This is, to say the least, strange. Crazy enough that Hatch inserted it, odder still that Ted Kennedy and John Kerry supported it. But if passed, this will open the floodgates to every fringe group out there:

Reporting from Washington - Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill -- Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.

Can you say "Scientology"? I knew you could!

Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science Church official, said prayer treatment was an effective alternative to conventional healthcare.

"We are making the case for this, believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality," said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging support for the measure.

Don't get me wrong, I happen to believe this myself. But I wouldn't dream of asking other people to pay for my spiritual beliefs without their full knowledge and consent.

And since many Christian fundamentalists consider Christian Science to be a cult, I suspect the uproar will get this pulled out of the bill.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (839)

PLAYS: (1918)

Sure enough, just as Nicole wondered, Juan Williams was pretty bent out of shape over Warren Ballentine's calling him out -- using black cultural lingo -- for being such a willing supplicant to the "Limbaugh is being oppressed by mean black people" meme currently popular in right-wing circles.

So who does he bring on to buttress his claim that liberals are being bigots? Why, none other than Tammy Bruce and ... the Rev. Ken Hutcherson!

Bruce is bad enough. This is the person who called Michelle Obama "trash" and opined that "President Obama has some malevolence toward this country". She's also suggested that torture is no worse than a bad day in West Hollywood. We also remember her classy tweet on learning of Ted Kennedy's death: "[He] left a woman to drown and now he's left us to drown." In other words, hardly an ideal person to be claiming a lack of civility from the left.

But Hutcherson? That's rich.

Folks outside the Seattle area may not know a lot about Hutcherson, so
they just see him as a black conservative. Which is common enough, especially on Fox. It's more genuine than being a fake liberal like Williams, at least.

But he's also one of the most prominent anti-gay bigots in the state, and for that matter on the West Coast.

This is a man who told his flock that "God hates effeminate men".

He also headed up an initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination in Washington state. (It went down in flames.)

Of even deeper concern is his heavy involvement in promoting a virulent and violent anti-gay organization called Watchmen on the Walls. This is a global evangelical-Christian outfit that, elsewhere in the world (particularly in Eastern Europe) is associated with violent anti-gay hate crimes.

I reported on a Watchmen gathering in nearby Lynnwood a couple of years ago (photos here). I also remember his sermon very clearly:

Continue reading »

During the 2008 presidential campaign, I documented 10, then 10 more and yet another 10 moments in the extremism of Mike Huckabee. Now, fresh off his victory in the straw poll at the so-called Values Voters Summit, the one-time Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor turned Fox News host called for the United States to leave the United Nations. Following his use of the late Ted Kennedy to fight mythical "death panels" and his tacit endorsement of ethic cleansing in the Middle East, the 2012 White House hopeful's latest statements can mean only one thing.

It's time for still another 10 moments in the extremism of Mike Huckabee:

31. Huckabee Calls for the U.S. to Leave the UN
32. Huckabee Uses Ted Kennedy to Push Death Panels Myth
33. Huckabee Warns of "Union of American Socialist Republics"
34. Huckabee Says Governors Should Ignore Court Rulings
35. Huckabee Sees "Hand of God" in Prop 8 Victory
36. Huckabee Claims Civil Rights of Gays Not Being Violated
37. Huckabee Opposes Two-State Solution in Middle East
38. Huckabee Calls for Abolition of IRS and Putting Politics in the Pulpit
39. Huckabee Parrots GOP's "Club Gitmo" Talking Point
40. Huckabee Headlines Electromagnetic Pulse Conference

31. Huckabee Calls for the U.S. to Leave the UN
The United Nations has been a favorite right-wing punching bag for generations, the bogeyman of Birchers and Birthers alike. At this weekend's "How to Take Back America" shindig (an event which featured sessions such as "How to Recognize Living under Nazis & Communists"), Mike Huckabee added his name to the list.

