Guys, you don't have to be sorry when bad people are dead. Jesse Helms was a bad person.
It's not because he wanted to lower taxes on corporations, or had a different idea for foreign policy then me. It wasn't because of his views on regulation, and it wasn't because he was a Republican.
Jesse Helms was a bad person because he was a spiteful, nasty racist and a homophobe who based his political career on appealing to the very worst in people and getting them to vote for him out of hatred and fear. Being on the left and calling for compassion for your fellow man doesn't mean that you have to exude some sort of Jesus style love for every man no matter how big of a piece of shit he was. Helms is deserving of our ridicule for making the world a worse place for his having been in it.
Maybe you could argue that he was merely the symptom of a disease, a product of his times as opposed to someone who molded it. I think at some point a person needs to take responsibility for his actions, and Helms passed that point several decades ago.