Kennedy IS a working class hero

I am astonished that anyone in the Bay State would roll their eyes at me when I spoke of the tragedy that is Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor.
“Are you kidding?’’ one Kennedy-hater asked. “How can you say he is a friend to the working class?”
There are a plethora of reasons.
Some of you might have spent this gorgeous weekend on Cape Cod, enjoying forty miles of the most beautiful stretches of seashore in the nation. The state park that is the Cape Cod National Seashore was preserved from becoming an eyesore of McMansions without public access to the water (like the Hamptons in New York) because of the Kennedy clan. John F. Kennedy established the public beaches in 1961, and his brother has worked hard to protect the seaside legacy for 46 years.
Then there’s the fact that Kennedy has consistently done battle to protect the pocketbooks of scores labor unions members who are hurting because of the construction slow-down. This month, Kennedy fought to extend unemployment benefits.
"There seems to be no end in sight for the barrage of bad news for working families," Kennedy said on the floor. "This recession continues to cost American their jobs, their homes and their savings and Republican opposition is blocking them from the relief they urgently need."
Consider this: years before Massachusetts was facing gas prices of $4 a gallon, Ted Kennedy was lashing out at the White House saying, “We need to do something about gas prices.”
Kennedy even stuck up for the Patriots last week, saying Pennsylvania Republic Arlen Specter has better things to do in Congress than investigate the so-called spygate scandal.
"With the war in Iraq raging on, gasoline prices closing in on $4 a gallon, and Americans losing their homes at record rates to foreclosure, the United States Senate should be focusing on the real problems that Americans are struggling with," Kennedy said in a statement. "I'm looking forward to another great Patriots season where they can let their play on the field speak for itself."
What happened in Chappaquidick was inexcusable, but certainly no one can argue that Kennedy has not made amends for that incident that took place decades ago. I dare anyone to deny a messy personal life or a drunken mistake. Kennedy is not bilking the taxpayers for the lease on gas-guzzling Caddy like his fellow Democratic lawmaker Charles Rangle or hooking up with $1000-an-hour hookers like Elliot Spitzer.
Kennedy has served the public for his entire life. He could have abandoned the fight long ago, kicked back at his family’s Hyannisport estate, boarded his schooner and sipped lemonade enjoying the Cape Cod seashore that he helped save long ago.

Veteran's Art Gallery

Boy - the libs are really digging to try and bring down John McCain. A story in the Los Angeles Times questioned the measely $58,000 he collects in a tax-free combat-related special compensation pension of sorts. Outrageous to suggest McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years as a POW in Vietnam, does not deserve every penny of it. "He was tortured for his country,'' his strategist Mark Salter told the LA Times. Duh.

Please support artist Pete Damon in his new business. He is a war hero who lost his arms serving this country in Iraq. He now owns an art gallery right here in Massachusetts.

http://www.themiddleboroughartgallery.com/

SHOULD A WOMAN BE ENTITLED TO HER SLAIN SPOUSE'S SPERM - YES

Weeks after the World Trade Center towers crumbled, my life revolved around widows; women who lost their firefighters husbands, who were among the 343 FDNY members who raced into the smoldering buildings but never emerged from the rubble on the worst morning in American history – September 11, 2001.
One of those women was Tillie Geidel, who lost her firefighter husband Gary. On Thanksgiving Day 2001, I went to the Geidel’s home on Staten Island where the table was set with a place for her slain husband. In his place was a blown up picture of Gary Geidel which she pushed up to the edge of the table.
I listened as Tillie talked about her daughter, Matilda, a miracle baby that she and Gary were so grateful for after years of in vitro treatements. Then she broke the news that she wanted another miracle.
“I called the fertility clinic. I wanted to know if there was anything left of his sperm,’’ Geidel told me at the time. Unfortunately, that miracle was not meant to be I would later learn.
I supported Tillie Geidel’s fight and I also support the fight of Kynesha Dhanoolal who successfully fought to have sperm taken from his body and frozen four days after her 26-year-old husband was killed in Iraq. The widow’s mother, Yvonne Watkins, told Fox TV that her daughter hopes to have her husband's sperm artificially inseminated as early as this summer."We're trying to honor my daughter and Darren's wishes," Watkins said. "All of his comrades and anyone who knew them knew he wanted children."
Here is the FOX TV story on the Iraq war widow’s push to have a sample of her husband’s sperm preserved:
http://www.myfoxdc.com/myfox/pages/News/Detail?contentId=6245525&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=3.3.1

