Free Republic

Teddy's anger One of the enduring mysteries of the 2008 campaign was what got Ted Kennedy so mad at Bill Clinton. The former president's entreaties, at some point, backfired, and the explanation has never quite emerged. I've finally gotten my hands on a copy of Game Change, in which Heliemann and Halperin report: [A]s Hillary bungled Caroline, Bill’s handling of Ted was even worse. The day after Iowa, he phoned Kennedy and pressed for an endorsement, making the case for his wife. But Bill then went on, belittling Obama in a manner that deeply offended Kennedy. Recounting the conversation later...

It looks like the fix is in on national health-care reform - and it all may unfold on Beacon Hill. At a business forum in Boston today, interim Sen. Paul Kirk predicted that Congress would pass a health-care reform bill this month. “We want to get this resolved before President Obama’s State of the Union address in early to mid-February,” Kirk told reporters at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce breakfast. The longtime aide and confidant of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was handpicked by Gov. Deval Patrick after a controversial legal change to hold Kennedy’s seat, vowed...

I received this e-mail from a Massachusetts resident and businesswoman (and I verified her identity through publicly available sources), regarding a phone call she received last night: I got an odd call last night that presented as a survey on the Kennedy election. I was willing to participate in the survey but was left with a bad feeling when it was over. Today I am hoping to let a few people know. I saw your blog. They identified themselves as McGrath [sic - see below] from Denver but I was unable to find anything on Google. The questions were obnoxious;...

REPUBLICAN SCOTT Brown still needs a political miracle to win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. But a cool opponent is giving him hope.

Election 2010: The back-to-back Senate retirements of Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd may be just the beginning. The people have seen the future of health care reform and found it doesn't work. Apres moi, le deluge. We don't know what the Mayan calendar says about 2010, but it's starting to look like the end of the world for Democratic electoral prospects. Americans who watched in shock as government tried to step between them and their doctors, may have the last laugh. The tea party isn't over until the angry mob votes. As rage grew over the attempt to nationalize one-sixth...

An attractive Republican conservative actually has a good chance at winning a US Senate seat in Massachusetts and stopping Obamacare in its tracks. All that’s needed is for those Tea Party Patriots and other independents to come out in the cold and vote. How many times throughout our history has one person been the difference between success and failure in our wonderful country?

There have been no recent "scientific" polls for the January 19 Massachusetts special election that will fill the Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy's death. But there has been one kinda-sloppy telephone survey suggesting that Republican contender Scott Brown, a state senator in the Bay State legislature, might actually defeat Attorney General Martha Coakley, who won the early-December Democratic primary. I am content with Coakley, as I wrote a while back. But I voted for (and contributed to) Alan Khazei, the founder of City Year, who is one of the best of the "community organizers" I've met. He's a comer...

HotAir is a big voice in the conservative blogsophere and has done much to advance the cause of those wishing to stop and reverse the growth of a large central government. Unfortunately Hot Air's Ed Morrissey has brashly thrown his weight behind Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election. This is disturbing and disheartening for every tea party, small government loving soul in America. While I certainly cannot blame casual Massachusetts Republicans for getting excited over Brown's possible win over Martha Coakley, it becomes much harder to justify it in the case of Ed whose life revolves around politics and...

I swear we don’t plan this stuff out. But no sooner than does a series of articles about the Collier County Sheriff’s Office program to deport troublesome illegal aliens conclude than an illegal alien is in the headlines, and not in a good way. The sheriff’s program, as outlined in stories Sunday and Monday, targets illegal immigrants who run afoul of the law. Deputies, through extra training, are empowered to enforce federal laws and begin deportation proceedings as they see fit. In places without the program, local authorities have to rely on federal agents to undertake the deportation process against...

The whitewashing of Ted Kennedy continued on the cover of Parade magazine, a supplement to many Sunday newspapers around the country. Dotson Rader interviewed Victoria Kennedy, the second wife of the late senator. Decades of womanizing and a woman’s death at Chappaquiddick after Kennedy left the scene of an accident weren’t really noteworthy. One large bold pull quote read "Nobody had a better sense of what was right than Teddy." "Tell that to Mary Jo Kopechne" was not a sentence that appeared in the article. The other large pull quote from Mrs. Kennedy was "He was elected to make...

