Health care, Bob Dole and Bo's new leash

by Mark Silva and updated

That last public wish of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy may come true -- in part, at least.

Before he died, the senator-for-nearly-five-decades asked that Massachusetts change its recently revised laws for replacing a U.S. senator. The Democrats are down one now in the Senate, with the president's health-care initiatve, near and dear to the late senator, on the table.

The state already had removed the appointive power from then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, when Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts posed the potential for a vacancy back home with his bid for the White House in 2004. The state now requires a special election, but that apparently won't come until January.

A state legislative committee will hold a hearing next week on a bill to allow Democatic Gov. Deval Patrick to appoint a temporary replacement for Kennedy while a special election is held to fill his seat, the Boston Globe reports this afternoon -- "a signal that Beacon Hill is moving to accommodate Kennedy's request that Massachusetts maintain two voices in the Senate.''

The state House and Senate chairmen of the Joint Committee on Election Laws announced today they have moved the hearing date from early October to Sept. 9. The bill could go to the floor of both the state House and Senate within days after the hearing.

''One of the senator's last public acts was a request that the Legislature explore ways to amend state law so the Commonwealth will not lose a voice in the United States Senate pending the filling of the seat with a special election,'' said state Sen. Thomas P. Kennedy (no relation to the late senator), Senate chairman of election laws committee.

Patrick today set the date of the special election, Jan. 19.

"In the meantime, without the modest change that Sen. Kennedy himself proposed, Massachusetts will not be adequately represented in the U.S. Senate,'' Patrick said at a news conference this afternoon. He supports the special election, he said, but will work with the state legislature to secure an interim appointment before the election.

"On the merits, the proposal seems to me reasonable and wise,'' said Patrick, suggesting that he can't speak for the changes made in the past but sees an urgency in filling the vacancy today. "I don't think, by any means, it is a certainty it will happen,'' he allowed, nor does he need the personal "head-ache'' of making an appointment, but it seems like a "nice, and elegant'' solution for the vacancy.

(One may be to able to appoint a senator, one couldn't: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, above, at the memorial service for Sen. Edward Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, by Michael Dwyer / AP. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, below, unveiling his official portrait during a ceremony in January, by Elise Amendola / AP)

by Mark Silva

The second week of President Barack Obama's vacation opened today with a round of golf at the Army-Navy Country Club.

Obama, who returned to the White House with his family on Sunday following a weeklong stay at Martha's Vineyard, plans to leave for Camp David on Thursday.

Today, on an unseasonably mild Monday with a "cold front'' that passed through Washington, it was a foursome on the links, over on the Virginia side of the Potomac River: With U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and aides Ben Finkenbinder and Marvin Nicholson.

While the president was away, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was at play with the press in the West Wing, maintaining he's not sure when the Pentagon's new assessment of the "winnable'' war in Afghanistan ready for new strategy will reach the White House.

"There's no Fed-Ex tracking number,'' Gibbs said.

by Mark Silva

Republicans are targeting Democrats in the midterm elections coming up next year, Vice President Joe Biden says, but "if they shoot and miss, this is going to be a changed country - not for two years, but for two decades.''

Biden offered this at a continental-breakfast fundraising reception in Center City Philadelphia today for freshman Rep. John Adler (D-N.J.), who replaced a Republican who served for 34 years. The fate of the Obama administration's drive to bring "fundamental change,'' he said, rests on how Adler and 24 other freshman Democrats in tight districts fare in the 2010 midterms.

"This election is in a sense bigger than the last election," Biden said.

"If you're on the other side, what do you want to do?" Biden asked. "You want to make sure these guys your target, you want to make sure that all those guys who won in close districts last year, lose.

"If you do that, it's the only hope you have if you are the other party of stopping the momentum for the kind of change we ran on and we committed to." he said, "If they shoot and miss, this is going to be a changed country - not for two years, but for two decades."

For all their opposition, Biden suggested Republicans "remain in a sort of catatonic state about what they're going to do'' about health care and other initiatives that Obama is pressing. "Have you heard one concrete alternative put forth by the opposition" on health care or energy independence?''

by Mark Silva

Bill Clinton, who made a failing pass at passing health-care reform early on his watch in the White House, suggests that another failure this year is "the worst thing we can do for the Democrats.

"We need to pass a bill this year,'' the former president told his fellow Democrats at a state party Jackson Day dinner in Tennessee over the weekend. "Doing nothing is not only the worst thing we can do for the economy, it's the worst thing we can do for the country. It's also the worst thing we can do for the Democrats.''

Clinton was joined at the state party fundraising dinner in Nashville by Al Gore, the former senator from Tennessee and vice president who failed to carry the state when he made his own bid for the White House in 2000.

"We have a lot of talk about liberal and conservative,'' Gore told the party audience at dinner, "and left and right, but when there are tens of millions of people in our country who can't get access to health care, we need to pass health care reform this year. Build support for it. Let's give President Obama the victory our country needs.''

Clinton also had this to say about all the raucous town hall meetings that congressmen have faced this summer: "I "I don't think all these people are coming to these town meetings raising Cain with your congressman in bad faith. I think they've had the daylights scared out of them. And I get it.''

(Former President Bill Clinton pictured at the annual Jackson Day Democratic fundraising dinner in Nashville on Saturday, photo by Mark Humphrey / AP)

by Mark Silva and updated

"The press doesn't like Rush'' Limbaugh, said Ari Fleischer, a former spokesman for a former president, George W. Bush, who once tossed back a question at his hosts on MSNBC about media affairs, asking why they are not going after Democratic members of Congress for not distancing themselves from Keith Olbermann.

"That was a good one,'' replied Mika Brezinski, the liberal half of the Morning Joe duo on the cable network where Olbermann hunts Republicans like <strong>Brad Pitt goes after Nazis in the great new Tarantino film all but the scalps.

"It's gamesmanship,'' Fleischer said of the "Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party'' discusssion. "It's a one-sided debate.''

Our colleague Andrew Malcolm at Top of the Ticket brought this old clip to our attention today, with a new note about how the "morning crew on the Obama administration's favorite cable channel was talking a while back about the same old Emanuel-Begala-Stephanopoulos-Carville talking points on Rush Limbaugh being the head of the Republican Party.''

"Also for the record,'' Malcolm notes, "KO fans will want to read this latest ratings report from the ever-alert Noel Sheppard showing, among other developments, that CNN's Campbell Brown beat Olbermann last week (you read that right! CNN's CB KO's KO).''

MSNBC notes, however that Campbell Brown beat Countdown one night . Year to date at 8 pm, Countdown is out-rating Campbell by 45 percent among the key adult demo (391,000 v 269,000) and by 32 percent among total viewers (1,217,000 v 916,000), the network says.

The Sheppared column also notes that: "For the second night in a row, Fox News' Glenn Beck attracted the most cable news viewers in the all important demographic of folks aged 25 to 54.''

By Julian E. Barnes

The top commander in Afghanistan has submitted his initial assessment of the war in Afghanistan, calling for a full overhaul of the military's war strategy, NATO officials said today.

In his assessment, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that he would call for an intensified effort to train more Afghan security forces faster, pump up intelligence collection efforts and improve how that information is used and shared.

He also has said he will discuss the need to develop a cadre of experts committed to the war and improve coordination between civilian and military efforts, particularly on development projects.

But at the heart of the assessment is McChrystal's belief that the military needs to follow an overhauled counter-insurgency strategy that focuses on making Afghan citizens feel safer.

The assessment is meant to be a more "philosophical" look at the current situation and does not contain any explicit requests for more troops or other resources.

"The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort," Gen. McChrystal said in the assessment, according to NATO officials.

NATO officials said the report was forwarded to Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, as well as NATO's Joint Force Command Brunssum. NATO and Central Command jointly oversee the Afghan war effort.

by Mark Silva

For all the howling - Okay, there hasn't been that much howling, rather more ranting from the likes of television's Glenn Beck - about all the leftists filling up posts in the Obama White House, there really are quite a few Republicans in power.

Obama, for instance, has stuck with Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve first appointed by former President George W. Bush, and Obama stuck with Bush Defense Secretary Robert Gates, our friend Tom Raum notes in an analysis for the Associated Press asking the question:

How does Obama love Republicans?

Let Raum count the ways:

Sheila Bair, holdover chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, has planed a big role in the management of the financial crisis. A one-time unsuccessful candidate for a Kansas House seat, Bair was first appointed by Bush in 2006. Forbes Magazine ranks her as the second most powerful woman in the world behind German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Ray LaHood, who retired as a Republican congressman from Peoria, serves as transportation secretary. "He was elected as part of the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994 and was so trusted by both Republicans and Democrats that he was selected to preside over the House during the impeachment vote against President Bill Clinton,'' Raum notes.

Former Rep. John McHugh, a Republican from upstate New York , is serving as Army secretary. He is remembered in the House for a willingness to work with Democrats.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was a Mormon missionary in China in his youth, is serving as Obama's ambassador to China.

The notion that Obama is moving the government to the left "is laughable, it's utterly laughable," Thomas E. Mann, a government scholar at the Brookings Institution, tells Raum in a story moved by the AP today.

Know the Bush twins? Test yourself here.

by Mark Silva

Skip journalism school, go straight to Today:

Jenna Bush Hager, one of the former first twins, has signed on as an occasional correspondent for NBC News' Today show.

Hager, daughter of former President George W. Bush and working as a teacher in Baltimore, will be based in Washington, DC, covering a variety of human interest and feature stories as a contributing correspondent for the leading morning news show.

"Jenna is a terrific addition to the Today team," said Jim Bell, executive producer of the Today show, in a statement released by NBC today. "In previous appearances, she displayed a natural ability to communicate and connect. She has great passion about important subjects, especially education and literacy.'

Hager is a best-selling author who traveled the world with her parents, serves as the Young Leadership Ambassador & Chair for UNICEF's Next Generation Committee, which aims to save, protect and improve the lives of children.

Hager's first book, ANA'S STORY: A Journey of Hope, tells the tale of a 17-year-old single mother living with HIV in Latin America. Her scond book, READ ALL ABOUT IT!, is a picture book co-written with mother Laura Bush

Hager, who studied English at the University of Texas, plans to keep her day job as a reading resource teacher at a public school in Baltimore while reporting for the Today show, the network says. Her father served as president of the United States for eight years. .

(Jenna Bush Hager, pictured in the studio above, now a correspondent for NBC News' Today show. (Photo by Jeff Christensen / AP)

by Mark Silva

This could either be a case of an overzealous publisher promoting a book, or a contrite author backpedaling from the written word once he's seen the reaction to it.

