86 Ted

[trancendyce]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/us...8mourn.html?hp

[spinetingler]

Saw a couple of very cook Kennedy documentaries last night.

Saw quite a bit of stuff that I didn't previously know.

[Scott]

check it out

He is so loved here in Boston.

http://www.boston.com/

[Gray]

paraphrased from FiveThirtyEight: a partial list of the men and women who served in the 86th Congress when Ted Kennedy was seated in 1962:

Alabama’s John Sparkman; Arizona’s Barry Goldwater and Carl Hayden; Arkansas’ J. William Fulbright; Connecticut’s Abe Ribicoff and Thomas Dodd; Georgia’s Richard Russell; Idaho’s Frank F. Church; Illinois’ Everett Dirksen; Indiana’s Birch Bayh; Louisiana’s Russell Long; Maine’s Edmund Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith; Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy (and later, Walter Mondale, who filled Humphrey’s seat at the end of that Congress); Mississippi’s John Stennis; Montana’s Michael J. Mansfield; Nebraska’s Roman Hruska; New York’s Jacob Javits; North Carolina’s Sam Ervin; Rhode Island’s Claiborne Pell; South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond; South Dakota’s George McGovern; Tennessee’s Al Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver; Texas’ Ralph Yarborough and John Tower; Virginia’s Harry Byrd; Washington’s Scoop Jackson; West Virginia’s Robert Byrd; and Wisconsin’s William Proxmire.

That's impressive. If you were going to do an All-Time Fantasy Senate draft, you wouldn't exactly take the 2009 squad over the Lions (and Lioness) of '62.

[ernie]

The Believer

[Scott]

so every living president except Bush sr will be in Boston Tomorrow is that a secret service nightmare or what.

I hope Bush Sr is all right.

[Hayduke]

so every living president except Bush sr will be in Boston Tomorrow is that a secret service nightmare or what.

I hope Bush Sr is all right.

Haven't heard anything about him lately. Is he still jumping out of perfectly good airplanes on his birthday every year?

[rikki]

Haven't heard anything about him lately. Is he still jumping out of perfectly good airplanes on his birthday every year?

That's the last time I saw him in the news. He may be too busy counting the piles of cash Carlyle Group earned during his son's Presidency.

Remember back in the pre-9/11 world when the worst criticism of the Baby Bush Presidency was that his cabinet was eaten up with conflicts of interest and was raking in millions from policy changes they implemented? Oh, to have those innocent days back again.

[itchybro]

so every living president except Bush sr will be in Boston Tomorrow is that a secret service nightmare or what.

I hope Bush Sr is all right.

He probably felt it would be in bad taste to attend.

[itchybro]

Found this tidbit to be quite amusing:

In 1983, Ted gave his own version of the Houston speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. A Washington Post reporter discovered that the Moral Majority had sent Kennedy a membership card—despite his being one of their targets at the time. Responding to the reporter's request for comment, Falwell's spokesman Cal Thomas jokingly invited Kennedy to come on down. Kennedy called his bluff. "I told Falwell, and he turned two or three different colors," recalls Thomas. The senator arrived on the appointed day with an adviser and his daughter, Kara, and they all had dinner at Falwell's house. The speech, remembers Thomas, "criticized those who attacked Falwell and conservative Christians. It was incredibly well balanced." In the heated early 1980s, the speech was Ted's attempt to remind Americans of his brother's insistence on tolerance and decorum in the religious sphere: "We must never judge the fitness of individuals to govern on the basis of where they worship, whether they follow Christ or Moses, whether they are called 'born again' or 'ungodly.' Where it is right to apply moral values to public life, let all of us avoid the temptation to be self-righteous and absolutely certain of ourselves."