Washington

At Tim Russert's Kennedy Center memorial, members of the Westboro Baptist Church picketed and held placards cursing the beloved Meet the Press host for his Catholicism and tolerance of homosexuality.

Something tells me that today, as hundreds weep not two hundred yards from my office, is not the day to say something nice about the most reviled family in America. But when is the day? Every year, the followers of the Reverend Fred Phelps protest hundreds of funerals -- mostly the funerals of soldiers -- and each set of mourners deserves better that to have anti-gay fanatics waving signs denouncing them as "fags" and "fag-enablers" (a category that apparently captures everyone but the Westboro members themselves). The bereaved Russerts certainly do. I sympathize with the woman who stopped her car and asked a passerby to run over and snatch away the "Russert in Hell" sign. But if we must choose one funeral as an occasion to rectify the public's ignorance of the Phelpses' bizarre history, it might even seem fitting that the occasion would be the death of a man recognized as an emblem of truth-seeking and setting records straight.

NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert died Friday. He was 58.

With Russert's passing, the country loses one of its most influential journalists -- host of Meet The Press, debate moderator, and trend-setter. He was a model for other, lesser hosts. Russert's signature innovation was to ditch the staid, respectful interviewing method implicit in a title like Meet The Press (as if the program were a social brunch) in favor of a more aggressive, at times bullying, in-your-face style. With the shift in approach came a change in style -- away from the classic television personality's search for patrician authority in favor of a newfound quest for working class authenticity.

The United House of Prayer for All People (TUHOPFAP) interred its charismatic leader, "Precious Daddy" Samuel C. Madison, today in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, this is a week of two Christian passages: Pope Benedict XVI's celebration of his 81st birthday, and the burial of Bishop S. C. Madison, leader of TUHOPFAP for seventeen years. One of the largest and most powerful of the "black holiness churches," TUHOPFAP is known for its street brass bands, cheap and delicious soul food, and mass outdoor baptisms, which involve fire-hoses and huge tanks of water imported from the River Jordan. This morning, members packed TUHOPFAP's D.C. church, known as "God's White House," to bury Bishop Madison and mourn his passing. Many of the women wore white -- a sign, perhaps, of the celebratory mood that the church seems incapable of casting off, even at the somber farewell to its beloved leader. In the cafeteria, Saint's Paradise ("Where our Main Ingredient is Love"), no one cried into his grits, and the church's signature brass piped its music, major-key, in over the intercom. But a question remains: Who will lead the Church next?

An FBI inquiry implicated New York governor Eliot Spitzer as an alleged client of expensive call-girls.

DC's Mayflower Hotel was grimly quiet last night, dulled by a silence befitting the undertakers' convention it happened to be hosting, or a wake for the political career of its most famous guest in the last month, Eliot Spitzer. In the bar, guests sank into velvet cushions and speculated loudly about what a $4300-prostitute looks like. But their conversation eventually wandered back to other matters, and before long the bar had no reminder of the Mayflower's newest notoriety, other than a single news crew outside the window, and a CNN ticker about a "DC hotel" in the background on the TV, with sound and subtitles conspicuously off. MORE

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement and spiritual icon of the last several decades, has died in the Netherlands.

Was he a cult leader?  The Maharishi's army of consciousness-expanders regards him with the slavish devotion, and they impute powers to his teaching that bear no relation to reality.  "Yogic flying," one of several cases in which TM supposedly lets practitioners suspend physical laws, closely resembles hopping around on a mat, not "flying" in any common use of the word.  The much vaunted claim that TM caused violent crime to drop in the District of Columbia by 18% is total hooey.

Meditation does seem to yield real and impressive effects for many who practice it, but the Maharishi demanded dangerous levels credulity -- specifically, faith in his own status as the exclusive fount of spiritual knowledge.  Nor was he entirely forthright with his followers (some of whom quit their jobs and moved to Iowa) about his intention of using TM to introduce them to an intense variety of Hinduism.  He was, in short, a domineering religious megalomaniac who tricked good people into dropping everything and following him.  If he wasn't a cult leader, he was certainly getting there.