Whatever it is, Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security and governor of Pennsylvania, says people have been ''hyperventilating'' about his published contention that he faced political pressure during the final days of President George W. Bush's first term to raise the national terrorism alert. It wasn't raised.

"A consensus was reached. We didn't go up. The process worked," Ridge said itoday in ann interview on ABC's Good Morning America.

This is a decidedly different tone than the one set by the pre-release excerpts from The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege, which Ridge's publisher circulated for a book coming out in September. And Ridge did not retract that story line today.

"An election-eve drama was being played out at the highest levels of our government" after Osama bin Laden released a pre-election message critical of President Bush,'' he writes of feeling pressure from other Cabinet members, Defense's Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, to raise the terror alert. "We weren't seeing any additional intelligence that justified it. In fact, we were incredulous,'' he writes, according to the publisher's promotional release. "I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?'''

Rumsfeld has called the claim "nonsense'' -- and a book-selling ploy. Ridge said today that there had been a lively debate about the alert level, but it was not raised and thus not an issue. Ridge said his concern at the time was to be "absolutely certain" that divergent points of view were heard and that people had their say.

Ridge, a Republican whom Sen. John McCain considered as a potential running mate last year, also says he agrees with former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration's review of terrorism-era detainee interrogation practices during the Bush administraiton. It "would be criminal,''Ridge said, for the new administration to prosecute people who likely believed they were acting within the law.

Cheney said Sunday that the new administration's stance "offends the hell out of me,'' which has generated considerably more conversation than Ridge's ruckus.

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama and his family returned to the White House today from a weeklong vacation on Martha's Vineyard interrupted by some big national stories.

But the president is planning to take the rest of the week off.

"The president will continue his vacation through the end of the week,'' the White House press secretary announced this evening -- with a note that the media will be informed "if any public events are added to the schedule.''

The White House already had said toward the end of the Obama family's week of vacation that they would head to Camp David in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland later this week and spend some of the Labor Day weekend there -- Thursday through Sunday at camp. But a spokesman had said some events in Washington were planned Wednesday.

But tonight, they left the week open for the president until further notice -- leaving it to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to hold a briefing on Monday and address whatever news he wants to address, or make.

The president's vacation was interrupted by an apperance with Ben Bernanke early last week as Obama announced that he was nominating the Federal Reserve chairman for a second term, and Obama and wife Michelle attended the funeral mass for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in Boston on Saturday, with the president delivering the eulogy.

It's possible that the president hasn't finished all the books he took yet.

by Mark Silva

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose administration authorized and legally justified interrogation tactics for detainees captured in its "war on terror,'' has this to say about the Obama administration's investigation of interrogations that may have exceeded the authority given the interrogators:

"I think it's a terrible decision,'' Cheney said in an interview aired this morning on FOX News Sunday.

And a political decision, he maintains - "absolutely.''

"I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from al Qaeda,'' Cheney said. "The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?"

And, Cheney maintains, he has "serious doubts'' about whether President Barack Obama "understands and is prepared to do what needs to be done to defend the nation."

Obama, whose administration has denounced as "torture'' some of the harshest tactics condoned by the Bush administration, has maintained that he is looking forward, rather than backward. But Attorney General Eric Holder now is reexamining some of the harshest interrogations conducted.

"President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel,'' Cheney told FOX News' Chris Wallace. "Now we've got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel.

"The negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political,'' the retired vice president maintained.

"In the intelligence arena, we ask those people to do some very difficult things,'' Cheney said. "Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president...if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions.... It's a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community....''

Cheney, who also said that he "was probably a bigger advocate of military action (against Iran) than any of my colleagues,'' allowed: "It was not my decision to make.

""I thought that negotiations could not possibly succeed unless the Iranians really believed we were prepared to use military force,'' Cheney said of the standoff with Iran over its enrichment of nuclear material. "And to date, of course, they are still proceeding with their nuclear program and the matter has not yet been resolved... The president made the decision and, obviously, we pursued the diplomatic avenues."

by Mark Silva

` "Today we say goodbye to the youngest child of Rose and Joseph Kennedy,'' President Barack Obama said today at the public funeral for the last of the three Kennedy brothers who held or sought the presidency.

"The world will long remember their son Edward as the heir to a weighty legacy; a champion for those who had none; the soul of the Democratic Party; and the lion of the United States Senate - a man who graces nearly one thousand laws, and who penned more than three hundred himself,'' the president said in a eulogy for Edward M. "Ted'' Kennedy - remembered by Obama today as Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior'' and "the greatest legislator of our time.''

Obama and wife Michelle assumed seats in the first pews of the basilica in Boston where some 1,500 mourners assembled this morning for a funeral mass - with an array of former presidents and first ladies seated beside them and behind them: President Jimmy Carter and Roslyn Carter to their left, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton - the secretary of state in the Obama administration who fought Obama for the Democratic nomination last year - behind them and President George W. Bush and Laura Bush beside the Clintons..

The television coverage of the assembly revealed an animated Bush engaging in banter with Hillary Clinton to his right, with Bill Clinton and with the Obamas seated before him before the mass. This culminated three days of memorial events for the longtime senator from Massachusetts who died this week following a year-long battle with brain cancer.

Last night, friends shared stories - with retired Sen. John Culver of Iowa telling an amusing tale of sailing with Kennedy. Today, they came to eulogize Kennedy, who will be buried this afternoon at Arlington National Cemetery.

Obama spoke of not only the late and longtime legislator's lawmaking prowess, but also his personal skills of persuasion. And he spoke of his own personal gifts from the man - a Cape Cod seascape hanging on Kennedy's wall that Obama, then a freshman, had seen and complimented. Kennedy gave it to him. "That was my second (favorite) gift from Teddy and (his wife) Vicki,'' Obama said today - "after our dog Bo.''

The senator, who died at 77 at his home Tuesday night, was the last of three brothers who had first captured the American public's imagination in the 1960s and engaged in the greatest legislative debates for five decades: President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, slain in 1963; Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated while seeking his party's nomination for president in 1968; and "Teddy'' Kennedy, first elected a senator in 1962, failing at his final bid for the presidential nomination - losing to an incumbent Carter - in 1980, but continuing to serve in the Senate for nearly three decades more.

"Those of us who loved him, and ache with his passing, know Ted Kennedy by the other titles he held: Father. Brother. Husband. Uncle Teddy, or as he was often known to his younger nieces and nephews, "The Grand Fromage," or "The Big Cheese.'' Obama said today. "I, like so many others in the city where he worked for nearly half a century, knew him as a colleague, a mentor, and above all, as a friend.

"Ted Kennedy was the baby of the family who became its patriarch; the restless dreamer who became its rock,'' the president said of a senator who served for nearly 47 years.

(Former President Bill Clinton is pictured above, left, speaking with President Barack Obama as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, center, looks on prior to the Roman Catholic Funeral Mass for Sen. Edward Kennedy at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Basilica in Boston. Photo by Brian Snyder / pool / AP )

by Mark Silva

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, President Barack Obama says that 11 members of his Cabinet have gone to New Orleans and he plans his own journey later this year.

"To complete a complex recovery that addresses nearly every sector of society, we have prioritized coordination among different federal agencies, and with state and local governments,'' the president says today, in his weekly radio and Internet address. "No more turf wars - all of us need to move forward together, because there is much more work to be done.''

Throughout much of the hurricane-flooded city there remains work to be done -- entire neighborhoods still deciminated from the storm that struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

The federal government's initial response to the crisis became a problem for the Bush administration which may have contributed to the public's loss of confidence in the second-term president. The FEMA adminstrator saluted for a "heckuva job'' by then President Bush, Michael Brown, is long gone, in his place a Florida storm-seasoned veteran of disaster preparedness, Craig Fugate, seated by Obama.

"On this anniversary, we are focused on the threat from hurricanes,'' Obama says today. "But we must also be prepared for a broad range of dangers - from wildfires and earthquakes, to terrorist attacks and pandemic disease. In particular, my administration is working aggressively with state and local governments - and with partners around the world - to prepare for the risk posed by the H1N1 virus.''

See the president's address above and read it below:

by Mark Silva

Republican Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming calls health-care reform "one of the most important debates of our lifetime.'' And he calls the Democratic prescription a mistake that could last another lifetime.

""If Congress and the administration mess this up, each and every one of us will pay for the mistakes, as will generations to come,'' Enzi says, in delivering the Republican Party's weekly address today.

""We need health care reform - but more importantly, we need to get it right. We need reforms that will actually lower health care costs for working Americans and we need to make sure we do not increase the deficit and add to the record debt we're already passing on to our children and grandchildren.

"People across America are telling Congress that current health care bills are the wrong approach and that there should be a course correction on health care reform,'' he says. "They've said we need to scrap these flawed bills and take the time to develop the real solutions that the American people want and need.''

See the senator's address above and read it below:

by Mark Silva

Al Gore invented the Internet. (not)

George W. Bush didn't use the Internets. (true)

Barack Obama wants to take over the Internet. (Drudge hype?)

The truth is that "cybersecurity'' is a big problem. The White House was told so earlier this year, and pledged to get on the case.

"My administration will pursue a new comprehensive approach to securing America's digital infrastructure,'' Obama said in an address in the East Room of the White House at the end of May. "From now on, they will be treated as they should be... as a strategic national asset. We will assure that these networks are secure.''

The fear is, among some in the industry, that the White House will be given an inordinate hand in the Internet in the event of a crisis -- sort of like Bush grounding all the airplanes after 9/11, except a virtual sort of grounding.

The new draft of legislation that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors "still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency,'' Cnet reported today -- giving the Drudge Report a banner headline about Obama getting emergency control powers over the Net. (Drudge was good to us this week, so we're linking to Drudge here.)

"The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat,'' CNet reports. "Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board, notes. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."

Among the many "czars'' for which the White House is drawing criticism from security circles is the so-called "cyber-czar'' in charge of making sure the government is ready to deal with a cyber-crisis. TheNational Security Council and Homeland Security Council made a 60-day review of the vulnerabilities in public and private computer networks and concluded in May that not only the federal government, but also state and local governments, the private sector and "key U.S. allies'' must coordinate programs to protect their computer networks against threats from outside tampering.

