Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has sent a letter to Governor Deval L. Patrick, MA Senate President Therese Murray, and MA House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo asking that state law be amended to keep his seat filled should it - when it - soon becomes vacant. Current law allows for a special election five months after the vacancy; Kennedy would like the law to allow the Governor to appoint someone to hold the seat for those five months on the condition they not run. From the Boston Globe:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in a poignant acknowledgment of his mortality at a critical time in the national health care debate, has privately asked the governor and legislative leaders to change the succession law to guarantee that Massachusetts will not lack a Senate vote when his seat becomes vacant.

In a personal, sometimes wistful letter sent Tuesday to Governor Deval L. Patrick, Senate President Therese Murray, and House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, Kennedy asks that Patrick be given authority to appoint someone to the seat temporarily before voters choose a new senator in a special election.

Although Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, does not specifically mention his illness or the health care debate raging in Washington, the implication of his letter is clear: He is trying to make sure that the leading cause in his life, better health coverage for all, advances in the event of his death.

This whole story is heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking. Edward Kennedy is a modern American hero, a gracious and gregarious man, and one of the most effective legislators in Congressional history. The worst day I had in Washington was the day his illness was announced; there was a black pall over the Hill all day.

This news comes on the heels of yesterday's Politico story about how his absence has impacted the health care debate. Kennedy, of course, has been seen less and less over the past few months, missing Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation vote, his own White House Medal of Freedom ceremony, and his sister's funeral.

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In Part 1, award-winning journalist Walter Brasch looked at the press that had abdicated their role as watchdogs upon the government during the Bush-Cheney Administration. In Part 2, he looks at some of the media that tried to restore the dignity and the role of the mass media to question authority.

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I am actually trying to avoid to post any diary since June,
but today I bent my rule just to direct your attention to somebody's else article.
In today's Boston Globe's editorial, named very funny:
"The audacity of ego", columnist Joan Vennochi pointed to
the one of the Obama's weakest property: narcissism, see
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor ial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/20/the _audacity_of_ego?mode=PF

"A convention hall isn't good enough for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
He plans to deliver his acceptance speech in the 75,000 seat stadium where the Denver Broncos play.
Before a vote is cast, he's embarking on a foreign policy tour that will use cheering Europeans - and America's top news anchors - as extras in his campaign.
What do you expect from a candidate who already auditioned a quasi-presidential seal with the Latin inscription,
"Vero possumus" - "Yes, we can"?

Obama finds criticism of his wife "infuriating" and doesn't want either of them to be the target of satire.
Tell that to the Carters, the Reagans, the Clintons, and the Bushes, father and son.

There's no such thing as a humble politician.
But when Obama looks into the mirror, he doesn't just see a president; he sees JFK."

In 1960, John F. Kennedy accepted his party's nomination with an outdoor speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
But he waited until he was elected before going to Germany to declare "Ich bin ein Berliner."

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Devastating editorial on the dangers of a foreign policy that is always subordinated to domestic political interests.

Hillary seems willing to follow in the footsteps of the first Clinton presidency, where foreign policy statements/decisions are made in order to further some domestic interest. It's been well established that this was the case during Somalia, Rwanda, and even Kosovo. Hillary hasn't even occupied the Oval Office and she's already starting to create diplomatic dust ups. Here is the Boston Globe editorial, available at http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor ial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/04/ 27/hillary_strangelove/?p1=email_to_a_fr iend

AMERICANS have learned to take with a grain of salt much of the rhetoric in a campaign like the current Democratic donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, there are some red lines that should never be crossed. Clinton did so Tuesday morning, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, when she told ABC's "Good Morning America" that, if she were president, she would "totally obliterate" Iran if Iran attacked Israel.
MORE POLITICAL COVERAGE

This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.

Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton's implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: "While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today's world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country."

A less restrained reaction came from an editorial in the Saudi-based paper Arab News. Being neighbors of Iran, the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs have the most to fear from Iran's nuclear program and its drive to become the dominant power in the Gulf.

