Political violence struck in Pakistan today, where a prominent politician was gunned down for his opposition to the country's blasphemy laws:

Paul's post below perfectly captures the state of play, and as he and Dahlia Lithwick point out, Judge Walker's detailed and shrewdly crafted opinion seems written with Kennedy in mind. And optimism in this case isn't entirely misplaced. Conservatives were skeptical about Kennedy when he was nominated in the place of the defeated Robert Bork in substantial measure because of concerns that he was sympathetic to gay and lesbian rights, and these fears have (thankfully) turned out to be well-founded, as the cases Paul mentions indicate.

The Massachusetts election of a Republican to Teddy Kennedy's Senate seat is going to be presented as a referendum on health care, which is odd for a state that currently has the only universal health care system in the country. And one that is very similar to the national proposal.

But if you look at what voters actually said, it seems more a rebuke of the way Washington has handled it than the substance of reform itself. From the New York Times story:

Michael Leahy of the Washington Post offers a California snapshot on the ideological war happening within the Republican Party. The protagonist is Assemblyman Anthony Adams, a humble sweater-donning "citizen politician." Despite his solidly conservative voting record, the GOP politician has been harassed by a right-wing recall effort all because he voted for Schwarzenegger's tax-increasing compromise budget.

In the days since his death, Ted Kennedy has been hailed on the left as a friend to organized labor. Here at TAP, our own Harold Meyerson wrote that Kennedy was a lifelong defender of workers "unable to join unions" and an opponent of Jimmy Carter's agenda of "deregulating industries." But Doug Henwood, editor and publisher of Left Business Observer, remembers Kennedy differently, as a supporter of deregulation in trucking and air travel.

Coverage of Ted Kennedy's death has been suffused with the narrative that he was a man held hostage by a sense of family destiny. In 1959, then-Senator JFK said, "Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him."