Here is the story I wrote for the New York Daily News on Thanksgiving 2001:

FAMILIES STRUGGLE ON A holiday filled with empty chairs and grief
MICHELE McPHEE, NICOLE BODE and EMILY GEST DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
1804 words
22 November 2001
New York Daily News
SPORTS FINAL
4
English
© 2001 Daily News, New York. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.
Seventy-three days after the World Trade Center collapse, thousands of families will sit down to Thanksgiving dinner today with an empty place at the table.
How are they spending the holiday, and how do they feel about observing it so soon after losing a husband or wife, a son, daughter, brother, sister or cherished friend?
On Staten Island, Jennifer Nilsen wants to skip Thanksgiving altogether. She is still overwhelmed by the loss of her husband, Troy, whose help she desperately needs to care for their two children - one of whom is autistic.
Elizabeth Rivas is skipping the family meal in Manhattan and heading to a camp upstate, where she and her four kids will seek the comfort of other families who lost someone in the disaster.
In Larchmont, Westchester County, 18 Reilly family and friends will miss Tim, who always helped peel the potatoes and never remembered to tell his mom he was bringing an extra guest to dinner.
Celebrating will be especially hard today for the families of those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, not only because their pain is so fresh on the first major holiday following the tragedy, but also because their loved ones died so violently, so needlessly.
"Picture whatever your celebrations are and an empty chair," said Bob Dingman, a disaster mental health services officer for the Red Cross who has counseled Sept. 11 families.
"You will notice that chair 27 times during dinner," he said. "And if that person said grace or made toasts, that empty chair is going to hit you like a sledgehammer."
Those fortunate enough to escape the towers also may be grieving today. "Sept. 11 is still very much a big part of their lives," said Dr. David Weng, director of an adult psychiatry clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. "It's also only been two months."
Some of the Thanksgiving stories of the families of Sept. 11: Full of dread
Jennifer Nilsen used to look forward to Thanksgiving, when her biggest worry was getting her husband and two young boys out the door without forgetting the apple crumb pie.
But after losing her husband, Troy, in the Trade Center attacks, the very idea of a feast fills her with dread.
"My husband loved Thanksgiving - it was one of his favorite holidays," said Nilsen, 32, a stay-at-home mom on Staten Island. "Him not being here, I don't even want the holidays to come."
Troy, 33, a network engineer for Cantor Fitzgerald, was the only one who could manage their 5-year-old autistic son, Scott, while she took care of 3-year-old Ryan.
When Nilsen announced she was skipping the festivities this year, her in-laws would have none of it.
"No matter what, we have to move forward. It's what Troy would want us to do," said his mother, Mary Nilsen, 62, who cooks the family dinner each year at her Staten Island home.
As she prepares the candied sweet potatoes, cauliflower with onion sauce, stuffing and a 21-pound turkey, Mary Nilsen will think of Troy. Since he was a teenager, her son was in charge of the spuds.
"He would whip those potatoes creamy and delicious," she said. "Nobody can take his place with that."
Sharing the pain
The kitchen is no place for Elizabeth Rivas today.
Since she married Moises Rivas six years ago, they had always made Thanksgiving dinner together when he got home from his job as a line cook at Windows on the World.
"We both cooked - turkey, rellenos from Ecuador and salads," recalled Elizabeth, 39, of Washington Heights.
Moises, 29, covered a friend's shift Sept. 11 and was lost when the restaurant on the 107th floor of the north tower crumbled.
"I don't want to be here. I want to get away," Elizabeth said. "I don't want to think about all the things that have happened to me."
She and her children, ages 2, 4, 12 and 15, will spend the long holiday weekend at the Fresh Air Fund's 3,000-acre Sharpe Reservation in upstate Fishkill, where they will participate in cookouts, boating, fishing and hiking with other grieving families.
It is a welcome getaway. Moises Jr., 4, still thinks it's his fault that Pappy didn't come home from work. Moises thinks he was a bad boy.
"There are going to be a lot of people there who are missing people, but at least we're all going to be together," Elizabeth said.
Looking for a miracle
Tillie Geidel already had one Thanksgiving miracle. Now she's hoping for another.
Geidel and husband, Gary, had tried to have a baby for years. Drugs and life-threatening operations didn't work. In a final effort, they took out a $10,000 loan and went to an in-vitro fertilization clinic.