But precisely because they are most at risk from Iran's regional ambitions, the Saudis want a carefully considered American approach to Iran, one that balances firmness and diplomatic engagement.

The Saudi paper called Clinton's nuclear threat "the foreign politics of the madhouse," saying, "it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush's foreign relations."

The Saudis are not always sound advisers on American foreign policy. But they understand that Rambo rhetoric like Clinton's only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.

Unfortunately this is just the latest in a series of important foreign policy statements and votes that Hillary has supported, in order to appear "strong" enough to pass the "commander in chief threshold."

Of course the first instance was voting for the AUMF - the vote granting the president the congressional authorization to begin the war in Iraq. If you've had any legal training, you will realize by reading the text of the this document, just how much power Congress handed over to the president by caving to Bush on this bill. The same argument can be made for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment.

Probably the most obvious example - since Hillary continues to suggest that she was duped into voting for war - is the recent Bosnia/Tuzla fabrication. What is so shocking about the lie she peddled was that there was really no rational reason for it. There was no marginal benefit to lying about her Bosnia experience, but she still did it! If she had never claimed to land under sniper fire, it's not like all of a sudden people would have thought "well, maybe Obama is more experienced in foreign policy!" Obama had essentially conceded the issue by trying to focus attention on judgment.

So why would she lie about Tuzla? If no one had ever heard of Tuzla, people would probably still have said she was more experienced.

The reason is, again, that Hillary's strategy is one of appearances - smoke and mirrors. If you can plant into the public consciousness that Hillary, the Wellesley and Yale Law grad, not only dodged sniper fire - but during the 1970s had actually tried to join the Marines, then it would make her look "tough." That is why she voted for the AUMF; that is why she voted for Kyl Lieberman; that is why she peddled the Tuzla lie; and that is why she says she is willing to "obliterate" Iran.

We're already suffering from the decisions of a president that is willing to sacrifice the best policy, for the most politically expedient. We don't need another.

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I've been doing a fair amount of work trying to understand the whole story behind 'The Path to 9/11' docudrama being presented on ABC this weekend.  The reason it's an important fight is because the right is making a sustained move to blame 9/11 on Clinton and delegitimize the mostly successful liberal foreign policy regime of the 1990s in favor of a hard-right nationalistic security state based on paranoia and propaganda.  Getting a major TV network to put out dishonest propaganda blaming the liberal foreign policy regime for the errors of the malicious right-wing, and then forcing this into schools, is a big deal.  We can't let this go without a real response.

As for the fraudulent docudrama itself, it really is a disgrace.  A senior Bush counterterrorism official just called the 'Path to 9/11' documentary shameful and straight out of Disney fantasyland.  President Clinton himself was denied an advance copy, and the movie fabricates scenes and directly contradicts the 9/11 Commission report.

Some reporters, not knowing any better, are buying the line that this movie is based on the 9/11 Commission.  It's not, as Digby points out, it's based on a weird book called 'The Cell' written by a dilettante reporter.  We need to correct the record as journalists come out with stories that don't appropriately note the errors in the film and the political campaign around it.

For instance, while Jesse McKinley's story in The New York Times is good, Suzanne Ryan of the Boston Globe falls for the lies.

The assignment: Executive producer Marc Platt was asked to take events from the surprise bestseller ``The 9/11 Commission Report" and convert them into a television drama so bracing that the American public would demand change in homeland security.

Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com.  She needs to know that she was manipulated.  Be polite.

Mekeisha Madden Toby of the Detroit News is similar.

The most sobering examination out of more than a dozen broadcast and cable tributes and specials, "The Path to 9/11" is a dramatization based on the 9/11 Commission Report and other published sources and personal interviews.

Mekeisha Toby can be reached at (313) 222-2501 or mmadden@detnews.com.  Toby needs to know that this review reprinted what is essentially not true, that this film was based on the 9/11 Commission.

Reporters need to know that we're here to help them get the story right.

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