As for taking over the Internet, however, Obama's got a BlackBerry -- which puts him about one generation ahead of Bush, who never used email in the White House -- and the Obama White House has asked for emails reporting on any "fishy'' rumors about health-care reform out there, but we doubt the president wants your server. Sorry, Matt.

by Mark Silva

A federal prosecutor in New Mexico today acknowledged that Gov. Bill Richardson and former aides won't face any charges stemming from the probe of an alleged "pay-to-play'' scheme there - a shadow that had prompted the Democrat to withdraw his nomination as U.S. Commerce secretary.

At the same time, however, U.S. Attorney Greg Fouratt said the decision not to bring charges "is not to be interpreted as an exoneration of any party's conduct." He sent a letter to defense attorneys contending that a yearlong investigation had "revealed that pressure from the governor's office resulted in the corruption of the procurement process" sending state bond business to a Richardson political donor in 2004.

Richardson, who was finishing a weeklong trade mission in Havana, Cuba, steered away from the loaded words in the prosecutor's dismissal: "I'm not talking about that.''

But Richardson spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said today that Fouratt's letter "is wrong on the facts and appears to be nothing more than sour grapes."

The Associated Press quotes sources as saying that the decision not to seek indictments was made by Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C., but Attorney General Eric Holder was not involved in the decision to close the case.

The chief federal prosecutor in New Mexico began an investigation last year into the hiring of a Richardson supporter, Beverly Hills-based CDR Financial Products, as a financial adviser on state transportation bond deals. The state work generated almost $1.5 million in fees for CDR.

The firm's CEO, David Rubin, and his firm contributed $110,000 to Richardson political committees from 2003 to 2005. The largest of those contributions, $75,000, was made less than a week before CDR was selected in June 2004 by the New Mexico Finance Authority to handle the reinvestment of idle bond proceeds.

Joseph diGenova, a Republican and former U.S. attorney during the Reagan administration, called Fouratt's letter "stupid" because it makes allegations of corruption in a case which it has closed. "That letter is an outrage and the U.S. attorney who wrote it should be fired,'' diGenova is quoted as saying. "The case is closed. If he had charges, bring them. Otherwise, he should shut up. He's being a politician now, not a prosecutor.''

by Mark Silva

As the Republican Party searches for its "great white hope'' -- never mind, Rep. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas has apologized for that suggestion about the party's talent search for an opponent for President Barack Obama in 2012 -- Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty may be warming up his chops. He says he is considering a run

Pawlenty, who will step down after two terms as governor, contended today that Obama's $787-billion economic stimulus still isn't working and that his health-care plans would lead to medical rationing. With just a fraction of the stimulus money spent so far, he said today, it "would be ludicrous to claim" the stimulus program is "what pivoted" a $14.1 trillion economy "at the so-called bottoming or now a potential beginning of recovery.''

In an interview taped in St. Paul for Bloomberg Television's Political Capital with Al Hunt, Pawlenty suggested that taxpayers "could have had a bigger bang for the buck" by "reducing the payroll tax, and putting money right into the pockets of individuals or truly focusing on bread-and-butter infrastructure projects.''

Some economists disagree with Pawlenty, Bloomberg notes.

""The stimulus worked in the sense that the economy was rapidly contracting, and is still contracting, but less so than earlier in the year," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

But Pawlenty maintains that any "fair critique" of Democratic health-care legislation should include the argument that the so=called "death panels" would make life-or-death treatment decisions. That's because Obama's plan "may lead to a different form of decision- making," he suggested. Obama accuses opponents of being "dishonest" by arguing that government would "set up death panels to pull the plug on grandma."

Pawlenty, 46, said today that Republicans "should be aggressive in criticizing President Obama's plan" to extend health-care coverage to up to 47 million uninsured people by crafting a government-run insurance company.

Pawlenty also acknowledged he is considering seeking his party's 2012 presidential nomination. "I'm going to finish out my term as governor" and "try to speak out to how the Republican Party can and should improve," he said. "If that gets some traction and some momentum, then I would consider" running for president.

He offers "hands-on leadership that can get things done" as a Republican governor in a predominantly Democratic state, he suggested. "I think I have been very effective as a reformer, keeping a lid on spending, trying to drive down tax burdens... I have done that in Minnesota."

(Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty pictured at a luncheon during the Republican National Committee summer meeting las month in San Diego. (Photo by Lenny Ignelzi / AP).

by Mark Silva and updated at 1 pm EDT

The stock market is up.

And President Barack Obama's stock is down.

A relative rally in the Dow Jones average, climbing out of the pit it hit in March but still well below the soaring peaks reached before last year's stomach-turning dive, has brought some cheer to investors and those still hoping to retire sometime before 2050

But at the same time, the president's job approval has slumped, reaching a new low in the Gallup Poll this week -- 50 percent measured Thursday in the results of the past three days' average of daily tracking surveys, with the potential for a slide below 50 today. The new results from the latest three-day Gallup track are out this afternoon, and Obama is holding at 50 percent job-approval, his all-term low.

Is there any relationship?

None that Gallup's analysts can find.

So why read any further?

Because this is not about Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck -- or is it?

Is the president's slide perhaps attributable in part to the drumbeat of criticism that the White House has faced for its health-care initiative and economic stimulus plans? Or simply because the public's approval of his handling of health care, and the economy, is down?

All that talk about Communists in the White House -- courtesy of FOX News' Beck -- and those "death panels'' in the health-care plan -- courtesy of Palin's Facebook -- certainly cannot help the president's approval rating.

Not that Palin could beat Obama in a matchup, as some would like to see.

But a connection between Obama's summer slide and the stock market's rally? None that Gallup can detect.

So read on. For the non-story of the day, on this welcome Friday, may be more interesting than the recent run of news -- or running of mouthes.

by Mark Silva

Introducing:

Soon to be, the newest member of the United States Senate.

George LeMieux.

But don't worry about remembering the spelling. He won't be there for long. The appointee of Republican Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida to fill the seat of the resigning Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) is a placeholder. Crist is running for the seat in 2010.

Crist made a worldwide search for someone from his own team to hold the seat -- LeMieux is the governor's closest political adviser.

"I'm a Charlie Crist Republican,'' LeMieux says.

Crist, remember, is the governor of a hurricane-prone state who has kept the state hurricane-free with the insertion of prayers in the Western wall in Jerusalem. (Okay, he never clamed credit, but he has noted the lovely coincidence.)

And now Crist will seek a seat from a swing state with a largely Republican congressional delegation and state Legislature but one Democratic senator and one Republican in Washington, a state that went with President Barack Obama in 2008 but lately has shown less than majority support for the president in polling.

LeMieux served as deputy attorney general under Crist and left that job to run the governor's 2006 campaign. Then Crist made LeMieux his chief of staff.

LeMieux left in December 2007 and works for a Tallahassee law firm.

"George is bright, capable, and an accomplished administrator," says the retiring Martinez , who is stepping down after less than one term in office.

And a capable placeholder -- with state Democratic Chairwoman Karen Thurman, a former member of Congress from Florida, calling the appointment a "glaring example of political cronyism" and "the last thing Florida needed while we face these tough economic times and the Congress is tackling critical issues such as health insurance reform and global warming."

Wire services contributed.

by Mark Silva

Cindy Sheehan is back.

But this time, the war protester who lost her son, Casey, at war in Iraq, is not camped outside the Texas ranch of former President George W. Bush, who ordered the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

She is staking out the media on Martha's Vineyard, where President Barack Obama, who has pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq but is boosting the U.S. military deployment at war in Afghanistan, is spending a week's vacation.

Sheehan, who liked to pitch a "peace camp'' outside the vacationing Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas, showed up today outside the schoolhouse in Oak Bluffs, Mass., where reporters covering the vacationing Obama are working. The president is tucked away at Blue Heron Farm, a 28-acre rented estate, no brush clearing.

"The reason I am here is because ... even though the facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same," Sheehan told a handful of journalists, with a Camp Casey banner behind her. Calling on peace activists to wake up and protest Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and complaining that troops still remain in Iraq, she said: "We have to realize, it is not the president who is power, it is not the party that is in power, it is the system that stays the same, no matter who is in charge."

"We are here to make the wars unpopular again," Sheehan said.

by Mark Silva

Rep. Lynn Jenkins probably never heard of Jack Johnson.

But the freshman Republican congresswoman from Kansas says she is sorry now about suggesting that the Republican Party, like those who wanted to dethrone Johnson from the heavyweight boxing ring, really needs "a great white hope.''

"Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope," Jenkins said last week at a gathering in her district. "I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington."

Word got around after someone in the audience recorded video of the event in Hiawatha, about 65 miles northeast of Topeka, and gave it to the Kansas Democratic Party.

"She apologizes if her words have offended anyone," Jenkins spokeswoman Mary Geiger told The Associated Press today. "That was not the intent in any way, shape or form."

At an event at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Jenkins denied that she had been speaking in racial terms about the challenge that the party faces with President Barack Obama, the first African-American president, when she evoked the title of a play about opposition toward Jack Johnson, the first African-American to win the heavyweight championship in boxing.

She said she only meant that the GOP needs "a bright light."

"I was unaware of any negative connotation, and if I offended anybody, obviously, I apologize," Jenkins told the Lawrence Journal-World.

Jenkins is white, as are three House colleagues whom she mentioned at that gathering as potential future party leaders: Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia; Kevin McCarthy of California and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Jenkins delivered her party's weekly address back in May. "The pace that Democrats in Congress and the White House are spending your tax dollars is simply staggering,'' Jenkins said then -- no mention of boxing.

The Great White Hope, a play written in 1967 and adapted for the silver screen in 1970, featured James Earl Jones in the lead role on Broadway. He won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a tale based on the story of the black boxing champion, Jack Johnson, which chronicles the racial prejudice that led to the pursuit of a "great white hope'' to defeat him.

Johnson defeated Canadian Tommy Burns on Dec. 26, 1908, in the World Boxing Championship held in Sydney, Australia. This initiated the quest for a "Great White Hope" to defeat Johnson. James Jeffries, a white fighter, came out of retirement to challenge the champ. Johnson won their fight on July 4, 1910.

Johnson held the title until April 5, 1915, knocked out by Jess Willard in the 26th round during in Havana, Cuba. (Willard's nickname was the Pottawatomie Giant - he was from Pottawatomie County, Kansas - Jenkins' home state. He was white.)

Barack Obama was elected president on Nov. 4, 2008. He faces reelection in '12.

He beat a white man, Sen. John McCain, whose running mate, Sarah Palin, still is considered by many in her party as one of "the bright lights'' of the Republican Party. She is, uh... retired. But she could always come out, like James Jeffries did.