Politics: Sen. Mary Landrieu was the new "Louisiana Purchase." Sen. Ben Nelson got the federal government to pick up his state's future Medicaid tab. Maybe we should just put Senate votes up on eBay. Nelson, the 60th vote in the middle-of-the-night Senate party line vote on health care reform, will go down in American political history as the inventor of the permanent earmark. His seemingly principled stand against including federal funding for abortion evaporated like the morning dew as he decided to take what was behind door No. 1. The deal for Nelson includes special Medicaid funding for Nebraska, along...

"I worked with him on many issues across party lines. There has never a major reform accomplished in the history of this country that hasn't been bipartisan, and he certainly, uh...all of the negotiations and efforts that I made with him, we never engaged in this kind of unsavory process of offering people different deals, which in the end cost people from other states lots of money and put burdens on them."

The Moment Ted Kennedy Would Not Want To Lose By Victoria Reggie Kennedy Sunday, December 20, 2009 My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars -- and competing interests -- were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation's working families and of our economy as a whole. Still, Ted knew...

My late husband, Ted Kennedy, was passionate about health-care reform. It was the cause of his life. He believed that health care for all our citizens was a fundamental right, not a privilege, and that this year the stars -- and competing interests -- were finally aligned to allow our nation to move forward with fundamental reform. He believed that health-care reform was essential to the financial stability of our nation's working families and of our economy as a whole. Still, Ted knew that accomplishing reform would be difficult. If it were easy, he told me, it would have...

On the Next Right blog serial poster Ironman calls for Republicans to seriously contest the January 19 special election to fill Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. I’ve argued that this is a long shot, and Ironman doesn’t persuade me that it isn’t. But he does make one good statistical point. While Barack Obama’s 62%-36% margin in Massachusetts makes it seem out of reach for a Republican, Republican Chris Christie did win the gubernatorial race in New Jersey which Obama carried 57%-42%

With the clock ticking down towards the close of the polls at 8 p.m., some communities reported low voter turnout in the special primary elections for US Senate. People breezed past community centers, gymnasiums, town halls, and other polling places without a second thought, the majority paying no mind to the race to fill the office left vacant by the late Edward M. Kennedy. Four Democrats and two Republicans ....

Tuesday, Dec 8, is the primary election for the US Senate seat, formerly held by Ted Kennedy. There are contested elections for both the Democrat and Republican candidates. The general election will be on January 19. The seat is currently held by Kennedy's former aide, Paul Kirk, who was appointed by the governor after well-publicized (and pretty sleazy) vote by the Legislature to have an interim appointee because of their fear that a vote on the Obama health care package might come up before a special election could be held. We were going to wait until the general election in...

Six Candidates Seek Ted Kennedy’s SeatBy JIM HICKEY Islanders go the polls in the state primary on Tuesday to cast votes that will help choose Democratic and Republican candidates to run for the Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate left vacant in August when longtime Sen. Edward M. Kennedy — who held the seat for 46 years — died after a 14-month battle with brain cancer. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. in every town. The four Democratic candidates are Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, Stephen Pagliuca, a managing partner of the Boston Celtics, U.S. Rep. Mike...

The House votes 224-199 to cancel a one-year repeal of the estate tax, set to begin next month, and instead permanently extends the current tax, with a top rate of 45 percent on estates larger than $3.5 million.

It may not seem like it, but there is an election for United States Senator around the corner. Yes, its true. The election for Ted Kennedy’s old seat is speeding ahead. While the Democrats are embroiled in a heated primary, Republican candidate Scott Brown is quietly running a solid campaign. In most states, Brown would be crushing his fumbling liberal opponents. But this is Massachusetts. However, Democratic enthusiasm is in the dumps, while Republican enthusiasm is up. And there is a wild card. The election is being held in January, when many “snowbirds”, retirees with winter homes elsewhere, are gone;...