Yup, he's gone. :-)

i just read about it on twitter.....

After a long bout with cancer.

Cancer related.

That family has seen more than its fair share of tragedy. May all of the deceased Kennedys rest in peace.

I haven't heard anything. I've been so busy that you broke the news first for me. I know he was concerned that the person to replace him would be chosen quickly, and that was 2 days ago. Thank you. +5

He had the same birthday as me! We are twins! (although he was just a little bit older)

I'm in Massachusetts,the entire clan is royalty here. Every channel is reporting his death!!

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, has died after battling a brain tumor. He was 77. Kennedy's family announced his death in a brief statement released early Wednesday. The arc of Kennedy's 46-year career in the U.S. Senate provides a cautionary reminder of how first impressions can turn out to be woefully wrong. When Kennedy entered the Senate in 1963 he was widely viewed as callow and unqualified, ridiculed as the playboy baby brother of a glamorous president and a hard-driving attorney general. A distinguished Harvard law professor, Mark De Wolfe Howe, spoke for many when he archly called Kennedy "a fledgling in everything except ambition." The young senator's image suffered further a few years later when a car he was driving after a night of partying in Chappaquiddick, Mass., went off a bridge, killing a young woman passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. At the time, many predicted that his political career was over. Yet Kennedy persevered. By the time he died early Wednesday morning, after a valiant battle with brain cancer, he was known as "the Lion of the Senate," lauded by political friend and foe alike as one of the most effective legislators in the nation's history. FIND MORE STORIES IN: George W. Bush | Ted Kennedy | Orrin Hatch | Robert Byrd | F. Scott Fitzgerald | Mary Jo Kopechne Over the decades, he became the canny and persistent driving force behind efforts, many of them successful, to expand the availability of health care, education and housing and advance the rights of immigrants, women, minorities, gays and the disabled. While drawing crowds with his skillful political oratory on behalf of Democratic causes, Kennedy — more so than many of his younger, hyper-partisan congressional colleagues — found ways to reach across the aisle to get things done. He helped push President George W. Bush's education reforms into law. He worked with some of the Senate's most conservative Republicans on AIDS research, health insurance and common-sense immigration reform, among other issues. One of those conservatives, Orrin Hatch of Utah, even wrote a song in praise of Kennedy. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who served more than a half-century in the Senate and is the guardian of its traditions, recalled a couple of years ago, "I did not particularly like him at the beginning. He did not like me." The two battled both over legislation and leadership posts, but became close. When the news broke of Kennedy's diagnosis with cancer last year, Byrd broke into tears on the Senate floor, calling out, "Ted, Ted, my dearest friend, I love you and I miss you." The nation will miss Ted Kennedy, too. He overcame great tragedy — the death of one brother in war, and two by assassination — and personal failures to redeem himself through public service. If life were like the movies, an ailing Kennedy would have been wheeled into the Senate chamber to cast a final, decisive vote on universal health care, an enduring cause of his long career. Alas, that cinematic finale was not to be. Yet Kennedy's towering legacy as a senator proves that contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous maxim, there are second acts in American lives.

Nope..this is the first I heard of this info!

Not much, yet, but he had been fighting a brain tumor for a year, now. He is the last of a generation of a pretty phenomenal family. I have not always agreed with him, but that is beside the point. He, like the others, could have just sat on their wealth and done no real work for their country. Whatever causes he worked for, I believe he was at least sincere. He had his flaws, but so do we all. My first really positive impression of him was his eulogy for his brother Robert and being able to do that at such a time. RIP.

No...but we knew it was imminent when he didn't attend his sister's funeral. RIP from me as well.

just that he passed away around 11:00pm

i am saddened for his family and an icon in politics has left us whether we agreed with him personally or not. +5

I heard all four living ex Presidents are going to be at his funeral.

Alas, he is reunited with Mary Jo Kopechne. Maybe he is getting an earful for leaving her to suffocate on a last pocket of air in that upside down gaudy Oldsmobile while he putzed around all night calling his buddies about his having drunked up and crashed a car.