(File photo above of boxing champion Jack Johnson. Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.) is pictured speaking with voters in northeast Kansas, photo by Orlin Wagner / AP)

This was Rep. Jenkins' weekly Internet address:

by Mark Silva and updated at 3:10 pm

President Barack Obama, who won the White House with an Electoral College landslide and enjoyed soaring public approval for the job he was doing in the weeks following his inauguration, has fallen to 50-percent job-approval in the newest daily tracking of the Gallup Poll released just now.

The new low for Obama in the Gallup Poll, which measured the president's public job-approval at a peak of 69 percent after his inauguration in January, tracks other national polls which recently have gauged his approval ratings at 51 percent.

It also coincides with apparent growing public concern about a protracted debate over health care in Washington, Gallup and other pollsters have found.

Should the slide continue, Obama will by no means be the first president to slide below 50-percent job approval in the Gallup Poll, which has been tracking public approval of presidents since Harry Truman.

But Obama has reached his own personal new low more quickly than most of his predecessors did, according to Gallup. The percentage of people voicing disapproval for the job the president is performing also stands at a near-high of 43 percent.

Aides to the president say he is not fixated on polling data. Obama entered office with high ratings, spokesman Bill Burton said today, but never thought they were "something he should put up on a shelf and admire."

"It's real easy to stay popular in Washington if you don't do anything at all," said Burton, but the president doesn't believe in working that way.

by Mark Silva

Today, as a three-day commemoration of Edward M. Kennedy gets underway, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington is hanging an old Andy Warhol portrait of the man.

The showing of the silkscreen, part of the museum's collection, was ready for the museum's opening today. At the gallery, one of Washington's finest museums, a remembrance gallery opened after Michael Jackson died in June.

This portrait of Kennedy was created in 1980 to raise money for Kennedy's ill-fated presidential campaign. The late pop artist used colors of the American flag and diamond dust in the making of the print. (It's lost in translation here.)

"What we're going to do in the next few days, is celebrate his life,'' says Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts colleague of Kennedy who sought the presidency in 2004. "It's a remarkable life,"

A procession is leaving Hyannisport at 1 pm EDT today, accompanying Kennedy's body to Boston for a final journey through the city synonymous with his family name. It will wind through downtown today, and the North End, where his mother was born and then on to the gold-domed State House and oast the Bowdoin Street residence of President John F. Kennedy when he first ran for Congress.

Crowds are expected on the Boston Common.

The procession will end at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Kennedy will lie in repose. The casket will be closed. Private funeral services start Friday at 7 p.m. with an invitation-only "celebration of life" and memorial in the library.

On Saturday morning, after a private family service, mourners will gather at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, also known as "the Mission Church," on Mission Hill, for a Mass of Christian Burial. The church seats about 1,500, and will be open by invitations only. President Barack Obama will deliver the eulogy.

The casket will be flown from Logan International Airport to Washington, where the senator will be interred near his brothers John and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in a 5 pm EDT burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

A bugler will be on hand.

by Mark Silva

So President Barack Obama, the erstwhile junior senator from Illinois who made that "audacious'' bid for the White House after less than one term, will deliver the eulogy for a long-serving senator, Edward M. Kennedy, in Boston on Saturday before burial of the Democrats' old lion at Arlington National Cemetery.

This was the Kennedy who had delivered his own inspirational words for Obama at a rally in Washington in the midst of an epic contest between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for their party's presidential nomination, declaring that he knew the heir to the dreams of his brother, John F. Kennedy, with the senator harking to "another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a new frontier.... So it is with Barack Obama..''

Obama already has started eulogizing Kennedy - from the lawn of the Martha's Vineyard estate where Obama and family are spending a week's vacation (some vacation, interrupted this week for the nomination of Ben Bernanke for another term as Federal Reserve chairman, and now a trip Saturday to the beautiful basilica in Boston where Kennedy's mass will be held Saturday morning, the day before the president's island respite is supposed to end) - and with an email circulated last night to the many supporters whom the Democratic Party courts with Organizing for America.

"I personally valued his wise counsel in the Senate, where, regardless of the swirl of events, he always had time for a new colleague,'' Obama said of Kennedy in that email he sent to his wide circle of supporters last night. "I cherished his confidence and momentous support in my race for the presidency. And even as he waged a valiant struggle with a mortal illness, I've benefited as president from his encouragement and wisdom....

"For America, he was a defender of a dream.''

Yet the question this morning looms large: What has Kennedy's passing done for the dream that Obama holds dearest this year, passage of a health-care initiative that will offer insurance to many millions of Americans who lack it?

There are two trains of thought, it seems:

They may both be wrong.

by Mark Silva and updated with Beck ratings.

Some people recommend summer reading lists.

Some recommend their favorite music.

Sarah Palin, the self-retired governor of Alaska, has some recommended viewing for TV-viewers:

FOX's Glenn Beck.

"I invite all my friends to watch,'' Palin says today.

And we are not "making things up'' here.

Palin, who campaigned as the Republican Party's candidate for vice president last year with the warning that Democrat Barack Obama was "palin' around with terrorists,'' is steering fans of her Facebook site to the TV commentary of FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck, who has been warning viewers this week that Obama is getting his advice from a Communist and other radicals in the White House who have no oversight from Congress.

Palin has built a growing following at her Facebook site - more than 800,000 and climbing since she started warning of the "death panels'' that Democrats are building into their health-care plans - after stepping down from the elected office she held in Alaska roughly half-way through her term as governor.

Today, while much of the political world was watching a flood of praise and reminiscence following the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Palin posted a short note on her page:

"FOX News' Glenn Beck is doing an extraordinary job this week walking America behind the scenes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and outlining who is actually running the White House,'' Palin wrote in her notes. "Monday night he asked us to invite one friend to watch; tonight I invite all my friends to watch. ''

It was Monday that Beck started lacing into Van Jones, the "green czar'' in the White House whom Beck has labeled as a dangerous radical - one of many such "czars'' whom Beck is warning viewers about in the Obama administration. Jones had co-founded the group, Color of Change, promoting an advertising boycott of Beck's show since he accused Obama of being "a racist'' and not generally favorably inclined toward white people. Color of Change says Jones is no longer involved with it.

Beck will like this: Palin has more than 800,000 friends, by her Facebook count - up more than 100,000 since she left public office and turned to her private social networking base as a forum for her political views.

Beck has more than 2 million viewers, and he boasted on air this week that Monday's ratings were through the roof. This just in from Show Tracker at the L.A. Times:

"Beck attracted 2.81 million viewers Monday, his third-largest audience since his show launched on Fox News in January, according to Nielsen Media Research data provided by the network. On Tuesday, nearly 2.7 million viewers tuned in, his fifth-largest viewership to date. And the conservative host got a plug from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who urged people to watch his program in a post on her Facebook page.''

Now Palin, at work building up her base, is helping Beck build his.

Real political terrors.

(Then-Gov. Sarah Palin delivering her resignation speech in Fairbanks, Alaska, in July, photo by Al Grillo) / AP. And above: FOX News Glenn Beck at the Time 100 Gala, a celebration of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in New York, photo by Evan Agostini / AP.)

Sarah Palin, the onetime national candidate for a major political party still viewed by many in her party as a prospect for the White House down the road, suggests watching this:

by Mark Silva

Graphically speaking, the trends in apparent public approval ratings since President Barack Obama's inauguration in January offer a telling story about the rapidly closing gap between those who approve of what the president is doing, and those who don't.

And the people at the Gallup Poll, who have been tracking the president's political pulse daily, say he may be nearing a new turn:

Approval under 50 percent.

The president's approval rating stood at 51 percent in the Aug. 23-25 surveys of the Gallup Poll, which reports its daily track as a three-day average. Other national polls -- the Pew Research Center's, NBC News' -- placed his approval at 51 last week.

Should he slip below 50 - and one poll, the Quinnipiac University poll, already has gauged the president's approval below 50 in the swing state of Florida -- Obama certainly will not be alone among post World War II presidents. Nor is the slide reversible, Gallup notes of presidents who have been there and then won reelection.

"However, Obama, in his eighth month in office, could hit this mark in a shorter time than has typically been the case,'' Gallup's Jeffrey Jones reports. " If his rating falls below 50 percent before November, it would represent the third-fastest drop to below majority approval since World War II, behind the declines for Gerald Ford (in his third month as president) and Bill Clinton (in his fourth month).''

It took Republican Dwight Eisenhower five years to fall below 50 percent in the public's eye, Gallup notes. It took both Republican George Bush's roughly three years. It took Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon more than two years.

Democrat Jimmy Carter got there a little after a year.

by Mark Silva

In a town where the notion of bipartisanship is a cliche that often finds little rooting in reality, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's career was remarkable for his success in crossing the aisle of a Senate that had grown increasingly partisan through the years.

Ask Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who can thank the Democrat, Kennedy, for passage of an immigration reform bill in the Senate that the GOP would not accept in the House, where it failed.

Ask former President George W. Bush, whose signature domestic initiative, the "No Child Left Behind Act," won passage during his first year in office thanks to Kennedy.

The stalled immigration initiatives, as well as the accomplished education legislation, have only grown more controversial after the voting. But without Kennedy, there may have been no votes.

This is one of the reasons for the resounding praise that has flowed with the passing of the senior senator from Massachusetts after nearly 47 years in office.

it's one of the reasons that the chorus of voices rising for the passing of the last Kennedy brother today includes Nancy Reagan as well as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It's one of the reasons that Sen. Robert Byrd (D-Va.) has suggested today that any health-care initiative enacted bear Kennedy's name in passage.

Yet, ironically, Kennedy's passing may have a lot to do with the failure of any health-care bill this year, should that happen. Kennedy's absence from that debate, and now disappearance from any vote, is a "huge'' loss, McCain has suggested.

For whatever personal failings Kennedy, 77, may have possessed, and many critics have noted those today, too, his political prowess made him a national lawmaker with few rivals. It's the reason that both President Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah today have called him one of the greatest senators.

Consider these voices today:

by Mark Silva and updated at 5:30 pm EDT

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy will be buried Saturday at Arlington National Cemetery near his brothers, former President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the Pentagon said today.

Kennedy, 77, was not only a veteran of the Army, but also a 46-year member of the U.S. Senate, which accorded him rights for burial at the national cemetery in Virginia, across the Potomac River from the Capitol where he served for nearly five decades.