After a series of painful disappointments, the treatment finally worked. The day Tillie found out she was pregnant, Gary, her rough- and-tumble firefighter husband, sobbed.
Mathilda was born Thanksgiving 1994.
Today, Tillie will set a place at the table for Gary, a missing member of the FDNY's elite Rescue 1 squad.
Gary, 45, a 20-year department veteran, died weeks before he planned to retire and move his family upstate. Tillie, 35, has refused to hold a memorial service, light a candle, watch TV or even read newspaper stories about the attacks.
"He was not supposed to [work] that day. I still can't believe this really happened," she said from the Staten Island home her husband built.
In recent days, she has begun to accept the sad reality that Gary will not take his place at the holiday table, though she will set a place for him anyway.
Tillie is hoping for another miracle. On Nov. 12, the day after her 12th wedding anniversary, she called
the Brooklyn fertility clinic that helped her conceive Mathilda. "I wanted to find out if there was anything left of him," she said.
The couple's doctor came to the phone in tears. For some reason, they still had some of Gary's frozen sperm, even though the Geidels had not paid to save a sample.
Tillie plans to undergo the procedure again and hopes to have her late husband's baby - maybe even by next Thanksgiving.
"We already had one Thanksgiving miracle, and I think God might have another one for us," she said.
If it's a boy, his name will be Gary Miracle Geidel.
"It would prove that God is still there," Tillie said.
Center of the family
For years, Tim Reilly surprised his mother when he brought home unexpected guests to Thanksgiving dinner. Claire Reilly Walcovy would scramble to set an extra place at the table, and fretted there wasn't enough food.
"He had a way with people. He could do those things and not get the wrath of God from my mother," said Tim's oldest brother, Chuck. "Typically, the people he brought over didn't have a place to go. He always tried to include people in our celebration."
Each year, Tim, 40, a vice president at Marsh &McLennan, was first of the six Reilly kids to call and ask about the Thanksgiving plans, said his sister, Maureen.
"He was the centerpiece of the family," she said.
Tim used to peel the potatoes, and he loved to make toasts. Last Thanksgiving, he raised a glass to Maureen's engagement, a nephew's success on the football field, a cousin who died and his mother, whom he saved from a near-fatal car accident.
Today, some of Tim's surprise guests of years past will be among the 18 people gathered around the table at Walcovy's apartment in Larchmont, including one who credited Tim with preventing his suicide.
They will join a few of the 48 first cousins whom Tim knew well and wanted his siblings to know better. And there will be a place for Tim.
"That empty chair is going to be there," Walcovy said. "Everything is so raw."
Celebrating luck
Louis Lesce is ready for someone else to prepare and clean up after Thanksgiving dinner.
"I'm tired of cooking," said Louis, 64, who normally assembles an Italian Thanksgiving feast of antipasto, mussels, fried calamari, salad, lasagna, sausage and meatballs, turkey, cranberry, stuffing, roasted potatoes, string beans and cream puffs.
"I'm going to pay the bill and walk out," he said of the meal he plans to have at a diner with his wife, Karen, and her mother. "Then I'm going to go to Atlantic City and win a lot of cash."
Louis has a right to feel lucky. Having had a quadruple bypass, he managed to climb down 86 floors of 1 World Trade Center.
"If I had stayed in the building seven minutes more, it would have collapsed on me," said Louis, a career-transition specialist who lives in Howard Beach, Queens. "I was with 20 people. I was the only one who got out."
Louis, whose left eye is a fiery red from a corneal abrasion he suffered Sept. 11, said he doesn't mind missing his kids or 10 grandchildren today, since he sees them every week.
"I want to be with my wife a lot more now," he said. "Even if I'm not working, I'll ride the bus with her. I don't want to be away from her."
New life
Another survivor, Jacqueline Landrau, 34, will give thanks for the healthy birth of her son, Rey, who arrived two days after the attacks.
Landrau, with boyfriend Reinaldo McFarland and their three young children, will join about a dozen other relatives today for a turkey dinner at McFarland's mother's apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
"Before, people took things for granted," said Landrau, a Morgan Stanley office assistant who escape down 45 flights of stairs and is still anxious about life.
"But now, everybody has had time to think about their lives and how they are going to spend it with their family."

