This Old Man Will Be Your Temporary Ted Kennedy

Sad! Mike Dukakis will not be the interim Senator from Massachusetts. Instead it will probably be announced tomorrow that a 71-year-old dude named Paul Kirk will keep Ted Kennedy's seat warm (for the naked dude).

Kirk is a former chairman of the DNC and he was friends with Ted and he would just keep all of Ted Kennedy's staff (the best staff!) and vote for health care and stuff. And then there will be a special election in January that will let the "voters" decide who the senator should be. (Though if the voters kept voting for Ted Kennedy it does not seem like so much of a subversion of democracy to have a guy in there for a little bit who will just vote like he is Ted Kennedy.)

The whole Kennedy family decided that this Kirk fellow was the man for the job and Republicans have basically decided to bitch about it but not do anything about this terrible "appointment" that subverts the will of Massachusetts voters by granting the 6.5 million residents of that state as many Senate votes as the 800,000 who live in North Dakota.