President Barack Obama, spending a week's vacation with his family at Martha's Vineyard, plans to speak at a funeral mass for Kennedy in Boston on Saturday.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who died late Tuesday following a year-long battle with brain cancer, will be laid to rest near the grave of his brother Robert, who was assassinated in 1968 as he campaigned for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

That, in turn, is near and up a hill from the resting place of their older brother, the president, who was slain in Dallas in 1963. The former president is buried there near other members of his family, including the former first lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

The third of the Kennedy brothers to receive a burial with military honors at Arlington served in the Army from 1951 to 1953, stationed in Europe during the Korean War. He was a private first class in the military police for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, then located in Paris.

(Above, the flame at the grave of President John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery. Photo by Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images.)

by James Oliphant

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy didn't live to see his last public wish granted.

Last week, during what turned out to be his final days, Kennedy sent a letter to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Democratic leaders of the state legislature, asking that the state law for choosing Kennedy's successor be amended.

Kennedy sought to have Patrick choose an interim senator until a special election could be held, .

Currently, the only way a senator can be replaced in Massachusetts is through a special election, which could take up to five months. Under state law, the governor must set a date for an election between 145 and 160 days from today.

Unless the legislature moves swiftly to change the law, the state will only be represented by one senator, Democrat John F. Kerry, during that period.

It also means, with crucial and close votes potentially nearing on health care and climate-change legislation, Democrats in the Senate will be short one vote.

In a chamber where more than 40 senators can act to stall any significant bill-- and where Republicans hold precisely that number of seats -- the new vacancy could be perilous for the White House's agenda. Another Democratic stalwart, Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, is seriously ill and frequently misses votes.

Television note: MSNBC will air a planned documentary, The Kennedy Brothers, at 9 pm EDT tonight, in addition to its already scheduled time of 7 pm Thursday as noted below. CNN's Larry King Live will devote its show at 9 pm EDT tonight to the memory of the senator from Massachusetts.

by Mark Silva and updated at 3 pm EDT

Praise for Sen. Edward M. "Ted'' Kennedy, the last of three Kennedy brothers who captured the American's public imagination in the 1960s and who dominated the Washington debate through the final decades of his nearly 47-year career in the Senate, rolled across party lines today.

The iconic Massachusetts Democrat who died at the age of 77 after a year-long bout with brain cancer was 'the greatest U.S. senator of our time,'' President Barack Obama said today.

"His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws reflected in millions of lives,'' Obama said in a personal statement delivered from a lawn of the Martha's Vineyard retreat where he and his family are vacationing. Obama cited Kennedy's legislative hand in the granting of "dignity'' for senior citizens, educational opportunity for children and hope for "all who can pursue their dream in an America that is more equal and more just -- including myself.''

"The Kennedy name is synonymous with the Democratic Party,'' Obama said, "But in the United States Senate I can think of no one who engendered more respect... from both sides of the aisle... That's one of the reasons he became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most extraordinary (leaders) to ever serve democracy.''

Obama, whose own campaign for president received a significant early boost with a primary endorsement by Kennedy, spoke at a vacation home not far from the Hyannisport, Mass., Kennedy compound where the senator was convalescing and died.

The president was awakened this morning by Marvin Nicholson, special assistant to the president and White House trip director, at 2 am EDT to inform him of Kennedy's passing. Obama spoke with Kennedy's wife, Vicki, by telephone at 2:25 am.

"The hope still lives, and the dream shall never die,'' Kennedy had said the night that he conceded to a Democratic National Convention that the party had nominated President Jimmy Carter for a second term, rebuffing Kennedy's final bid in 1980 for his party's nomination for the office his brother, John F. Kennedy, had won and brother Robert F. Kennedy had died seeking. Those words were echoed today in the remembrances of Ted Kennedy.

Obama is portrayed in a documentary that MSNBC already has prepared to air about the Kennedy brothers Thursday evening as the newest torch-bearer for dreams that the three Kennedy brothers had carried for five decades of American politics.

"Teddy spent a lifetime working for a fair and more just America,'' Vice President Joe Biden said today. The former and longtime member of the Senate from Delaware and Kennedy colleague called the late senator's wife this morning.

"For 36 years, I had the privilege of going to work every day... and being a witness to history,'' Biden said in an emotional personal statement in Washington. "In that process, every day I was with him, and this is going to sound strange, but he restored my sense of idealism and my faith in the possibilities of what this country can do.... It was infectious... He made everybody he worked with bigger, both his adversaries and his allies...

"He was kind of like an anchor,'' said Biden, speaking at length about the personal comfort that Kennedy had lent him during his own personal tragedies, the loss of his wife and child in a car accident early in his Senate career. "It was never about him, it was always about you..

"We will never see the likes of him again,'' Biden said.

by Fred Bob, special to the Swamp

The home video surely will make you seasick.

But once you wade into the thick of the crowd, the magnitude of the purported world record set Sunday in Luckenbach, Texas -- 1,857 guitar-pickers picking in rythm and even in tune -- offers a welcome lullaby on this day of czars, talk-TV wars and soaring deficits.

As our colleauges in Austin write of the Luckenbach record-breaker:

"The Americans it seems have beaten the Germans again. This time, the event was for the Guinness World record of most guitar players playing simultaneously or as it is recorded in the Guinness book, the largest guitar ensemble.

"Until this past Sunday, August 23rd, 1,802 participants in Leinfelden-Echterdingen Germany held the record. The German participants, led by Andreas Vockrodt, played 'Smoke on the Water' simultaneously led by the band 'Party Blues in Bb' on June 26th, 2007. The Germans had taken the title when they broke the record that was previously held by 1,683 guitar players playing "Smoke on the Water" in Kansas City...

So Sunday, "after a quick refresher on how to play the G chord, all 1857 guitar players began playing the Luckenbach Song (Back to the Basics of Love). The song, which was obviously the only one appropriate for the event, was recorded in 1977 by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson and put Luckenbach, Texas on the map for good.''

"Ain't nobody feeling no pain."

Until you watch the Kansas City event:

by Mark Silva

Move over, Joe McCarthy.

Glenn Beck has found several Communists in the government, starting with....

"Nobody wants to think that our president is a bad guy.... He seems like a likeable guy,'' Beck said on air this evening, calling this week the "hardest'' of his long broadcast career.

Why? Because he is asking "tough questions.''

And here we thought it was because advertisers are boycotting his show after Beck called the president "racist.''

"Last night we broke all kinds of records for ratings,'' Beck said tonight.

Beck, the FOX News Channel commentator with a popular show of his own airing opposite a less-viewed Chris Matthews clearly leaning to the other direction over on MSNBC, is taking on the "czars'' of the Obama administration -- starting with "the green czar,'' Van Jones, in charge of encouraging "green jobs'' at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

"He's a Communist... focused on what? Job creation,'' Beck said today. "Let me ask the White House this question. What kind of jobs does a Communist create?''

"We already know of at least five radical leftists advising the president of the United States,'' Beck said on this evening's program, naming them, including Cass Sunstein, "the regulatory czar,'' an esteemed law professor who "has proposed that your dog be allowed an attorney in court'' (and could very well become a nominee for the Supreme Court) and, Carol Browner, "the global warming czar,'' remembered around Washington as Bill Clinton's EPA czar and in Florida as the enviro-czar.

"Comrade Obama,'' Beck quoted Venezuela's Hugo Chavez as saying.

"When the Communist president of Venezuela says something like that and there are literal Communists advising the president, '' Beck asked, "should we be asking some more questions?''

Probably, and they start at Beck's desk.

(File photo of the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin / AP)

by Mark Silva

President Obama is dancing with the czars, the way some of his critics would have it.

And those critics have grown louder and louder lately, complaining about not only the president's alleged "socialist'' health-care plans, but also his alleged "communist'' adviser - Van Jones (pictured below), the environmental adviser whom FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck is calling "the green czar.''

(That's one of the nicer things Beck calls Jones, who, like a few others who have arrived in Washington with a zeal for public service, possessed somewhat more radical views about politics in his college days. Beck should know about radicals.)

As for those czars...

Obama has "more of them than the Romanovs,'' Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona joked today at his "town hall'' meeting in Sun City, Arizona, repeating a laugh line that he has played again and again. (But the audience wasn't laughing about something which some see as a threat to their very Constitution -- that is the threat of advisers to the president whom people lightly call "czars.")

This czar-struck administration is raising the hackles of the anti-czar crowd, for sure.

Beck calls it "The new Republic... apparently the old one wasn't good enough,'' Beck says. "One area I have a lot of questions on is the czars... There are nearly three dozen of these czars. They don't answer to anybody. They are advisers to the president.''

Actually, they answer to the president - and Obama hardly is the first president to have an array of senior assistants who have a say in White House policy.

And Beck really has it out for the "green czar,'' Jones, whose actual title has more to do with being a special advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Some "czar'' Jones is, on this White House CEQ roster:

Chair: Nancy Sutley, Chief of Staff: Jon Carson; Deputy Chief of Staff: Nikki Buffa; General Counsel: Ted Boling....

Associate Directors: Land and Water Ecosystems: Mike Boots; Climate Change: Jason Bordoff; NEPA Oversight: Horst Greczmiel; Communications: Christine Glunz; Green Jobs: Van Jones; Legislative Affairs: Jessica Maher;Policy Outreach: Amy Salzman.

This czar-business, like the car-business, has gotten out of control. The title itself has become a "clunker'' with little cache, considering how many there may be.

When the administration dropped the word "toxic" from its talk of financial markets' woes, the press secretary was asked in March: "Do you have some marketing czar now who decided that "legacy loans" is more attractive to private investors than the word "toxic"?

"If there's a marketing czar,'' Press Secretary Robert Gibbs replied, "I've failed to get his or her memo.''

(The illustration above of three of history's greatest henchmen - Ivan the Terrible (Christopher Guest, left), Al Capone (Jon Bernthal) and Napoleon Bonaparte (Alain Chabat) demarks a scene from the film, "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" by James Dittiger. The photo of Van Jones above is just a wire photo -- Ethan Miller / Getty Images.)

By James Oliphant

A wave of bleak news about the stagnant economy promises to give opponents of President Obama's expansive domestic agenda more ammunition to argue that this is an inopportune time to enact overhauls of the nation's health-care and energy policies.

As part of its fiscal mid-year review, the Obama administration projected today that the United States will run a $9-trillion deficit over the next decade--$2 trillion more than it had estimated in February when its budget initially was outlined.

