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ORALANDO, September 15, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In addition to his announcement that he is considering a run for President in 2012, former US Senator Rick Santorum gave his assessment of the controversy around the Ted Kennedy funeral during his speech to the Catholic Leadership Conference last week. Santorum's talk focused on rejuvenating the Catholic Church in the United States.During his speech Santorum lamented "what the Church allowed to happen" with the Kennedy funeral, referring to it as a "deification" of Kennedy.  "The damage done" to the Church, he said, "is profound.""We have Catholic politicians who have led this country astray, have led...

There will be no shortage of Kennedys this evening at President Barack Obama’s address on health care to a joint session of Congress. Vicki Kennedy, widow of the late Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, is a guest of First Lady Michelle Obama. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will host the late senator’s children, including Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy, Ted Kennedy Jr., and Kara Kennedy and her two children. The notable presence of Kennedy family members suggests the president will give a nod to the late senator in his speech this evening. Kennedy devoted much of his nearly five decade...

The Kennedy Funeral: Boston's Latest Scandal t | t | t | t by Phil Lawler, September 3, 2009   A week after the death of Ted Kennedy, the relevant question is not whether the Massachusetts Senator deserved a Catholic funeral, but whether he deserved a ceremony of public acclamation so grand and sweeping that it might, to the untutored observer, have seemed more like an informal canonization. We cannot know the state of Ted Kennedy's soul when he finally succumbed to brain cancer. We are told that he was visited regularly by a priest in his last days; we...

TORONTO, September 4, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The decision to permit a grandiose public funeral celebrating the life of  pro-abortion extremist Senator Ted Kennedy has caused a rift in the Catholic Church in North America.  Several prominent Catholic priests in the pro-life movement as well as other Catholic pro-life leaders criticized the decision, and advocated a more subdued private funeral instead.  Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley shot back Wednesday defending his actions with some fairly strong words for his critics.However, the war of words has escalated to new heights with the latest blogpost of Fr. Thomas Rosica, the President and CEO of...

Your head will explode when you read this. From NewsBusters: The Huffington Post explains that "Melissa Lafsky is the deputy web editor at Discover magazine, where she writes the Reality Base blog. She was previously the editor of the New York Times's Freakonomics blog, and is a former associate editor at HuffPo's Eat The Press." So she's a major-media-certified pundit when she wrote about Chappaquiddick drowning victim Mary Jo Kopechne on Arianna's pages today:Mary Jo wasn't a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future....We don't...

Here is video of Laura Ingraham talking with talk show host Nancy Skinner about incredible comments made about Mary Jo Kopechne by a blog poster at Huffington Post. Kopechne died on July 19, 1969 when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy drove the car they were traveling in off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island where she drowned, even as he escaped a failed to call authorities for many hours. The poster actually seemed to suggest that perhaps Kopechne would have felt her death "was worth it" if she could see, what the writer characterized as the incredible career Ted Kennedy went...

If we'd had insatiable 24/7 cable news networks in July 1969, the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which a passenger in a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy drowned would likely have dominated the national consciousness for months. Special programs every night devoted to nothing but pundits bickering over the depths of the 37-year-old Kennedy's responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, 28. Town-hall-style chat shows every afternoon in which ordinary Americans issued their verdicts and sentences before the evidence was in.

It was just one line at the end of a segment. But it spoke volumes about the way a media willing to look the other way saved Ted Kennedy's political career at the time of Chappaquiddick. Jim Pinkerton made the observation on yesterday's Fox News Watch at the very end of the segment on the media's treatment of Kennedy's death. View video here.

Mark Steyn: Things only a Kennedy could get away with And by not calling his bluff on Chappaquiddick, Americans became complicit in it. We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a...

Birth: Jul. 26, 1940 Death: Jul. 19, 1969 Teacher and Administrator, she is most remembered for her controversial death in an automobile accident with Senator Edward Kennedy; the resulting political scandal caused Kennedy to reverse his decision to run for the US Presidency. Born in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, she was the only child of insurance salesman Joseph and Gwen Kopechne. After graduating from Caldwell College, New Jersey, she taught at Montgomery Catholic High School in Montgomery, Alabama, and then moved to Washington DC to work as a secretary for Florida Senator George Smathers. Shortly afterwards, she went to work...

Didn't see this.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation — or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture — declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it. In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo...

The Huffington Post explains that "Melissa Lafsky is the deputy web editor at Discover magazine, where she writes the Reality Base blog. She was previously the editor of the New York Times's Freakonomics blog, and is a former associate editor at HuffPo's Eat The Press." So she's a major-media-certified pundit when she wrote about Chappaquiddick drowning victim Mary Jo Kopechne on Arianna's pages today:

From Kennedy’s close friend Ed Klein: I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?” That is just the most amazing thing. It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too. Hear audio here

Ed Klein, former editor for Newsweek and New York Times Magazine, was a close personal friend of Ted Kennedy and decided to share some memories of the late Senator on The Diane Rehm Show. KLEIN: I don't know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" That is just the most amazing thing. It's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of...

Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy stood for sleaze. Bloated and drunken, he used his standing in the Kennedy clan to chase vulnerable women - which brought his dream of reaching the White House to a shameful end. He was the youngest of the four Kennedy brothers, and by far the longest lived. Incredibly, he was in line to inherit his brother John F. Kennedy's legendary presidency, but his chances were dashed following the drowning of the pretty, young campaign assistant Mary Jo Kopechne. Forever known as the Chappaquiddick Incident after the Massachusetts island where it took place, the scandal in 1969...

Below is a small excerpt from a remarkable piece on Senator Kennedy by someone who, like me, spent many years in Massachusetts under the shadow of the Kennedy dynasty. It is a tribute to Kennedy from a liberal turned conservative, and the whole piece deserves to be read – no matter how you felt about the Senator. Nevertheless, its main point is that conservatives and moderates from every perspective should not put aside their opposition to the horrendous government health plans now making their way through Congress thinking it would be some sort of testimonial to Senator Kennedy. This would...

Ted Kennedy had an immeasurable impact on the American political landscape during his time in office and has been praised by feminists as a champion of women’s rights. But conservative women do not look upon Kennedy’s record with women as favorable because of the choices he made both in his political and in his personal life. Conservatives say that the left-wing feminist movement was pivotal in his approach towards women and women’s issues and destructive to the way he viewed women later on in his career. “Liberal feminists had a willful blind spot when it came to Ted Kennedy’s personal...

Back then the word “liberal” was associated with noble ideals. It involved having a concern for the poor and a bedrock belief that there were fundamental, inalienable human rights which must be recognized in the civil (positive) law because they were endowed by the Creator and revealed in the Natural Law. As the years have past, the word has changed in its meaning and that claim has been eroded. I still remember that he began his political career as a strong defender of the rights of children in the womb. For example, in 1971, Senator Kennedy described his strongly Pro-Life...

"After all is said and done, Ted Kennedy is still the man in American politics Republicans love to hate," Republican strategist Lee Atwater, himself the victim of brain cancer, observed in 1990. Though attitudes toward Senator Kennedy softened because of his illness, he remained a figure with few admirers who weren't also colleagues, constituents, or political fellow travelers. Kennedy votaries who dismiss criticisms of the late senator as the product of partisanship or ideological bitterness tell themselves a comforting lie. Scores of Democrats shared Kennedy's politics. None elicited the heated response in conservative direct mail, campaign ads, or red-meat speeches....