Kennedy, assorted

In no particular order:

-An old friend, who is probably left of myself, posts: "During a contract battle at UMass Teddy's refusal to cross the GEO picket line to go to the inauguration of the university president led to the resolution of the battle and a more or less win for GEO. We have lost a true friend. My heart is in the Commonwealth with you all today."

-From TPM, video of Kennedy going after Republicans on the Senate floor in 2007 for refusing to allow a vote on raising the minimum wage. This makes me think of how Kennedy's legacy is being defined right now. There's a fair amount of talk about how he "worked across party lines" (sure, that's true in plenty of cases, and makes for the kind of story a lot of columnists like). He needs to be remembered too for doing what was right, as in that video, even if it meant excoriating the other side. The classic example to me of a hero's story changed would be MLK - where his advocacy against the Vietnam war, among other things, is left out of the story. Let's make sure Kennedy's legacy includes the more radical parts.

-Successor: the field looks pretty good. I'm not sure about either of these Kennedy's running; I think they probably won't. They'd probably be alright if they did. As for the others, Capuano, Coakley and Meehan would all be pretty darn good. Stephen Lynch is the one possibility who's bad; he's the most conservative of the ten U.S. Representatives in MA. The danger, of course, is that some combination of the above folks split the liberal vote and Lynch wins. It's early yet to be worried about that, but it's something to watch for.

-I can only think of seeing Kennedy in person once. Maybe there were others I'm forgetting. It was at Logan Airport, at least 8 years ago if not a while before that. I was walking toward the back of the USAir gates at Terminal B and he had gotten off a plane and was walking toward the front. Wait, that's really him, I thought.