Looking to top John Bolton's hypothetical about lopping off 10 floors of the United Nations building, Huckabee called for casting the whole institution into the sea. To a standing ovation, Huckabee declared:

"It's time to get a jackhammer and to simply chip that part of New York City. Let it float into the East River, never to be seen again."

32. Huckabee Uses Ted Kennedy to Push Death Panels Myth
In their ever-escalating effort to derail health care reform, Republicans from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to Obama's ersatz negotiating partner Chuck Grassley warned of mythical government "death panels" which would "pull the plug on grandma."

To make his version of the case, Governor Huckabee turned to the example of the late Senator Kennedy. Just moments after criticizing Democrats for defying "good taste" by claiming "Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory," Huckabee announced:

"It was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them. Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He chose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments."

Continue reading »

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1212)

PLAYS: (1577)

I've received some exclusive video of the late, great Sen. Ted Kennedy right before his passing, discussing his family, life and career in politics. This interview was recorded in conjunction with the release of his new book: "True Compass".
You can also buy it here.

Via email:

Click here to read an excerpt from True Compass that details the months leading up to Senator Kennedy's speech to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

As usual, he is impressive. He says he's never shied away from being called a liberal because that's what he was. Now that's an example to follow.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1358)

PLAYS: (4042)

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told CNN's John King that President Barack Obama doesn't believe people are protesting him because he is a black man. "I don't think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin," said Gibbs.

In her Sunday column, Maureen Dowd said that race is playing a part in the vocal opposition to Obama.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

John Amato:

While Dowd writes some of the most insane stuff I've seen, she does mix in some truths as well and I'm surprised she makes this observation. It's apparent to anybody that has eyes in their skulls what's been going on. There is a large amount of people in this country that do not like President Obama because he's black. Just watch the news once in a while or do some reading. Don't ever expect Gibbs or anyone in the White House to say this publicly because the media would go crazy over this, but we know it's true. And the conservative movement has been hijacked by the crazies even before Clinton took office. It's not a new phenomenon. What is shocking is to see the hatred on display so out in the open and being encouraged by the media. Glenn Greenwald takes up the case in his post: Is the Right's attack on Obama's legitimacy new or unprecedented?

This is why I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly "hijacked" by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks. And the crazed conspiracy-mongers in that movement became even more prominent during the Bush years. Frum himself -- now parading around as the Serious Adult conservative -- wrote, along with uber-extremist Richard Perle, one of the most deranged and reality-detached books of the last two decades, and before that, celebrated George W. Bush, his former boss, as "The Right Man."

Bob Somerby continues on and writes:

By the summer of Clinton’s second year in office, two active attempts were made on his life. One guy even flew a small plane into the White House, apparently trying to kill him. Colbert King doesn’t seem to remember. Might we suggest why that is?

You see, King is part of a media “elite” which enabled—or encouraged—the lunatic claims against Clinton, then Gore. Perhaps for that reason, people like King have airbrushed that decade—and they express their vast surprise when the same thing is done to Obama. Meanwhile, King name-calls two minor crackpot pastors—and forgets to name the powerful players who are vastly more responsible for the lunatic claims against Obama.

King is brave when it comes to naming no-names. Where are the names of the powerful players who have really been driving this lunacy?

Somehow, when it comes to such names, people like King seem to get light-headed. They may feel their knees start to buckle.

There have always been local lunatics like Anderson and Drake in our politics. But the movement went national in the 1980s, when Rush Limbaugh moved to New York. King has criticized Limbaugh a few times—in the last year, that is. But Limbaugh drove the lunatic hatred against the last Democratic president (Hillary Clinton helped kill Vince Foster!)—and King never mentioned his name, not once, during that whole brainless era. (Nexis archives.)

King openly criticized Jerry Falwell—after the 9/11 attacks, that is. But Falwell’s name never appeared in his column during the 1990s, when he pimped those murder claims all around. Somehow, King failed to notice that ugliness. Or perhaps he was too scared to speak.

Like the bulk of his weak, weak-minded cohort, King failed to act in the 1990s. This morning, he seems to have forgotten that the decade happened at all.