"Caddies and Curtains - How to Redecorate on the Taxpayer's Dime"

BY MICHELE McPHEE
The legislators who wanted some of us to be able to play “Let It Ride” at a luxury casino slated to replace the ramshackle Suffolk Downs racetrack down the street from the litter-strewn park in Eastie where I reside, the lawmakers who were brave enough to battle Beacon Hill last week, were puzzled when their leader – our governor – Deval Patrick was in the wind on voting day.
But once again the governor of the Bay State is already viewing his gubernatorial reign as a part-time job.
Where was Patrick? He was being wined and dined by publishing houses in Manhattan for two work days last week. (I guess Patrick put in for a “volunteer day,” or two. Remember that rip-off for the taxpayers that allow state employees to take one day off a month to volunteer?) He left the Big Apple last Friday with a Big Book Deal - $1.35 million to write his autobiography.
I said it in my show last week. I have written two books (shameless self promotion right here: my second book, “Heartless, The True Story of Neil Entwistle and the Brutal Murder of His Wife and Child” will be available from St. Martin’s Press on June 3 or you can pre-order it at www.amazon.com) and it is not an easy endeavor. Granted, I didn’t have a seven-figure advance to motivate me, but I did, like Deval, have a deadline. And believe me, it’s not easy working a full-time job and meeting a publisher’s due date.
At least Mitt Romney waited until his final year in office until he pulled his vanishing trick and took off for 215 days. Now we have a governor who is going to write his memoir on the taxpayer’s time, meaning he will disappear as dynamically as Romney did. It certainly gives new meaning to Patrick’s campaign promise: “Magic Can Happen Here.”
So on the Friday night Michele McPhee show and on the Saturday morning slot we came up with some book titles that we would like to pass on to Patrick.
After much debate, here are the winners and the honorable mentions:
First Place: “Caddies and Curtains: How To Decorate On The Taxpayer’s Dime.”
Second Place: “Together We Can – Just Words?”
Third Place: “Deval-uation of Massachusetts: A state in a state of decline.”
Honorable Mention: “Audacity of Hype.”

