Rue McClanahan, who died June 3rd, was in the original 1967 New York production of MacBird, Barbara Garson's notorious satire of LBJ and MacBeth, in the role of Lady MacBird. It also starred Cleavon Little, Stacy Keach, and William Devane...

There are no recent developments in the May 4 burglary of two safes from the Sixth Floor Museum. Private security guard Patrick Cleveland was quickly arrested and charged, and claimed he was framed. A week later, the Dallas News reported that more arrests were in the offing. it was first reported that "JFK documents" and "jewelry associated with Jacqueline Kennedy" were taken. The items of jewelry were said to be models of cheap knockoffs sold in the museum gift shop, and the museum is mum about what the "documents" may have been ....[ed. note: Some stories spoke of a second "safe" that was robbed, and I offer the fact that it's the first time the word "second" has been used in regard to the TSBD.]

The boxes of JFK assassination papers unearthed two years ago by Dallas DA Craig Watkins will finally, as promised, be going to the Sixth Floor's new reading room, according to Watkins' office...

Senator Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter was ignominiously sent into presumed retirement by voters in Pennsylvania. The octogenarian lost the May 18th Democratic primary to Congressman Joe Sestak, and Specter said he would support Sestak in November. Democrats apparently judged Specter's recent party switch with suspicion, and the winner used to good advantage a clip from the five-term Republican admitting that the only reason he became a Democrat was to save his job. Specter switched parties in the other direction in 1965...

Speaking of another of our favorite people, the hits keep coming to whatever is left of Gerald Posner's reputation. Posner had to resign from his job as investigative reporter at the Daily Beast when dozens of examples of lifted, uncredited passages cropped up in his gossipy, poor-selling book Miami Babylon. Now the alternative paper the Miami New Times has accused Posner of plagiarism in two other books, Why America Slept, about 9-11, and Secrets of the Kingdom, on the regime in Saudi Arabia. It has also been alleged that Posner also deleted material about the plagiarism from his own Wikipedia entry. Oddly, Posner has retained Mark Lane to represent him in possible court action against the paper, explaining that while he was convinced Lee Oswald killed JFK, Lane could have won an acquittal for the accused assassin and was thus the perfect choice. In a letter to New Times, Lane gamely tried to change the subject by chiding the paper for not doing anything about the fact that CIA and FBI agents had posed as reporters.

It should be noted that way back when the mainstream media was lavish in its praise for Case Closed, Harold Weisberg and others were cataloging Posner's misuse of sources, and showing that he claimed to have interviewed people who stated they had never talked to him...

He may also have plagiarized the Warren Report, as we know...

There were many striking reminders of Dallas in the UN's April report on the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi on December 27th, 2007. Calling the government probe a "whitewash" and suggesting that the country's intelligence apparatus may have something to hide, the investigation found that the city's police chief, perhaps on orders from army headquarters, ordered the crime scene hosed down two hours after the attack, that he delayed investigators from reaching the scene for two days, that he prevented an autopsy and blamed it on the victim's spouse, that the IS1 (Pakistan's FBI equivalent) conducted its own probe without legal authority to do so and stationed an IS1 agent at the hospital that evening, and that the government quickly presented questionable evidence of Taliban involvement "which prejudiced the police investigation which had not yet begun."

The report did not make any conclusions about who was behind the plot or even the cause of Bhutto's death, but, referring to the 15-year-old suicide bomber, flatly stated: "no one believes that this boy acted alone."

Singer Erykah Badu will receive a summons for disorderly conduct for stripping naked in Dealey Plaza on March 13th while filming a music video. Despite the presence in the video of a sizable crowd, there were initially no complaints from the public, which gave rise to speculation that the incident was some sort of photographic hoax (and to many, not the first such photographic hoax in Dealey Plaza), but the police supposedly did receive one belated complaint. Badu, a Dallas resident, stated she admires JFK and intended no disrespect.

HBO's fine show Treme,' a series about post-Katrina New previous, non-JFK evidence and he Orleans, is set in a poor neighborhood adjacent to the French Quarter that is home to many of the locations frequented by Lee Oswald during the summer of 1963.