Might we make a long story short? King and his cohort bought all the crap against the last Democratic president. Some of them actively encouraged the hatred; some of them simply enabled it. But by October 2000, King could barely bring himself to say a word in favor of Candidate Gore. To recall the pained column in which King made himself say that Gore would probably be somewhat better than Bush, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/26/09. In that column, you see how thoroughly these weak-minded people failed you in the last decade.

King and there rest of his cohort drank the Kool-Aid during that decade—gulped it lovingly down. Now, they pretend that the era never occurred—and they express their vast surprise when the same lunacy is aimed at Obama. They are amazed to see what’s being said about this new Democratic president. And they diddle their cowardly brains: It must be his race, they proclaim.

In this way, people like King refuse to tell the real story. Here it is:

Your discourse has been this way for decades. A powerful movement generates ludicrous claims against all major Democrats. They did it to Clinton, then to Gore—with King’s blessing. Now, it’s being done to Obama.

So far, no one has flown a small plane into the White House. But in the past, it was tried.

King ran off and hid in the woods while this was being done the last time. (He was still bad-mouthing Hillary Clinton in the familiar old ways as late as summer 2008.) Now he pretends it just didn’t happen. And he makes it hard for liberals to argue the truth—to help the public see the big picture about our devolving culture.

This isn’t about unfortunate nuts like Pastor Anderson. It isn’t about an unfortunate nut like Drake, who at least is an equal opportunity kook. (He also wished divine retribution on Pastor Rick Warren this year.)

This is really about the names—and the movement—which don’t appear in King’s column. It’s about multimillionaire stooges like Limbaugh and Hannity—and so many others like them. It’s about Charles Grassley—and Sarah Palin. It’s about the astonishing Betsy McCaughey, the “misleader-in-chief” from 1994 who still can’t seem to get herself profiled in Colbert King’s weak-kneed newspaper.

When it comes to the establishment Washington Post, the fake McCoys can’t get arrested.

Uh-oh! Charles Grassley is an accepted figure in Establishment Washington. Voters deserve to hear what he’s done. But Colbert King won’t say his name. To this day, he never has.

It's been going on for years and the media elites are terrified to ever say a word about it and this blatant deep seeded hatred will continue for many more decades unless the media doesn't act the cowards they have been for all these years and expose the nuts and stop promoting their insanity for ratings. Someone is going to get hurt and very soon.
I think Dr. Tiller and his family have already paid the ultimate price, don't you?

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (72)

PLAYS: (175)

During what I thought was one of the better parts of the President's address to Congress tonight was the last portion of his speech where he reminded everyone that health care is not just a policy issue, but a moral issue and a matter of social justice.

Whether the legislation he signs ends up reflecting that is another matter. When you're starting from the position that it's important to keep the insurance companies in place I'm not sure how you get there myself.

That is why we cannot fail. Because there are too many Americans counting on us to succeed – the ones who suffer silently, and the ones who shared their stories with us at town hall meetings, in emails, and in letters.

I received one of those letters a few days ago. It was from our beloved friend and colleague, Ted Kennedy. He had written it back in May, shortly after he was told that his illness was terminal. He asked that it be delivered upon his death.

In it, he spoke about what a happy time his last months were, thanks to the love and support of family and friends, his wife, Vicki, and his children, who are here tonight . And he expressed confidence that this would be the year that health care reform – “that great unfinished business of our society,” he called it – would finally pass. He repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that “it concerns more than material things.” “What we face,” he wrote, “is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”

Continue reading »

It doesn't happen often, but when the sports world collides with politics, it's worth noting -- especially when it's an athlete who was a staunch support of both George Bush and John McCain, eying Ted Kennedy's vacant Senate seat:

BOSTON -- Curt Schilling, the former major league pitcher who won the allegiance of Bostonians by leading the Red Sox to the 2004 World Series, said Wednesday that he has "some interest" in running for the seat held for nearly 50 years by Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Schilling, a registered independent and longtime Republican supporter, wrote on his blog that while his family and video game company, 38 Studios, are high priorities, "I do have some interest in the possibility."

