Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

U.S. Sen. Al Franken said today that the absence of the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy was already “a major loss” to the Senate debate on health care reform, and now the Massachusetts Democrat’s death “just makes me more determined to get it done.” 

Roll Call:

“He was a man who fought for kids and for the disabled and for the poor and the sick and the disadvantaged,” Franken said. Health care reform “was the cause of his lifetime.”

Kennedy’s passing, Franken said, “just makes me more determined to get it done.”

Associated Press (via Star Tribune):

“His inspiration will be there, maybe in a bigger way,” [Franken] said. “Who knows, maybe it’ll be called the Kennedy bill.”

Photos: WDCPIX

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar recalls a cryptic message from Sen. Ted Kennedy that mystified the staffer who took it: “The lantern is lit.”

Klobuchar tells the Minnesota Independent she recognized the message as Kennedy’s way of beckoning her to his tiny, memorabilia-bedecked U.S. Capitol office, where the liberal lion held a small salon of senators rapt with “wild stories” from Boston and the campaign trail.

Kennedy’s jokingly obtuse message was an example of the “delightfulness and wit” he had in surplus and which Klobuchar finds sorely lacking among politicians generally.

Klobuchar, who joined the Senate in early 2007, says Kennedy “was really welcoming to new senators” — kindly sparing them a pedantic “this is how it works” lecture about the institution.

And at some point he began inviting a small group of senators — Klobuchar, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Charles Schumer of New York and one or two others — to an office he kept in the Capitol, tucked behind a press room.

“I don’t even know why we were a group,” Klobuchar says. “We were not debating the issues of the day.”

But Klobuchar recalls with fondness Kennedy’s Irish yarns and stories of the Senate. To her they formed a kind of “gift of history,” bestowed over a series of “five, six, maybe 10″ meetings.

A rising talent on the Washington, D.C. emcee circuit herself, Klobuchar says she admired Kennedy’s ability to belt out a song for the 100 people at a birthday party she attended.

Most recently, Klobuchar said she spoke with the ailing Kennedy when he returned to the Senate for a vote last spring, visiting with him where he always sat: at the back of the chamber, where he could keep an eye on the room. They talked about how he was doing, then moved to current events.

“He loved to hear about Franken-Coleman,” she says. “Just like everybody else.”

Here is Klobuchar’s full statement:

Ted Kennedy’s wit and stories, his passion for a cause and his country, and his love for the Senate just made you want to go to work every day.

I had the privilege to serve with Ted Kennedy in the Senate for just two years. He was a mentor to so many of us just starting out, not in the traditional “this is how you get it done” way, but instead as an inspiration. He never gave up and had a fiery zest for the legislative battles that was always tempered by a bipartisan pragmatism. He was incredibly strong and effective and had the deep respect of everyone that worked with him.

My thoughts and prayers are with Vicki, his children, and the entire Kennedy family.

On Michelle Obama’s speech: “As an African American and as an American, it was extremely hopeful,” he said. ”That we’re going to move ahead and we’re going to turn the page on the past — on racial politics, on the civil-rights movement — and this is truly the beginning of the post-civil rights era.”

Remington also argued that the discord in the Democratic Party among Hillary Clinton supporters has been overstated by the media. “There are some peole that will always have sour grapes in every election cycle,” he noted. ”But I say this: if those people choose to not support Barack Obama at this point in the game, then they’re not Democrats. That’s just the fact of the matter. You need to support Barack Obama to move forward and beat this corrupt Republican regime or you’re not a Democrat.”

Penalties rise for City Pages’ parent: Expect penalties against Village Voice Media for its predatory ad-pricing suit in San Francisco to keep inching up. On May 19, a judge ordered SF Weekly (owned by City Pages’ parent, VVM) to pay nearly $16 million to competitor the San Francisco Bay Guardian and promise they wouldn’t sell ads below cost. The kicker: She also ordered the paper to pay legal costs for the Guardian, conservatively estimated to be around a cool mil.

About that level of political discourse… Noting the “deafening” silence in the blogosphere over news of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer, MPR’s Bob Collins emailed Scott Johnson at Power Line to see if a post was in the works. All heart, Johnson replied, “I am planning on writing about Senator Kennedy’s contribution to the lowering of the level of poltical [sic] discourse, but will probably wait til tomorrow morning to do so, if I don’t change my mind. “

Obama received the support of Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., a candidate for the presidency in 1980 and the brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, as well as that of President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.Kennedy Schlossberg penned an editorial in the New York Times, in which she compared Obama to her father. “I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” Kennedy Schlossberg said, “But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president – not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.”

Kennedy Schlossberg’s uncle, Ted Kennedy, is considered one of the old lions of the Senate, and has been a symbol of unapologetic liberalism to Democrats and Republicans alike. Kennedy will appear at an event with Obama in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

Sen. Kennedy’s support may have been swayed by remarks made by former President Bill Clinton, the husband of Obama’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.  The Washington Post reported that Kennedy was “infuriated when Bill Clinton yesterday compared Obama’s South Carolina victory to Jesse Jackson winning the state’s much smaller caucuses in 1984 and 1988.”