Once I find some video, I’ll link it. For now, here is the text of the speech. Good stuff.

What follows is the letter Teddy Kennedy sent to President Obama. When you look at the duplicitous Chuck Grassley’s and the loathsome Joe Wilsons of the GOP, I am more and more glad I have cast my lot with Barack Obama, the legend of the Kennedys, and folks like Sherrod Brown and Jim Webb, even with the latter’s conservative tendencies. Hell, he makes it look almost rational.

May 12, 2009

Dear Mr. President,

I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me – and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.

On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.

You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.

When I thought of all the years, all the battles, and all the memories of my long public life, I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the President who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me-and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination.

There will be struggles – there always have been – and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat – that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.

And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family’s health will never again depend on the amount of a family’s wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will – yes, we will – fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.

In closing, let me say again how proud I was to be part of your campaign- and proud as well to play a part in the early months of a new era of high purpose and achievement. I entered public life with a young President who inspired a generation and the world. It gives me great hope that as I leave, another young President inspires another generation and once more on America’s behalf inspires the entire world.

So, I wrote this to thank you one last time as a friend- and to stand with you one last time for change and the America we can become.

At the Denver Convention where you were nominated, I said the dream lives on.

And I finished this letter with unshakable faith that the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.

With deep respect and abiding affection,
[Ted]

Some miscreants in public school districts are not going to air the President’s address to our nation’s schoolchildren next week.

Pull their funding. Close any school that is unpatriotic enough to ban the President of the United States. This smacks of treason.

Do it now.

The Racist Rethugs have a variety of excuses as to why they reject Obama speaking to their children directly.

I’d love to say such opposition is based in reality. But hey, these are the same idiots calling Obama a socialist, fascist, and racist in the same breath. The reality is, he is none of those things and he certainly isn’t a liberal. Damn the luck, but I knew that when I backed him anyway.

Hell, thirty years ago, his policies would – in the main – label him as a Republican. Hell, forty years ago Richard Nixon was for employee-mandated health insurance. How far we’ve fallen that even Tricky Dick was more liberal than the so-called “Socialist” Obama.

Nah, these folks merely don’t want a black man telling their kids to live their dreams, stay in school, and to work hard – and possibly together! gasp! – at improving their lives and communities.

To be even more to the point, these racists “dun’t wanna a lazy nigger telling their rugrats how to live”.

In short, they are afraid he’s going to push an agenda of responsibility and service to our children. You know, like that’s a bad thing or something.

He might not even do it. I don’t know because the speech hasn’t even been publicly shown yet! But I do know there is a precedent for presidential brainwashing and that would be the Rethugs own Ronald Reagan trying to “indoctrinate” our children to be pro-gun and pro-tax cuts to the rich as he did back in 1988.

So….if you, like most Rethugs, support the insurance companies, you must be fine with a 22% chance of failure in getting your medical care paid for.

If we were in school, that would give you a 78, which is a C, and possibly a D in some districts.

For all their talk of American exceptionalism, Republicans are hunky-dory with a C-class medical insurance system. Yelling “We’re Number One” doesn’t make it so, as we increasingly are finding out.

Well, those of us who aren’t Republicans.

Not entirely related but more proof of anti-reform stupidity and hypocrisy:

Lastly, some words for Robert Reich on what the President should say in next Wednesday’s speech.

Not that he will.

Some calm, common sense for those trying to pretend Obama is a progressive lefty.

I, for one, am glad he’s in charge but certainly knew going in that he’d bend over backwards to please those who’d rather put a bullet in his head.

Let’s just hope it all works out for the best.

As promised, the video from Obama’s interview on CBS’s Sunday Morning yesterday where he discusses on how he tries to be a good father in the White House: