(Partial list of politicians who died in 2006)

Richard Michael "Rik" Mayall (born 7 March 1958) is an English comedian, writer and actor. He is known for his comedy partnership with Ade Edmondson, his over-the-top, energetic portrayal of characters, and as a pioneer of alternative comedy in the early 1980s. Such notability has led him to appear in sitcoms such as The Young Ones, Blackadder, The New Statesman, and Bottom and even onto the big screen in comedy films such as Drop Dead Fred and Guest House Paradiso.

Mayall, the second of four children, was born in Harlow, Essex to John and Gillian Mayall. He has an older brother, Anthony, and two younger sisters, Libby and Kate. When he was three years old, Mayall and his parents — who taught drama — moved to Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, where he spent the rest of his childhood and performed in his parents' plays. After attending the King's School, Worcester, Mayall went to the Victoria University of Manchester in 1976 to study drama, where he befriended his future comedy partner Ade Edmondson. He also met Ben Elton and Lise Mayer, with whom he later co-wrote The Young Ones.

Larry Claxton Flynt, Jr. (born November 1, 1942) is an American publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications (LFP). In 2003, Arena magazine listed him as the number one on the "50 Powerful People in Porn" list.

LFP mainly produces sexually graphic videos and magazines, most notably Hustler. Flynt has fought several prominent legal battles involving the First Amendment, and has unsuccessfully run for public office. He is paralyzed from the waist down due to injuries sustained in a 1978 assassination attempt.

Flynt was born in Lakeville, Magoffin County, Kentucky, the first of three children to 23-year-old Larry Claxton Flynt, Sr. (August 16, 1919 – July 1, 2005), a sharecropper and a World War II veteran, and 17-year-old Edith (née Arnett; August 13, 1925 – March 29, 1982), a homemaker. He had two younger siblings; sister Judy (1947–1951) and brother Jimmy Ray (born June 20, 1948). His father served in the United States Army in the European Theatre of World War II. Due to his father's absence, Larry was raised solely by his mother and maternal grandmother for the first three years of his life. Flynt was raised in poverty, and claimed Magoffin County was the poorest county in the nation during the Great Depression. In 1951, Flynt's sister, Judy, died due to leukemia at age four. The death provoked his parents' divorce one year later, and Larry was raised by his mother in Hamlet, Indiana, and his brother, Jimmy, was raised by his maternal grandmother in Magoffin County. Two years later, Larry returned to live in Magoffin County with his father, because he disliked his mother's new boyfriend.

Alain Badiou (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ badju]  (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).

Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Politically, Badiou is committed to the far left, and to the communist tradition.

Slavoj Žižek has written of Badiou that he is "a figure like Plato or Hegel walk[ing] here among us".

Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1957–1961). He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault, and published a couple of novels before moving to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969. Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l’Analyse. By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)", and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".

Richard John "Rick" Santorum (born May 10, 1958) is an American author, attorney, and Republican Party politician. He served as a United States Senator representing Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007, and was a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.

Born in Virginia, Santorum was raised primarily in Butler, Pennsylvania. He obtained an undergraduate degree from Pennsylvania State University, an M.B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, and a J.D. from the Dickinson School of Law. Santorum worked as an attorney at K&L Gates where he met Karen Garver. They married in 1990, and have seven children; an eighth child died shortly after birth. Santorum was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district in 1990, becoming a member of a group dubbed the "Gang of Seven".

Santorum was elected as a United States Senator for Pennsylvania in 1994. He served two terms until losing his re-election bid in 2006. Santorum holds socially conservative positions, and is particularly known for his opposition to same-sex marriage and birth control. While serving as a senator, Santorum was the author of the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005 and the Santorum Amendment. In 2005, Santorum introduced the Workplace Religious Freedom Act along with Senator John Kerry.