The 42-year-old lives in suburban Medfield and campaigned for President George W. Bush in 2004 and Sen. John McCain in 2008. Read on...

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (82)

PLAYS: (174)

Wow. Imagine that. Someone on Fox News attacking a child, a funeral, Howard Dean, and universal health care in one fell swoop. Bravo Laura.

Transcript:

INGRAHAM: But tell me why you think it's okay for people to be up there on Capitol Hill saying do it for Teddy? Why is that okay?

SKINNER: Well, I'll tell you why. You said are they using this -- Ted Kennedy's death? Ted Kennedy himself called it, health care, the cause of his life. Okay. So it's not using it, Laura.

And here's what really bothered me during this debate over the weekend on the radio. And we were all talking about it is that you had these moving eulogies by Orrin Hatch at obviously the services, but McCain, and Mitch McConnell saying, and even FOX News, the coverage said lion of -- liberal lion crossed party lines. Everybody said how wonderful and how he crossed party lines.

Now that he's gone, they can't see how health care can get passed because he's not there to do it. That's like using him as an excuse to bury health care reform along with him. You're eulogizing him and saying he went to your mother's funeral.

INGRAHAM: Well.

SKINNER: You loved him, but you can't do what it is he's done his whole career.

INGRAHAM: Right.

SKINNER: .not a single one of his dear friends can do what he's done.

INGRAHAM: But that's - right. That's not quite accurate though because over the last several months clearly, the Democrats haven't been saying let's do it for Teddy. Let's do it for Senator Kennedy. He's struggling for his life. And let's fight for it. I didn't hear that a lot over the last several months.

So only after his death, and after the polls show that the public basically doesn't want this whole Obama care thing, do they think okay, the whole rebranding, the first two times around hasn't worked. So now we're going to try this. And let me just play -- we have a sound bite of one of the prayers at the mass on Saturday. This is the funeral mass. And this was one of the Kennedy grand kids during the prayers. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For what my grandpa called the cause of his life, as he said so often, in every part of this land that every American will have decent quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege. We pray to the Lord.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Nancy do you think that that adorable little boy came up with that on his own? It mean, it sounds like it's right out of Howard Dean's speech or something. Come on, this was politicizing the funeral.

SKINNER: But you know what? I've been -- I was there, Laura, at the convention when Ted Kennedy actually gave his last speech. And he was bed- ridden before he even gave that speech. So I'm telling you, he said this is the cause of my life. Everybody - 1960s.

INGRAHAM: Who cares?

SKINNER: .I've been working on this.

INGRAHAM: Nancy, who cares? Who cares that it's the cause of his life? It's a sixth of our economy.

SKINNER: It's not just.

INGRAHAM: It's not a tribute to one man. This is our future.

SKINNER: Right.

INGRAHAM: This is our liberty and our freedom at stake.

SKINNER: That's why he worked on it.

INGRAHAM: It's not about Ted Kennedy.

SKINNER: What the calls are for, Laura, is for bipartisanship. If he crossed the line -- for Nixon, he got Nixon's cancer institute passed. And Nixon didn't want his name on.

INGRAHAM: Right, we're going back to Nixon for the bipartisanship.

SKINNER: He's done no child left behind. He's done lots of things. It's not about ted Kennedy. This is the thing. If we're going to look at a compromise on health care, which that's what everybody is talking about now. The far left wants single pair universal. That's gone. The far right wants the status quo. Well, these people are saying.

INGRAHAM: Far right?

SKINNER: (INAUDIBLE) for the American people.