On the same day, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal budget deficit for fiscal 2009 will soar to $1.6 trillion, which would represent 11.2 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, the highest percentage since the end of World War II.

That number, however, was slightly lower than what officials originally predicted, citing less spending on the bailouts of financial institutions as the reason.

The culprit for bad projections is the economy, still mired in a recession, which has resulted in significantly lower tax revenues at the same time that federal spending has ramped up sharply. Administration officials, however, said they expected the economy to begin to grow more by the end of the year, with unemployment beginning to recede sometime next year. Still, the economy isn't projected to grow in a robust fashion until 2011.

Republicans and other critics of Obama's call for expanded health insurance for all Americans, as well his advocacy of a "cap-and-trade" program to limit greenhouse gas emissions, contend that those goals should be set aside in a time of limited economic growth.

Sen. John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, called the deficit projections a ``three-alarm fire warning'' that should steer Congress away from a health-care plan which he contends would compound the deficit.

`The key for the Congress is to do no harm, to do nothing to make matters worse,'' said Thune, who said it was more important to focus on curbing the long-term cost of Medicare and slowing the growth of health-care expenses rather than expanding government entitlements.

by Mark Silva

Remember, it was Republican Sen. John McCain who put the trademark stamp on this political "town hall'' business - waging his first campaign for the GOP's presidential nomination in 2000 with a series of assemblies in the town halls of New Hampshire that eventually built to a crescendo of packed halls in churches and veterans halls' that helped the Arizonan trounce his rival from Texas, George W. Bush, in the first presidential primary election that year.

So, today, it was McCain, pacing the floor of a town-hall meeting in Sun City, Arizona, with a microphone in hand calling on his audience to heed his warnings about the "health-care reform'' that President Barack Obama, the Democrat who defeated him in November, is pressing Congress to enact before the end of this year.

And McCain was giving much credit today to the raucous town-halls that members of Congress have faced this summer in slowing the "railroad'' of the health-care plan that Democratic leaders are driving.

"I'm grateful for the town hall meetings,'' McCain said. "If it had not been for these town hall meetings all over the country, I believe a health-care (plan) would have been railroaded'' through Congress.... "I think you are seeing the beginning of a peaceful, and let me emphasize peaceful, revolt in America...

"We don't want to destroy the strongest health care in the world - we don't want to harm it,'' McCain told his crowd with a certain campaign-like fervor in his voice. "We do not want to destroy the quality of health care, but we all want to get the costs under control ...

"We have committed an act of generational theft, we have robbed our children of their future... The deficits are now out of control,'' said McCain, voicing a familiar refrain: "My friends, there is corruption in Washington... This system is broken.

"Now we own Chrysler and General Motors,'' McCain said, adding the cost of the State Children's Health Insurance Program which Obama and Congress expanded this year to the pile of debt that the nation is amassing. "Can we afford to lay another $1 trillion... debt on the American public and our children? I don't think so.''

And some in the crowd called: "No....!''

"What we cannot, and must not do is the quote, public option, which is really the government option,'' said the senior senator from Arizona, open-collared and opening fire on perhaps the most controversial element of Obama's health-care plan. "Look at it in Canada, look at it in England... My friend, this is the camel's nose under the tent....

"You don't have to take my word for it, friends, we're talking about a new trillion-dollar or multi-trillion dollar debt laid on Americans,'' said McCain, maintaining that what the public really wants is to control the spiralling cost of health-care.

SEE A PHOTO GALLERY OF PRESIDENTIAL VACATIONS

By Christi Parsons and updated at 1 pm EDT

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. -- It's just your average vacation schedule - a little reading, a little tennis and golf, a little briefing from the National Security Council.

But even though he has advisors in tow at the island resort of Martha's Vineyard this week, President Barack Obama insists he is planning more relaxation than work. And his schedule so far suggests he is serious about holing up with his family.

On Monday, for instance, the president worked out, played tennis with the first lady and then hit the links with some friends. Today, he is golfing again, at the Mink Meadows Golf Club -- after this morning taking the briefest of work-breaks to announce the re-nomination of the Federal Reserve chairman.

And then there are the books which the president brought with him on Air Force One, for possible reading on a hammock on the 28-acre Blue Heron Farm where he's staying.
He has five books - including David McCullough's "John Adams" and Tom Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" - more than a lot of people read in a month when they aren't also trying to redesign American health care.

Still, it seems like a light schedule for the president, helping to fuel excitement about the possibility of First Family sightings around the island.

Sporting khakis and a white polo shirt, the president stopped on his way out to the course to shake hands with golfers on the clubhouse porch.

"I hope I didn't mess anyone's day up," Obama said, according to Ronnie Lytle, a local retiree who had arrived for an 8:20 a.m. tee time but didn't get to play because so many carts were being reserved for the president's party.

"You did," Lytle told the president, "but I don't care."

The first foursome played nine holes. According to a resident who saw the president play from the second fairway to the second hole, Obama yelled "Fore!" shortly before his ball hit a tree.

Still, the ball landed not far from the green, said Sally Fitzgerald, who lives next to the hole. Obama chipped it up with "a pretty good chip,'' and then, by her count, took three putts to sink it.

"But that's a tough green," Fitzgerald said. "It's a par four.''

(Photos of the first golfer at Mink Meadows above: Steven Senne / AP / above, and Alex Brandon / AP , below.)

By Jim Tankersley

Cast your mind back to high school history class and you may recall a watershed American courtroom drama, a 1925 case against a Tennessee biology teacher that gripped the nation by pitting Darwin's evolution theory against Biblical creationism.

Nearly 85 years later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants the federal government to stage a modern version - "a Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" - with the science of global warming taking center stage, as I report today.

The feds are cool to the idea. But If a court were to compel the hearing, it's easy to imagine the Scopes Trial re-cast with modern players:

Al Gore in the role of defense attorney Clarence Darrow, arguing that the very fate of civilization is on trial.

Leading climate skeptic Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) as prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, arguing that if warming wins, industry goes.

Or perhaps, reaching back in the Bryan populist playbook (and your high school history text), urging the judge not to crucify America on a "cross of carbon".

By Christi Parsons and Mark Silva

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. -- President Barack Obama, praising Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for resolute handling of the worst economic crisis in decades, said today that he will nominate the appointee of his Republican predecessor for a second term.

Taking a short work-break from his summer vacation, Obama met with reporters at Oak Bluffs, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard this morning to personally announce his decision to nominate Bernanke for another four-year term.

"As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression, I'm sure Ben never imagined that he would be part of a team responsible for preventing another,'' Obama said. "But because of his background, his temperament, his courage, and his creativity, that's exactly what he has helped to achieve. And that is why I am re-appointing him to another term as dhairman of the Federal Reserve.''

The president and the Fed chairman today attempted to present a message of stability in the face of a persisting recession.

"The Federal Reserve, like other economic policy makers, has been challenged by the unprecedented economic events of the last few years... We have been bold,'' Bernanke said in a brief statement after the president's remarks. "If confirmed by the Senate, I will work to the utmost of my abilities... to help find a solid foundation for growth and stability.''

The nomination to another four-year term starting in January is subject to approval by the Senate, where Bernanke is likely to face sharp questions about whether he responded quickly enough to the mortgage crisis or competently led the bailout of financial firms.

But the nomination already has won tentative endorsement by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who says he believes that Bernanke is "probably the right choice" for the job.

by Jim Puzzanghera and Christi Parsons

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, a scholar of the Great Depression who moved boldly last fall to prevent another economic catastrophe, will be nominated by President Obama to a second four-year term as head of the nation's increasingly powerful central bank, a senior administration official said Monday night.

After months of uncertainty about Bernanke's fate, Obama is scheduled to announce his decision this morning in an appearance with the Fed chief on Martha's Vineyard, where the president is vacationing with his family.

Although Bernanke is a Republican who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, he has worked closely with Obama's economic team, and the president decided to renominate him to maintain continuity as the country appears poised to climb out of the deepest recession in decades, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement still was pending.

Bernanke's term expires Jan. 31 and Obama has been noncommittal about whether he would nominate the 55-year-old Princeton University economist for another term. But Obama has praised Bernanke's response to the financial crisis, which involved aggressive use of the Fed's emergency powers.

Obama said at a news conference in June that he thought Bernanke had "done a fine job under very difficult circumstances."

"I think that the Fed probably performed better than most other regulators prior to the crisis taking place, but I think they'd be the first to acknowledge that in dealing with systemic risk and anticipating systemic risk, they didn't do everything that needed to be done," Obama said when asked about Bernanke during the June news conference. "I think since the crisis has occurred, Ben Bernanke has performed very well."

Bernanke has received largely positive reviews from Wall Street as well, and his efforts, along with those of economic officials from the Bush and Obama administrations, are widely credited with preventing a meltdown of the financial system.

See the full report on Obama's expected nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as Fed chairman in Tribune newspapers and here in the Swamp:

by Mark Silva

Amid reports tonight that President Barack Obama plans to nominate Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reseve, for another term, the White House has scheduled a personal statement from Obama on vacation in Martha's Vineyard in the morning.

It was Bernanke and the former Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, who convinced former President George W. Bush and Congress to authorize a $700-billion bailout of the financial markets last fall, in the face of a credit crisis that threatened to plunge the economy into a deeper recession. And it is Bernanke who maintains that that and other federal initiatives are working, and that the recession's end is in sight.

Economic activity in both the United States and globally appears to be "leveling out," Bernanke said last week in an address to the annual Federal Reserve conference in Wyoming. "The prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good.''

Nevertheless, lingering credit problems and consumer confidence -- with trouble in businesses and households alike -- remain a concern, the Fed chairman said, noting that restoring a free flow of credit is critical to a lasting recovery.

"Although we have avoided the worst, difficult challenges still lie ahead," Bernanke told the conference. "We must work together to build on the gains already made to secure a sustained economic recovery."

The Associated Press and other news organizations tonight are citing sources saying that the president will nominate Bernanke for another term. The president has scheduled a 9 am EDT statement Tuesday at the Oak Bluffs School on Martha's Vineyard, where the media covering the vacationing president are working.

In remarks prepared for the announcement, and obtained by the AP, Obama plans to praise Bernanke for leading the country through a financial crisis and, with his expertise on the Great Depression, helping to prevent a similar crisis.

"Ben approached a financial system on the verge of collapse with calm and wisdom, with bold action and outside-the-box thinking that has helped put the brakes on our economic free-fall," Obama plans to say.

