This is disgusting. I'm gonna puke

[link to news.yahoo.com]


are they fucking for real? so pants around the ankles, drunk driving the broad you knocked up to her death or waitress sandwiches are all part of the 'lion"? this guy was a pure demon from hell that made a career out of destroying and weakening america. take money from people that earn it and give it to those that sit on their ass.

FUCK OFF! Stop selling it, nobodies buy'in it.....

Ted Kennedy's Quiet Catholic Faith

By AMY SULLIVAN / WASHINGTON
2 hrs 22 mins ago

The wall heading down to the basement in my parents' house is covered with framed photos of friends and family members. Yet hanging right there in the midst of them, next to graduation portraits and vacation snapshots, is a photo of Bobby Kennedy. In that reverential treatment of the Kennedy clan, my parents were far from alone. For million of American Catholics, the election of John Kennedy in 1960 as the first Catholic U.S. President was a personal triumph, and for decades after they showed their pride by hanging pictures of the President and his brothers as if they were part of the family.
It's safe to say that no other American family has been so associated with the word Catholic as the Kennedys. But while they were famously Catholic, the hard-living Kennedys weren't known for being famously devout. So it might come as a surprise that faith played a deep and important role for many of them, including Ted Kennedy. The Rev. Patrick Tarrant, who was at the Senator's bedside the night he died, told ABC News that Kennedy was "a man of quiet prayer." Said the priest: "The whole world knows a certain part of his life very well, but I think there's another part of his life that very few people know, and that is his deep faith." (See a Kennedy family photo album.)
That faith was instilled by Rose Kennedy, the family matriarch, who for much of her life attended Mass twice daily at St. Francis Xavier in Hyannis Port, where her daughter Eunice was buried last week. Rose's children and grandchildren complained of being coerced to accompany her. But the little church on the Cape provided comfort in the times of tragedy that seemed to visit the Kennedys like the seasons. After their eldest brother Joe died during World War II, John and his sister Kathleen - both of whom sometimes struggled with their faith - would go to St. Francis Xavier together to pray.
Teddy's relationship with the church was uneven. He felt more disconnected from his faith after losing four of his older siblings to early and violent deaths, surviving a plane crash that killed one of his aides, and experiencing the tragedy and scandal of Chappaquiddick. But he continued to pray, even when he wasn't sure it would do much good. In the early 1980s, after the failure of both his marriage and his challenge to take the Democratic presidential nomination from Jimmy Carter, Kennedy would often walk across the street from the Senate office buildings to St. Joseph's parish, where his brother Bobby also used to find solace in prayer. (See pictures of the Lion of the Senate.)
When Kennedy spoke publicly about religion, it was usually in political - not personal - terms. In 1983, several months after he mistakenly received a fundraising letter from the Moral Majority asking for help battling "ultra-liberals like Ted Kennedy," he accepted an apologetic invitation to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University). The Senator delivered an address on the topic of "Faith, Truth and Tolerance," but it was less a personal discussion of his faith than a chance to prove that he wasn't afraid to show up in the lions' den. In a speech that went after critics in the Religious Right, Kennedy quoted Pope John XXIII's words at the start of the Second Vatican Council: "We must beware of those who burn with zeal but are not endowed with much sense."
Kennedy only fully embraced Catholicism later in life, particularly after marrying his second wife. Vicki Kennedy was one of a handful of prominent Catholic Democrats who strongly urged John Kerry to defend questions about his faith during the 2004 presidential campaign, and she served as a surrogate for the Obama campaign in 2008 in heavily Catholic areas. The now retired Monsignor Thomas Duffy remembers the Senator and his wife becoming regular fixtures at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Washington's Chevy Chase neighborhood. "He and Vicki used to come to Mass rather regularly when they were in town," says Duffy, noting that her children also went to confession and attended religion classes. "We sometimes didn't agree on certain issues, but we would always chat."
See the most memorable quotes by Senator Kennedy.
See TIME's complete Ted Kennedy coverage.
Kennedy also relied on his faith as he watched his two eldest children struggle with cancer. While his daughter Kara was undergoing treatment at a nearby hospital in the Mission Hill section of Boston, Kennedy used to stop for prayer at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica, the church where his funeral will take place on Saturday, Aug. 29. The amount of time her youngest child spent in churches would have surprised and gratified Rose Kennedy. In 1995, Teddy spoke of her legacy, "She sustained us in the saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us."
As his faith became a bigger part of his life, Kennedy became more sensitive to accusations that Democrats were godless and hostile to religion. One week after the 2004 election, he placed a call to the left-leaning Evangelical leader Jim Wallis. "They're saying we're not religious," Kennedy told Wallis. "But we know that's not true." Wallis spent an evening at the Kennedy home, talking with the Senator and Vicki, and left surprised by what he heard. "I'd never heard Ted Kennedy speak publicly about his faith the way some other politicians do," Wallis recalls now. "But the conversation was very personal and very theological - we talked about Scripture and Catholic social teaching and moral issues, including abortion." Kennedy, he says, "was deeply conflicted on abortion, feeling kind of trapped by the liberal side, frankly." (See pictures of Pope Benedict XVI visiting America.)
Indeed, abortion was the main topic for which Kennedy received criticism from church leaders. He had begun his political career opposed to abortion - in a 1971 letter, Kennedy wrote, "Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized." But like many other Democratic politicians, he became a supporter of abortion rights by the 1980s. By the end of his career he was regularly awarded a 100% positive rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America for his abortion-related votes, a record that put him at odds with Church leadership.
The history of American Catholicism will no doubt highlight the fact that John Kennedy had to prove that he wasn't too Catholic in order to win the presidency in 1960, and 40 years later, his brother watched as Democrats like Kerry faced down charges that they weren't Catholic enough. "Abortion is the big issue, and John Kennedy never had to directly confront that," says Shaun Casey, author of The Making of a Catholic President. "We'll never really know how he might have handled that." (Read "How the Democrats Got Religion.")
Even so, John Kennedy's election and Ted Kennedy's decades-long leadership helped form a strong Catholic identification with the Democratic Party that still resonates. Catholic voters have shifted to support Republican candidates in some elections, but they maintain a connection with the Democratic Party that doesn't exist in the same way with, for example, Evangelical voters. Those photos on the wall, and the Catholic social teaching behind the social-justice issues that Ted Kennedy championed, continue to exert a pull.
And ultimately, says Casey, Senator Kennedy's relationship with Catholicism is one familiar to many American Catholics. "He went through a period of alienation from the Church," says Casey. "But he came back on his own terms. He made a form of peace with the Church. That should give hope to lots of Catholic Democrats that they might find a way to stay in the fold."