INGRAHAM: Yeah. How about 55 percent of the country? Far right? I mean, I don't think that's necessarily working now when you look at these polls. It's broad based opposition. But Nancy, we appreciate it very much.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (87)

PLAYS: (201)

Chuck Todd walks through the Republicans phony argument on why they won't be able to negotiate with the Democrats on the health care bill. Now that Ted Kennedy is gone there's no one else that will "have a conversation with" them "the way Ted Kennedy would have done it". As if they ever had any intention of working with Democrats on anything. Good bill, bad bill, doesn't matter. They were never going to do anything but obstruct.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1019)

PLAYS: (2236)

I thought it was distasteful enough that Chris Wallace asked Juan Williams to have to explain why Ted Kennedy wasn't given the "Jesse Helms" treatment by the New York Times in their obituaries of the two men, but it also turns out that he was showing NewsBusters a little love as well. I'm glad Media Matters reads NewsBusters, so I don't have to.

Also, I'm sure I won't be the only one that thinks Chris Wallace or anyone at Fox complaining about "media coverage" is laughable on its face.

Wallace: I also want to talk about the "media" coverage of Ted Kennedy's death this week. Not only the amount of it, which was extraordinary, but also the tone of it, and I want to put up the first paragraph of The New York Times obituary on Ted Kennedy's death. This is the first paragraph this week.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night.

Now, here's the first paragraph of the Times' story on the passing of Jesse Helms last year.

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

Bill Sammon, I'm sure some people will be offended that I'm even making the comparison between these two men, but that is a frightening difference.

Sammon: It is and there are two ways to rectify that double standard. One would have been for the New York Times to find something nice to say about Jesse Helms substantively, other than this mossy drawl. The other, if you're going to go the, and I think that's the preferable way to do it, because you want to, when someone dies, you want to find something nice to say.

The other way if they wanted to be fair would, they would have had to put something in Ted Kennedy's about Chappaquiddick, about his demagoguery Robert Bork, the, you know, lunch-counter America, the back alley abortions, all those kind of things, but they didn't, so either way you do it it's unfair, and that was a striking example.

Wallace: Juan, do you think that there's a striking difference in the way those two men were sent off?

Williams: Well, I think you should be nice to people at the time of their death in general, no matter what their sins, but in fact I think it was good journalism. I think in fact that if you look at the public impact that Jesse Helms had on the country, it was to stand in opposition to civil rights and all the gay rights and all this. If you look at the public impact of Ted Kennedy...

Wallace: But wasn't he for something?

Williams: Yeah! He was for stopping those things and that's what the lead said. I don't have any problem with that and in fact Chappaquiddick has been mentioned prominently throughout this whole period.

Sammon: Not in that lead.

Williams: Not in the lead but in the story. It's not like anybody's hiding Ted Kennedy's flaws. We know them.

Of course, par for the course, it's always alright to politicize a eulogy if you're a Republican. From our own Jon Perr-- Jesse Helms and the Partisan Eulogies of George W. Bush:

Continue reading »

Nice work from Jed at Daily KOS TV. Fox News didn't bother to let their viewers know that Senator Kennedy voted against cloture and the final bill as well.

h/t The Political Carnival

On the day I was born, said my father, said he
"I've an an elegant legacy waitin' for ye.

'Tis a rhyme for your lips and a song for your heart

To sing it whenever the world falls apart.

"

Look, look, look to the rainbow

Follow it over the hill and the stream
Look, look, look to the rainbow

Follow the fellow who follows a dream.

For those of you who are younger, who may not quite get exactly what the Kennedys meant to us, this lovely piece from Bob Herbert explains it well - they made us feel better than we were, and made us want to be better people. He suggests that their theme song, rather than "Camelot," should instead be "Follow the Rainbow" from "Finian's Rainbow":

The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”

Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”

Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.

“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”

Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.

“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”

That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1175)

PLAYS: (2553)

The most moving part of the services for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy for me was when his son, Ted Kennedy, Jr., spoke. With so much mythology swirling around about the Kennedy family and their legacy, it's easy to forget that at his core, Kennedy was a family man, who in addition to his public service, had to serve as the head of a rather extraordinary family:

There is also much to say and much will be said about my father the man. The storyteller, the lover of costume parties, a practical joker, the accomplished painter. He was a lover of everything French: cheese, wine, and women. He was a mountain climber, navigator, skipper, tactician, airplane pilot, rodeo rider, ski jumper, dog lover, and all around adventurer. Our family vacations left us all injured and exhausted.

