancock's grandfather, Arthur B. Hancock, founded Kentucky's legendary Claiborne Farm, while his father, Arthur B. "Bull" Hancock Jr., expanded the business to where it became arguably the most important breeding farm in the United States during the 20th century, and whose sales and influence also impacted European racing.
After graduating from Vanderbilt University, Hancock moved to the New York City area and worked for a year as an apprentice under future Hall of Fame trainer Edward A. Neloy. He then returned to Claiborne as the assistant broodmare and yearling manager under the tutelage of his father. However, after Bull Hancock's death, Claiborne's leadership wasn't passed to Arthur. Instead, those duties went to his brother, Seth.
Obit: Famed artists Peter Max, known for his iconic 1960s "Day-Glo" psychedelic and similar paintings, died at the age of 88. He was a big part of 1960s pop culture with his poster designs and such.
You can't talk about the decade without including him.
Snip:
Max began his career in graphic design in the 1960s and his swirly, colorful, instantly recognizable designs epitomized the era’s “flower power” art. But thanks to his prolific output and fun, accessible style, Max’s work remained well known and popular well into the 21st century.
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But in his first flush of success in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his mural-like tableaus of flowers, the cosmos and cartoonish figures – all in vivid colors such as turquoise, orange and neon green – seemed to be everywhere. Dorm room walls were plastered with his posters. Household furnishings such as clocks and bedspreads sported his designs.
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Another obit: Former Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, 84, has died. The article notes he had a neurological disorder, and Kyl had announced last December he was leaving public life due to dementia.
Details:
Kyl spent almost three decades in Congress, serving in both chambers, and watched his party undergo a drastic transformation, with his career spanningRonald Reagan’spresidency to PresidentDonald Trump’sfirst term.
Former Republican Arizona Gov.Doug Ducey, who consideredKyla mentor, described the former senator in a February 2025 interview with The Associated Press as a true statesman and a “workhorse” among Washington’s “show horses.
”If you saw him on the plane, he was sitting in the aisle, in coach, and he was reading,”Duceysaid. “And he was reading potential bills or Senate business.”
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Kyl would never cut it in today's shitshow of a U.S. Congress, even more lazy under GOP rule than in his day.
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Women are ditching churches, especially right-wing ones, to escape the MAGA cancer,
Apparently Mitch McConnell rose from the dead to finally show up at the US Senate today after being out of circulation since June thanks to health issues.
Not that Mitch actually missed anything. Congress hardly did a damned thing during the time he was away.
I am surprised he came back. He is going to be gone in January since he will be retired.
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Even the USSC will surprise cynics like myself every now and then. This time they handed a defeat to Donald Trump over the mail voting issue.
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Worthless piece of shit and natural idiot Mike Johnson has no intention of regulating AI.
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Obituary: Noted designer Bob Mackie, 87, has died. His peak years were in the 1970s, when he designed flamboyant fashions for the likes of Carol Burnett and especially Cher.
Snip:
Mackie got his start doing drawings for Golden Age costume designer Jean Louis, then worked as an assistant to Edith Head. He created designs that Carol Burnett wore on her eponymous sketch show — particularly the “curtain-rod” dress she wore in a “Gone With the Wind” spoof that, he admitted in a 2000 interview with the Archive of American Television, would be forever associated with his legacy — and “The Judy Garland Show.”
He would eventually become known for his over-the-top, figure-hugging creations such as the elaborate, sparkling, black, midriff-baring two-piece ensemble with matching Mohawk headpiece that he designed for Cher to wear to the 1986 Oscars. He also designed splashy gowns for her to wear on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,” “Cher,” “The Sonny and Cher Show.” Among the other stars for which he designed gowns were Whitney Houston, Barbara Eden, Bette Midler, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli, Tina Turner, Joan Rivers and Mitzi Gaynor. He also dressed men for extravagant stage looks, including Elton John, the Jackson Five and Robert Goulet.
Noted jazz singer Cassandra Wilson, 70, died earlier this week:
Cassandra Marie Fowlkes was born on December 4, 1955, in Jackson, Mississippi. Music was already part of the family. Her father, Herman Fowlkes, was a jazz and blues guitarist and music teacher, while her mother, Mary McDaniel, loved Motown.
Wilson studied piano as a child, later learned guitar and clarinet, and absorbed music from many directions. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell could sit alongside jazz, blues and the sounds she heard growing up in Mississippi.
After moving toward the New York jazz scene in the early 1980s, she became associated with saxophonist Steve Coleman and was a founding member of the experimental M-Base Collective.
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Just three days after her feminist colleague Gloria Steinem had died, Robin Morgan, 85, passed away. She was one of the original second-wave feminists and perhaps best known for editing the classic anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful.
Morgan started out in show business as a child actress. Her best known role was playing Dagmar, the youngest daughter, in the live television series Mama, during the years 1950-1956. Morgan left the series before it ended.
"My mother Robin Morgan died peacefully in her sleep early this morning. Surely, she will be remembered for designing the iconic image of the women's movement (the fist in the circle of the women's symbol) and for her formative anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful, for co-founding the Sisterhood is Global Institute with Simone de Beauvoir, for co-founding the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, for a lifetime of fierce feminism and fierce friendship. But first and foremost, she was an artist. Her art fueled her politics, fueled her feminism, fueled the way she raised me. She taught me that how one does anything is how one does everything—that the personal is the political, and that as she once wrote, 'Hate generalizes, love specifies.' I'll have more to say and more songs to write about her, but for now, I'll express my love and gratitude that so many of you knew and loved her as both my mother, and as your friend."