Yes, he has been very respecfully broadcast in the news all day. Nothing like Michael Jackson, of course. I am really concerned as to who will replace him since he was irreplaceable as a great Senator of Massachusetts.

ya i did the night when it happened

The Last of the Kennedy Dynasty … may he go “fast!” As soon as his cancer was detected, I noticed the immediate attempt at the "canonization" of old Teddy Kennedy by the mainstream media. They are saying what a "great American" he is. I say, let's get a couple things clear and not twist the facts to change the real history. 1. He was caught cheating at Harvard when he attended it. He was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him. 2. While expelled, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, but mistakenly signed up for four years instead of two. Oops! The man can't count to four! His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to England (a step up from bootlegging liquor into the US from Canada during prohibition), pulled the necessary strings to have his enlistment shortened to two years, and to ensure he served in Europe, not Korea, where a war was raging. No preferential treatment for him! (like he charged that President Bush received). 3. Kennedy was assigned to Paris , never advanced beyond the rank of Private, and returned to Harvard upon being discharged. Imagine a person of his "education" NEVER advancing past the rank of Private! 4. While attending law school at the University of Virginia , he was cited for reckless driving four times, including once when he was clocked driving 90 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood with his headlights off after dark. Yet his Virginia driver's license was never revoked. Coincidentally, he passed the bar exam in 1959. Amazing! 5. In 1964, he was seriously injured in a plane crash, and hospitalized for several months. Test results done by the hospital at the time he was admitted had shown he was legally intoxicated. The results of those tests remained a "state secret" until in the 1980's when the report was unsealed.. Didn't hear about that from the unbiased media, did we? 6. On July 19, 1969, Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts . At about 11:00 PM, he borrowed his chauffeur's keys to his Oldsmobile limousine, and offered to give a ride home to Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker. Leaving the island via an unlit bridge with no guard rail, Kennedy steered the car off the bridge, flipped, and into Poucha Pond. 7. He swam to shore and walked back to the party, passing several houses and a fire station. Two friends then returned with him to the scene of the accident. According to their later testimony, they told him what he already knew - that he was required by law to immediately report the accident to the authorities. Instead Kennedy made his way to his hotel, called his lawyer, and went to sleep. Kennedy called the police the next morning and by then the wreck had already been discovered. Before dying, Kopechne had scratched at the upholstered floor above her head in the upside-down car. The Kennedy family began "calling in favors", ensuring that any inquiry would be contained. Her corpse was whisked out-of-state to her family, before an autopsy could be conducted. Further details are uncertain, but after the accident Kennedy says he repeatedly dove under the water trying to rescue Kopechne and he didn't call police because he was in a state of shock. It is widely assumed Kennedy was drunk, and he held off calling police in hopes that his family could fix the problem overnight. Since the accident, Kennedy's "political enemies" have referred to him as the distinguished Senator from Chappaquiddick. He pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given a SUSPENDED SENTENCE OF TWO MONTHS. Kopechne's family received a small payout from the Kennedy's insurance policy, and never sued. There was later an effort to have her body exhumed and autopsied, but her family successfully fought against this in court, and Kennedy's family paid their attorney's bills ... a "token of friendship"? 8. Kennedy has held his Senate seat for more than forty years, but considering his longevity, his accomplishments seem scant. He authored or argued for legislation that ensured a variety of civil rights, increased the minimum wage in 1981, made access to health care easier for the indigent, and funded Meals on Wheels for fixed-income seniors and is widely held as the "standard-bearer for liberalism". In his very first Senate roll, he was the floor manager for the bill that turned U.S. immigration policy upside down and opened the floodgate for immigrants from third world countries.. 9. Since that time, he has been the prime instigator and author of every expansion of an increase in immigration, up to and including the latest attempt to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. Not to mention the pious grilling he gave the last two Supreme Court nominees, as if he was the standard bearer for the nation in matters of "what's right". What a pompous ass! 10. He is known around Washington as a public drunk, loud, boisterous and very disrespectful to ladies. JERK is a better description than "great American". "A blonde in every pond" is his motto. Let's not allow the spin doctors make this jerk a hero -- how quickly the American public forgets what his real legacy is. Keep this going for truth, justice and the American way!