He was a dinner table debater and devil's advocate. He was an Irishman and a proud member of the Democratic Party.

Here's one you may not know: Out of Harvard he was a Green Bay Packers recruit but decided to go to law school instead.

He was a devout Catholic whose faith helped him survive unbearable losses and whose teachings taught him that he had a moral obligation to help others in need.

He was not perfect, far from it. But my father believed in redemption and he never surrendered. Never stopped trying to right wrongs, be they the results of his own failings or of ours.

But today I'm simply compelled to remember Ted Kennedy as my father and my best friend. When I was 12 years old I was diagnosed with bone cancer and a few months after I lost my leg, there was a heavy snowfall over my childhood home outside of Washington D.C. My father went to the garage to get the old Flexible Flyer and asked me if I wanted to go sledding down the steep driveway. And I was trying to get used to my new artificial leg and the hill was covered with ice and snow and it wasn't easy for me to walk. And the hill was very slick and as I struggled to walk, I slipped and I fell on the ice and I started to cry and I said "I can't do this." I said, "I'll never be able to climb that hill." And he lifted me in his strong, gentle arms and said something I'll never forget. He said "I know you'll do it, there is nothing you can't do. We're going to climb that hill together, even if it takes us all day."

Sure enough, he held me around my waist and we slowly made it to the top, and, you know, at age 12 losing a leg pretty much seems like the end of the world, but as I climbed onto his back and we flew down the hill that day I knew he was right. I knew I was going to be OK. You see, my father taught me that even our most profound losses are survivable and it is what we do with that loss, our ability to transform it into a positive event, that is one of my father's greatest lessons. He taught me that nothing is impossible.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (86)

PLAYS: (208)

Rachel Maddow gave some kudos to friend of the site Bob Cesca for his most awesomely titled headline at the Huffington Post, Healthcare Reform Named After Ted Kennedy Must Not Suck. I'll just add that I agree completely with both of them.

Hooboy. Did you hear about the neocon stenographers...er, national paper of record that printed an op-ed that might have as well been written by Dick Cheney himself? In a jingoistic and highly questionably-sourced article, WaPo's Fred Hiatt basically insisted that torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammad worked, damnit! And of course, the big Dick himself, Darth Cheney will be on Fox News to reinforce what a smart and wonderful thing torture is. And Princess Darth, Liz Cheney, will be on This Week's roundtable to reinforce it. Meanwhile, the legacy of Ted Kennedy will be still on everyone's mind too. Meet the Press, This Week and State of the Union will immerse themselves in the life and life's work of Kennedy. Any bets on how fast some GOPer (Orrin Hatch, I'm looking at you) will bemoan EMK's death as the end of the hope of bipartisanship on health care reform?

ABC's "This Week" - Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and John Kerry, D-Mass.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Hatch; Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Michael Eric Dyson, sociology professor at Georgetown University.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Kerry; Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.; Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Maria Shriver, nieces of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy; Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian; former Kennedy adviser Bob Shrum.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Howard Fineman, Michele Norris, Andrea Mitchell, Bill Plante. Topics: Has television forever altered American politics and changed history? Chris Matthews's special personal reflections on Senator Edward Kennedy. Meter Questions: Will outspoken fringe players dominate GOP for the rest of Obama's term? YES: 9 NO: 3; If unemployment is still high next year, will Obama revise his tax proposals? YES: 11 No: 1.

CNN's "State of the Union" - Hatch; Dodd; Red Sox president Larry Lucchino; Boston Mayor Thomas Menino; former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Thomas P. O'Neill III; environmental advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of Sen. Kennedy; Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, once a Kennedy aide; Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Mary Landrieu, D-La.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - An encore presentation of Fareed's Emmy nominated interview with China's Premier Wen Jiabao.

"Fox News Sunday" - Former Vice President Dick Cheney.

So, what's catching your eye this morning.