Her legacy was one of deeds, words and images. Morgan is widely credited with coining the term “herstory”, the feminist reworking of “history”, and popularizing the clenched fist/female symbol icon of the liberation movement. Her poem Monster, with such lines as “I want a women’s revolution like a lover/I lust for it” was quoted at feminist rallies and beyond. Her poem Arraignment helped capture the movement’s embrace of the late Sylvia Plath and condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, whom Morgan and others blamed for Plath’s suicide in 1963. Morgan’s rhyming couplet “I accuse/Ted Hughes” inspired the title for Sonic Youth’s song J’Accuse Ted Hughes.
Labeled an “anarchist housewife” in one government report, Morgan confronted the establishment, left and right. In 1970, she and fellow protesters were arrested and jailed after occupying the offices of the avant garde Grove Press, whose owner, Barney Rosset, was fighting employees’ efforts to unionize. In the widely reprinted 1970 essay Goodbye to All That, she called out activists and libertines from Abbie Hoffman and Hugh Hefner to Dave Dellinger and the music group the Fugs.
Longtime second-wave feminist, writer, and co-founder of Ms. magazine Gloria Steinem, 92, passed away yesterday at her New York apartment. There was no cause of death given. The announcement of her death noted she was surrounded by many of the friends she had over the years.
It is hard to overstate just how important a figure she was. She started as a journalist, but she came of age in the 1950s, and with it were attitudes that said women couldn't do this or that, or, if they aspired to be writers, especially in the newspaper field, they were relegated to writing features, especially on the so-called "women's pages." During this time, she went "undercover" working as a Playboy bunny for a magazine called Show. The resulting article made her famous.
Steinem later co-founded New York magazine, which was the magazine that highlighted the premiere issue of Ms. Steinem, with several other women, founded the long-running magazine. Steinem also found time for activism on behalf of women's rights and wrote several books, one of which will be published later this month.
Ms. had its share of critics including some feminists who thought it didn't go far enough and from sexist jerks like broadcast journalist Harry Reasoner, who barely hid his contempt for the magazine. Ms. survived and continues to survive but for many years through a non-profit foundation.
Because Gloria Steinem in her younger days looked like a fashion model and worse yet, was articulate, she elicited a lot of hostility from people like Betty Friedan, who although a very good writer, wasn't photogenic and simply wasn't articulate. There was also a tale spread around by I think the Redstockings, a radical feminist group in its heyday of the late sixties and early seventies and still exists today, which made insinuations Gloria Steinem was somehow a tool of the CIA. In reality, early on she worked for an outfit that had some connections with the governmental organization, but she wasn't a spy or any of that other bullshit.
From Wikipedia:
In 1967, Steinem revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she worked full time from 1958 until 1962 at the Independent Research Service, which was largely financed by the CIA.[113] In May 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, published a report put together for the Independent Research Service by Steinem and others on the Vienna Youth Festival and its attendees.[114][115] Redstockings raised the question of whether Steinem had continuing ties with the CIA, which Steinem denied.[116] Steinem defended her relationship to the CIA, saying: "In my experience the agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."[76] Steinem also stated that she considered the CIA allies in promoting U.S. government policy against communism during the early Cold War.[117]
Redstockings was full of shit with its innuendo, but somehow in some quarters the fairytale Steinem was a spy is still being spewed. It doesn't even make sense. If she had ever been a spy or something nefarious, she would not have disclosed it in the first place. Redstockings were a bunch of paranoid idiots on this story. Undoubtedly, it was rooted in envy. Anyway, envy is a nasty character trait, and feminists weren't immune to it.
Gloria Marie Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934, the daughter of Leo and Ruth (Nuneviller) Steinem. Her free-spirited father, whom she adored, was a peripatetic antiques dealer, a big dreamer with no money.
“He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink,” Ms. Steinem told Time magazine in 1969.
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When Gloria was about 10, her parents divorced, and her 19-year-old sister, Susanne, left for Smith College in Massachusetts. Gloria and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo where Ruth had once lived. Gloria’s life was consumed by caring for her mother, by then a meek and fearful woman who was addicted to sodium thiopental. She was “an invalid,” Ms. Steinem later wrote, “who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches and dime pies.”
Gloria shopped, prepared meals and tended to Ruth for seven years, until her senior year of high school, when they sold the house, saving the money for Gloria’s college tuition. Gloria spent her senior year living with her sister in Washington, D.C., while Ruth went to California, where she was cared for by her ex-husband.
While Gloria’s formal education had been severely lacking, she compensated for it by devouring books and reveling in words and ideas. She followed in her sister’s footsteps to Smith (also Ms. Friedan’s alma mater), where she majored in government. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.
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Unfortunately, the author resorts to some 1950s bullshit about how Gloria taking care of her mother somehow "colored" her views on marriage and children.
For fuck's sake, people have the right to live the lives they want without somebody second-guessing them.
On the other hand, I didn't know Gloria Steinem was mostly self-taught before going into college.
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