"The actions we have taken to stabilize our financial system, repair our credit markets, restructure auto industry and help the overall economy recover have all been steps of necessity, not choice. They have faced plenty of critics, some of whom argued that we should stay the course or do nothing at all. But taken together, all of these steps have brought our economy back from the brink. They are steps that are working.''

Bernanke was appointed Fed chairman by Bush and sworn in February 2006. Obama plans to nominate Bernanke for a second four-year term, the AP reports.

(Bernanke is pictured above on Capitol Hill in an AP photo.)

by Mark Silva

This may help explain why President Barack Obama is so -- as the producer for FOX News' O'Reilly Factor puts it -- "thin-skinned'' about FOX News.

FOX's Glenn Beck used his popular program today to "attack the background of Van Jones, a White House environmental advisor who co-founded an African American political advocacy group that has organized an advertising boycott of his program,'' as the L.A. Times' Matea Gold notes in Show Tracker.

This is the Beck who, one morning on FOX & Friends, accused Obama of "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."

In protest, the group, "Color of Change,'' has promoted an advertising boycott and says it has secured commitments from 36 companies pledging not to advertise on Beck's afternoon show, with a growing audience of more than 2 million viewers.

Beck "spent a large share of his program suggesting that Jones, who co-founded Color of Change in 2005, is a radical,'' Gold writes. "During a six-minute biographical profile, set to ominous music, Beck said Jones was twice arrested for political protests and has described himself as a "rowdy black nationalist.'''

"Why is it that such a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama administration as one of his chief advisers?" Beck asked.

Jones serves as a special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. James Rucker, executive director of Color of Change, says Jones has not been active with the group ifor nearly two years and Beck is "trying to change the subject... The issue is his baseless fear mongering."

Although the ad boycott has generated publicity, FOX News says it has not hurt the network;s revenue or Beck's audience. "The advertisers referenced have all moved their spots from Beck to other programs on the network so there has been no revenue lost," a spokeswoman said.

Since his show made its debut i January, Beck has attracted a sizable following with his crticisim for the Obama administration. This month, his viewership has averaged 2.25 million, with ratings up from July, when it averaged 2.05 million viewers.

"This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, I don't know what it is,'' Beck said on FOX & Friends last month "I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.''

"The controversy has triggered a broader discussion about the risks to advertisers of running commercials amid the incendiary rhetoric of cable talk shows,'' Gold notes.

Clorox announced last week that it was making a clean sweep of its ads from all political talk shows. ""We do not want to be associated with inflammatory speech used by either liberal or conservative talk show host," the company said in a statement. "After a comprehensive review of political talks shows across the spectrum, at this time we have made a decision not to advertise on them.''

As for the vacationing White House, there appeared to be no word forthcoming on Beck's newest assault, but a spokesman professed that he wasn't sure what O'Reilly's producer was talking about on that "thin-skinned'' question.

.(Glenn Beck, of FOX News, is pictured above right in a a file photo by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times. Van Jones, of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is pictured above left speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas in a phhoto by Ethan Miller / Getty Images)

by Greg Miller

The Obama administration disclosed new cases of alleged abuse in the CIA's interrogation program today,issuing a report that described how prisoners were choked to the point of passing out and threatened with harm to their immediate families.

The newly declassified report by the CIA's inspector general also reveals that agency personnel were nervous almost from the inception of the interrogation program that they would one day face prosecution in U.S. or international courts.

The likelihood of that outcome increased today, as Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed a prosecutor to review a collection of alleged CIA abuse cases, setting the stage for a probe that could lead to criminal charges for CIA personnel.

The move was largely driven by the disturbing details contained in the 2004 inspector general's report, a document that sent ripples of anxiety through the government when it was first issued but became available for public view - at least in part - for the first time on Monday. Large sections of the report remained blacked out.

The document includes fresh details that had not been previously disclosed. Among them are that top Al Qaeda prisoners were told that their family members faced harm if detainees didn't yield information.

"We could get your mother in here," a CIA interrogator told Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri, the alleged plotter behind the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, according to the IG report. The threat was meant to prey on fears in Middle East circles that prisoners would be made to witness the sexual abuse of their immediate family members.

In another case, alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was told, "We're going to kill your children," the report said.

by Josh Meyer

Att'y Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. today opened a preliminary investigation into whether some CIA operatives broke the law in their coercive interrogations of suspected terrorists in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- prompting sharp criticism from both the right and the left.

Holder said that he decided to establish what he called a ``preliminary review'' after he conducted a thorough examination of past reviews of the interrogations, including an internal CIA investigation completed in 2004 by the agency's inspector general and separate reviews by Justice Department internal affairs watchdogs and line prosecutors.

``As a result of my analysis of all of this material, I have concluded that the information known to me warrants opening a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations,'' Holder said in a just-released statement.

``The department regularly uses preliminary reviews to gather information to determine whether there is sufficient predication to warrant a full investigation of a matter. I want to emphasize that neither the opening of a preliminary review nor, if evidence warrants it, the commencement of a full investigation, means that charges will necessarily follow.''

Holder tapped Assistant U.S. Att'y John Durham to lead the review, saying Durham is best positioned to do so because he has already investigating the CIA. Last year, the Bush administration's final attorney general, Michael Mukasey, appointed the Connecticut-based Durham to investigate the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations.

``During the course of that investigation, Mr. Durham has gained great familiarity with much of the information that is relevant to the matter at hand. Accordingly, I have decided to expand his mandate to encompass this related review,'' Holder said.

by Mark Silva

Is President Barack Obama picking on FOX News?

Or is it the other way around?

Bill O'Reilly's producer was asking today, why the thin skin?.

"I am Barack Obama,'' the president had noted at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner earlier this year. "Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me.... (laughter) Apologies to the Fox table.'' (more laughter)

At a press briefing in late June, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked: "You said a couple of days ago that Americans are concerned and anxious as the president about the deficit, and they have a right to be. The president says it keeps him asleep at night. The polls also indicate...

"Keeps him awake,'' Gibbs corrected the questioner.

" Keeps him awake, I'm sorry...

"FOX is what puts him to sleep,'' Gibbs added. "Sorry, I just -- I couldn't resist.''

Then there was the fellow named Randy, a self-declared NRA member, at the "town-hall'' styled meeting on health-care reform last week in Montana, who told the president: "I also get my news from the cable networks because I don't like the spin that comes from them other places.''

"Oh, you got to be -- you got to be careful about them cable networks, though,'' said Obama, who has noted that one, in particular, seems to have it out for him.

At a town hall in New Hampshire, a man announced himself as "one of the people that turned myself in on the White House Web page the other day for being a skeptic of this bill.''

"Can I just say this is another example of how the media ends up just (completely) distorting what's taken place?'' Obama said. "What we've said is that... if you get an e-mail from somebody that says, for example, 'Obama-care is creating a death panel,' forward us the e-mail and we will answer the question that's raised in the e-mail. Suddenly, on some of these news outlets, this is being portrayed as "Obama collecting an enemies list."

At another town-hall on health-care reform in Ohio last month, the president spoke of "all those folks who are out there saying we can't afford this, this is socialism, this will lead to government-run health care; all the folks who are getting ginned up on talk radio and some of these cable news shows...''

And at a town-hall in Missouri in April, the president said, knowingly: "You know, when you see -- those of you who are watching certain news channels that -- on which I'm not very popular -- (laughter) -- and you see folks waving tea bags around ...'' (laughter)

Today, at the Vineyard White House's first press briefing at Oak Bluffs, Mass., a producer for FOX News Channel's Bill O'Reilly asked: "Why does the administration seem to be so thin-skinned with regard to Fox News?''

(O'Reilly Factor producer Jesse Watters "hits Martha's Vineyard to check in on President Obama's vacation!'' FOX notes of tonight's show.) While you're getting the microwave popcorn ready, see what the White House has to say about all this, here in the Swamp:

by Mark Silva

Everyone takes books to the beach in the summer.

And President Barack Obama, who has started a weeklong vacation on Martha's Vineyard -- working out this morning, playing tennis with First Lady Michelle Obama and planning a round of golf with House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and others on the island retreat -- has brought some books along, too.

A couple of novels, a tome about global warming and a biography of one of his earliest predecessors in the White House.

According to the Vineyard White House -- with spokesman Bill Burton reporting in at "Martha's Filing Center'' at the Oak Bluffs School today -- the president is packing:

The Way Home, by George Pelecanos.

(From Publisher's Weekly: " Bestseller Pelecanos (The Turnaround) probes the volatile and fragile relationship between a father, Thomas Flynn, and his son, Chris, in this less than satisfying effort. As a rebellious teen into drugs, Chris had minor brushes with the law and did a stint in juvenile prison. Now 26, he's working for his father's D.C.-area carpet installation business and staying clean

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman.

(From Amazon.com: "Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is "hot, flat, and crowded." Already the earth is being affected in ways that threaten to make it dangerously unstable. In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things--unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green.'')

Lush Life by Richard Price

(From Publisher's Weekly: "Master of the Bronx and Jersey projects, Price (Clockers) turns his unrelenting eye on Manhattan's Lower East Side in this manic crescendo of a novel that explores the repercussions of a seemingly random shooting. When bartender Ike Marcus is shot to death after barhopping with friends, NYPD Det. Matty Clark and his team first focus on restaurant manager and struggling writer Eric Cash, who claims the group was accosted by would-be muggers, despite eyewitnesses saying otherwise.'')

John Adams by David McCullough.

(From Publisher's Weekly: "Here a preeminent master of narrative history takes on the most fascinating of our founders to create a benchmark for all Adams biographers. With a keen eye for telling detail and a master storyteller's instinct for human interest, McCullough resurrects the great Federalist (1735-1826), revealing in particular his restrained, sometimes off-putting disposition, as well as his political guile. '')

by Josh Meyer

President Obama has approved the creation of a new multi-agency interrogation unit for suspected terrorists that will be based at the FBI but overseen by policy-makers at the White House and its National Security Council, senior administration officials said today.

The new unit, called the HIG, or High-value detainee Interrogation Group, was seen as one of the administration's most forceful efforts to date to distance itself from the Bush administration and the controversially coercive interrogation methods used by its CIA with approval by political appointees at the Bush Justice Department.

The CIA still will play a role in the interrogation and transfer of future high-value terrorist suspects, including al Qaeda leaders and their financiers and facilitators, according to the administration officials, who briefed reporters on the new plan but refused to discuss its details by name.