He Was A Good Jake - In Memory of Bob Kilduff

“He Was A Good Jake” – by Michele McPhee

It is inevitable; a Godly law of sorts, that weather will be chaotic when we mark the Last Alarm of a firefighter with his funeral service. The rains are often torrential. Or maybe the sun is blinding through unnaturally blue skies. Sometimes winds are so fierce, the hats of the mourners are blown right off their heads.
This morning, it was pellets of ice that hurtled into the mourners outside the South End’s sprawling Cathedral Catholic church who gathered to remember 39-year Boston Fire Lieutenant Bob “B.K.” Kilduff.
The dinging of the ice rocks on car hoods accompanied the skirling of bagpipes as politicians, firefighters and loved ones crowded into the church. All of them walked past Kilduff’s fire helmet, battered and rusty from his nearly four decades of service to this city, held aloft by a lone firefighter in at the top of the church steps. The helmet’s numbers, 2-3, were blackened by acrid smoke and banged up from the rescues of children and elderly from flames; dented from the collapses and explosions and unforeseen dangers that can strike a firefighter at any time while working on the line.
It was Bob Kilduff’s helmet that made me angry this morning. Angry that Barack Obama thinks he could be my President despite having befriended a hateful bigot who, just days after the World Trade Center towers fell, stood at a pulpit screaming “the chickens have come home to roost” and blaming foreign policies of this country for the cowardly slaughter of 3,000 Americans in New York City, in a field in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon on 9-11 2001. At the very moment that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was screaming, guys like Bob Kilduff were digging - crawling through the rubble for the missing. And then they carried out the bashed helmets of the 343 New York City firefighters who rushed into the towers to pull off the largest rescue in this country’s history but would never emerge from the rubble of the towers.
As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was ranting about Americans and whites and Jews; the children, wives, parents of those 343 slain firefighters were in churches or mosques or synagogues with nothing but a torn bunker gear coat, or a badge, or a patch to remember their lost. They honored this country, never disparaged it. Today, empty helmets are being carried by the families of emergency responders that continue to be felled by the poisonous toxins sucked in that terrible morning; breathed into their lungs at the exact moment Jeremiah Wright was using his lungs to scream hateful propaganda that suggested we brought 9-11 on ourselves.
One month before Kilduff died he was at a union event representing Boston jakes as the Vice President of Local 718, the union that represents firefighters. There he told the assembly, “We stood together in good times and in difficulties.” And Kilduff was right.
That is exactly why I am so raised up about Barack Obama and his minister. The divisive rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright should have been condemned by Obama long before he was shamed into delivering “The Race Speech” in Philadelphia this week (a large portion of which was I thought read more about ‘’why the working-class whites are angry’’ rather than as a much-needed explanation on why the Senator not only attended the church, but financially supported it with a check in 2006 for $22,500.)
No man of honor would tear down his own, his compatriots, like Wright did four days after 9-11. The attacks were an opportunity for all ministers, pastors, rabbis, clerics to truly exemplify what has now become a campaign slogan made famous by our governor: “Together We Can.”
Now that slogan is "just words," to plagarize, borrow, whatever, another Patrick/Obama campaign speech.
Wright would have been better served by turning to the work of FDNY Fire Chaplin Mychal Judge – the first man to die on 9-11, and a recovering drunk who helped scores of alcoholics from every background and ethnicity achieve sobriety. That’s my definition of a spiritual advisor – which is what Rev. Jeremiah Wright was to the Barack Obama campaign
Barack Obama’s speech on race in America will become a historical one, but it wasn’t enough to explain how he came to embrace a man whose views on bigotry were so damning. And it didn’t explain why he lied to the American people by telling us that he never heard Wright's hate mongering, the second lie in as many months from the Obama camp. The first was about the call to Canada about NAFTA which Obama only came clean about after confronted with a memo.
Boston Fire Lt. Bob Kilduff liked to tell “his boy” – his son Bobby, also a Boston firefighter – that “no matter what the situation, there is a way of leaving it better than you found it.” That’s how Kilduff lived his life, going as far as to scribble legislation on scrap paper during the last days of his life. His good friend and Local 718 President Ed Kelly said it best: “B.K. died a warrior’s death.”
But in my view Barack Obama’s race speech did not leave me feeling any better about the fact that he brought a guy like Wright into the inner circles of our government. It’s a question of integrity. “Show me your friends I’ll show you who you are,” is an adage that many of our mothers swore by.
Well, today Bob Kilduff’s friends crowded into a Boston church while Barack Obama’s friend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continued to insult the memories of all the emergency responders who laid down their lives in service to this country. And Barack Obama continued to insult our intelligence with the lazy lie: I didn't know.

"The Clutch"

Why do women engage in "the Clutch?" Silda Spitzer made me physically ill when I saw her make that long, slow, horrifying walk into the hot glare of TV lights, her eyes cast downward as throngs of hostile peppered her husband - who will now forever be known as Client No. 9 - with questions about the tens of thousands he is accused of spending on a high-end hooker. The humiliation was etched into her face with an embarrassed smirk. Still the Harvard-educated attorney was there, clutching Elliot Spitzer's arm. She is not the only political wife who engaged in "the Clutch" in recent memory. There was Hillary Clinton's famous hand-holding when Bill Clinton wagged his finger at the American public saying "I did not have sex with that woman!" Larry "Senator Wide Stance" Craig dragged his poor wife into the cacophony of TV trucks and camera flashes when he was caught toe-tapping gay sex signals in a public restroom at a Minneapolis airport. David Vitter's wife was in the "Clutch" after his name was found in the black book of an infamous DC Madam. Gary Hart's wife stood-by-her-man after he was caught in compromising positions with a young hottie. Gary Condit's wife was in the clutch even after her husband's admitted lover Chandra Levy went missing and is presumed dead. The best clutch came from Dina McGreevy, who clutched the hand of her New Jersey governor husband when he declared: "I am a gay American."

If any boyfriend I had was unmasked as a prostitute paying-sicko, was caught having an affair with a college student, or was busted for toe-tapping a signal wanting a quick Monica Lewinsky in the stall of a men's room, the only clutch I would engage in would happen lower than his hand...and it would probably make him weep with much more than regret.

You can't put a price on dignity.

ARE YOU A SLOTH? CYNIC? COMPLACENT? MICHELLE OBAMA THINKS SO

Here is a link to the story I am talking about tonight, Thursday March 6

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/10/080310fa_fact_collins/?yrail