Senator Kennedy has lost his battle with cancer.
I just saw the breaking news from the New York Times. I do not do television in the morning. Too much to handle right now. Let’s pass a healthcare bill that will offer a public option in Senator Kennedy’s memory.
I was listening to Rage Against the Machine when I read the news.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver dies. Weird, I thought about her first thing this morning and wondered her condition.
The Kennedy family shaped my early life. This was long before I discovered dysfunctional families, theirs and my own. I gained positive incentives from the Kennedy family: staying athletically healthy my entire life, volunteering, social causes. Only Ted and Jean are survivors from the nine brothers and sisters of Rose and Joe Kennedy.
From the Los Angeles Times:
“He has lived for this day when America would finally extend this right to every citizen. There’s no doubt if he could, he would be here in the thick of this,” Kennedy’s son Patrick, a Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, said in a recent interview, sitting on a bench on the Capitol grounds with tears in his eyes.But history’s third-longest-serving senator isn’t out of the game yet. Exerting what influence he can from his sickbed, he advises his aides in Washington over the phone. He has made himself the poster child of what he calls “my life’s cause,” and is using his illness in a final press for universal healthcare.
Kennedy, 77, seems determined not to miss this. He has outlasted medical expectations since doctors diagnosed a malignant tumor last spring, and is not above expending every last bit of his political capital to deliver the bill he will be most remembered for. Democratic leaders plan to bring him back to the Senate floor later this year in a wheelchair, or a bed if necessary, to cast his vote for healthcare reform.
“I have enjoyed the best medical care money (and a good insurance policy) can buy. . . . Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to,” Kennedy wrote in an unusually personal essay published in this week’s Newsweek, adding near the end of the article: “We’re almost there.”
He cited his sophisticated course of treatment — risky surgery at Duke University Medical Center to remove part of the tumor, proton-beam radiation at Massachusetts General Hospital and multiple rounds of chemotherapy — as a privilege of the rich.
“My wife, Vicki, and I have worried about many things, but not whether we could afford my care and treatment.”
By HELENE COOPER Published: April 12, 2009
WASHINGTON — For the first time since settling into the White House, the Obama family attended church services in Washington on Sunday, but their closely watched search for a spiritual home was overshadowed by news that a longer quest — for a dog — had ended.
White House photograph by Pete Sousa
The Obamas with 6-month-old Bo, who was a gift from Senator Edward M. Kennedy and his wife, Victoria.
President Obama and his family attended Easter services at St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Square from the White House. Known as the “Church of the Presidents,” it is where President George W. Bush often attended services and where the Obamas went for special services on Inauguration Day.
There has been much speculation in Washington about which church the president and his family will regularly attend. They have not had a home church since the presidential campaign, when Mr. Obama and his family left Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago after a controversy involving the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. On the Sunday before he was sworn in, Mr. Obama attended Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington.
Yes, the children have a dog. Yeah!
Tags: Family | World | Obama | Easter | US Politics
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