But the new unit, in addition to being housed at FBI headquarters in Washington, will be led by an as-yet-unnamed FBI official and comprise interrogators, analysts and linguists from numerous civilian and military agencies, the officials said. Its deputy director will come from a U.S. intelligence agency, and the unit overall will report to the White House.

In the Bush administration, the CIA had the lead and usually exclusive role in interrogations of suspected al Qaeda operatives, with the U.S. military conducting the questioning of many militants caught in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Bill Burton also discussed the new unit, telling reporters covering the vacationing Obama on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., that it will include "all these different elements under one group.''

Att'y' Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and the two senior administration officials said the recommendations were made after extensively consulting with military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including some of the nation's most experienced and skilled interrogators that they employ.

``The task force concluded that the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies,'' Holder said.

The HIG will deploy mobile teams of experienced interrogators, analysts, subject matter experts and linguists to conduct interrogations of high-value terrorists if the United States obtains the ability to interrogate them. Its primary goal, Holder said, ``would be gathering intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks and otherwise to protect national security.''

But Holder also said that advance planning and interagency coordination under the new HIG ``would also allow the United States, where appropriate, to preserve the option of gathering information to be used in potential criminal investigations and prosecutions.''

"The new policies proposed by the task force will allow us to draw the best personnel from across the government to conduct interrogations that will yield valuable intelligence and strengthen our national security," Holder said. "There is no tension between strengthening our national security and meeting our commitment to the rule of law, and these new policies will accomplish both."

by Mark Silva

The illness which has sidelined the senior senator from Massachusetts after 47 years in Washington bodes the end of a dramatic era which opened a little over five decades ago with a mix of money, romance and idealism.

Three brothers - the Kennedy brothers - have left an indelible mark on the modern history of a nation that aspired to reach the moon but was brought down to earth with an unwinnable war in Vietnam. In the inaugural words of President Barack Obama, whose own campaign evoked a dream that a nation had invested in the Kennedys: "We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.''

"They stirred the country's blood and maddened their rivals,'' MSNBC's Chris Matthews says of the Kennedy brothers in a nostalgic Hardball documentary about the campaigns and political legacy of a family, The Kennedy Brothers, that airs Thursday night.

We've seen it, and it's well worth watching.

It is, for sure, long on romanticism and short on criticism. But the sharply detailed and well-written history of a dream that died in Dallas and took decades to rekindle makes it a story as much about a nation as about one family:

The young president, John F. Kennedy, who won the White House in 1960 and was felled by an assassin in 1963, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and charismatic candidate for president until another assassin stopped him on the campaign trail in 1968, and the brother, Edward M. Kennedy, elected to the Senate in 1962 and who made his own failing bids for a presidential nomination, are the subjects of the MSNBC documentary.

But the lushly illustrated story with intimately personal film footage really is about a bridge between the old and new generations of American politics -- the politics of the old ward machines that gave way to the poltiics of new imagery, a transition that paralleled the transition of American television from black and white to technicolor.

Did you remember Frank Sinatra singing JFK's campaign song?

"He had high hopes.''

"Before John F. Kennedy entered the political scene, no politician had ever seemed so comfortable--so himself--in front of television cameras,'' MSNBC notes. "While politicians of the past were forever frozen in black and white photos, the Kennedy brothers were a crisp color image. ''

The first two brothers were taken by unspeakable violence. The third, 77, is battling brain cancer, a disease that has sidelined him at a time when one of the causes of his era - health-care reform - is mired in a stumbling Washington debate which even Republican Sen. John McCain has acknowledged is poorer for Kennedy's absence.

"Ted Kennedy was very happy being a senator,'' historian Doris Kearns Goodwin notes in this documentary -- and the personal scandal of Chappaquiddick helped ensure that he would go no further than the Senate. Though Matthews takes a direct, documented hit at Kennedy's "unprepared'' 1980 campaign -- simply "un-Kennedy.''

Matthews brings his own perspective to the show - he wrote the book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America. Matthews' interviews for this show include Frank Mankiewicz and biographer Peter Canellos. The producers have burnished the narrative with memorable, and priceless, film footage.

The climax is the hard-charging campaign that Sen. Kennedy mounted for Obama in 2008: "That dream that would never die,'' Matthews suggests.

In "Ted's" words: "The dream lives on.''

The Kennedy Brothers airs Thursday at 7 pm EDT.

by Mark Silva

Sen. Joe Lieberman may have been channeling Clint Eastwood when he had this to say about actor Alec Baldwin's recent suggestion that he'd like to challenge the independent senator for reelection

"Make my day,'' Lieberman said Sunday of Baldwin's threat, in an appearance on CNN's State of the Union.

But Baldwin may have been channeling Hamlet when he told Playboy magazine: "I'd love to run against Joe Lieberman. I have no use for him."

To be or not to be a candidate for Senate in 2012 -- that's no question for Lieberman, the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president in 2000 but an independent since the Democrats rejected his nomination for reelection the last time around.

But, it's a big question for Baldwin, best known now for his role on 30 Rock but also a film and TV star with a history of political activism -- he was outspoken in the aftermath of that disputed 2000 presidential election.

"No," he wrote a while back at the Huffington Post. "I am not moving to Connecticut to run against Joe Lieberman. As much as I think Lieberman is an enormous letdown to the party that gave him their nomination for vice president, I am sure that Democratic Party leaders in that state will take care of themselves."

For his part, Lieberman says he respects the Hollywood star.

"I must say I respect Alec Baldwin as an actor and a comedian and if he wants to run that's his right," Lieberman told CNN's John King.

"We'll hold the debate right here," King said.

Doesn't he wish?

They could beam a virtual Baldwin to the set with CNN's election hologram.

Actor Alec Baldwin at bat at the 61st annual Artist vs. Writers charity softball game on Aug. 15 in East Hampton, N.Y. But Baldwin apparently won't be going to bat against Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2012. (Photo by Rick Odell/Getty Images)

by Mark Silva and updated at 10:55 am

Two new developments on the interrogation front:

President Barack Obama has approved the establishment of an "elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects'' as part of a strategy to overhaul policy on detention and interrogation, the Washington Post is reporting.

A White House spokesman today acknowledged that Obama has approved creation of a new, special terrorism-era interrogation unit to be supervised by the White House.

Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters covering the vacationing Obama on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., that the new unit does not mean the CIA is out of the interrogation business. The new unit will include "all these different elements under one group," Burton said, and it will be situated at FBI headquarters.

And the Justice Department's ethics office is recommending that Attorney General Eric Holder reopen and pursue several cases of alleged CIA abuse of prisoners, a reversal of the Bush administration's closing of the cases of extreme interrogations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the New York Times reports and the Associated Press has confirmed.

Holder is "poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects,'' Tribune's Washington Bureau reported earlier this month, citing a senior Justice Department official as saying that "Holder envisioned an inquiry that would be narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

The Obama administration's new tack on interrogations will be dubbed the "High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group,'' the Post reports today, and will comprise "experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies.'' Housed at the FBI, it will report to the Ntional Security Council - "shifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight,'' the Post's Anne Kornblut reports.

The Obama administration had created a task force on interrogation and rendition policies, that task force reporting today. Another task force on the fate of prisoners at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is still at work.

"Under the new guidelines,'' the Post reports, "interrogators must stay within the parameters of the Army Field Manual when questioning suspects. ''

by Mark Silva

On vacation this week on Martha's Vineyard, President Barack Obama plans to "be playing this by ear.''

That means, for now, the rumored meeting with the convalescing Sen. Ted Kennedy up in Hyannisport or a round of golf with Tiger Woods are, well, just bad rumors. At least that's what the White House is suggesting about a week's vacation which is, admittedly, somewhat seat of the pants.

Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts battling brain cancer, could have made quite a difference in the health-care negotiations underway, Sen. John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, said today on ABC News' This Week.

" No person in that institution is indispensable,'' the Republican McCain said of his Democratic colleague who helped him pass an immigration reform bill in the Senate - only to see it die in the House. "But Ted Kennedy comes as close to being indispensable as any individual I've ever known in the Senate because he had a unique way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations...

"So it's huge that he's absent, not only because of my personal affection for him,'' McCain said, "but because I think the health care reform might be in a very different place today."

But, as for all the speculation that Obama, the former junior senator from Illinois, might meet up with the lion of the Senate this week while the Obamas rest at a 28-acre estate on the island off the south shore of Cape Cod, the White House says there are no plans for that.

"Obviously the president and his family have been in contact with Sen. Kennedy and their family over the course of his time as president,'' assistant press secretary Bill Burton said today, en route to Martha's Vineyard with the president. " I can't imagine that contact would continue even while they're here. But there's no plans at this point to go over to Hyannis Port.''

And, as for that golf which the golf-loving president might take in with one of the world's golfing giants, Burton said simply: "I think that's a bad rumor. I don't even know that he's going to be here this week. But no, there's -- nothing like that is on the schedule. There's no plan for that.''

Then again, Burton said: "Let me just start by saying that the president is coming to Martha's Vineyard because it's a beautiful place where the residents are great and the people who come to visit in the summers ain't too bad, either. They've got great beaches, great restaurants, a good community...

"He's on vacation, though, and there are no scheduled plans. And just like when anybody else goes on vacation, if dinner plans pop up, they go out to dinner. If your friends come over, they come over. So I think we'll all just be playing this by ear.''

(Photo of President Barack Obama, lower right, and eldest daughter Malia, 11, lower left, followed by wife Michelle, upper right, and daughter Sasha, 8, departing Air Force One after at Cape Cod Coast Guard Air Station near Falmouth, Mass. today, . By Vince DeWitt/ pool via Bloomberg .)

by Jim Tankersley

With Americans so worried about the struggling economy and Congress prepping for a host of major legislative battles this year, President Barack Obama should scale back his health-care reform push and settle for a smaller, bipartisan bill, a key Senate moderate said this morning.

In particular, Obama should put off his push to cover every American with health insurance, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on CNN's State of the Union.

"Great changes in our country often have come in steps," Lieberman said. "The civil rights movement occured in steps. Let's focus now on how to reduce costs."

A moment later, he added "Morally, every one of us would like to cover every American with health insurance. But that's where you spend most" of the roughly trillion-dollar health plan. "We should think about putting that off until the economy is out of the recession."

Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate but endorsed Republican John McCain in last year's presidential election, was seconded by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who said the nation's "economic malaise" warranted putting off a major health care overhaul until at least next year.

But Senate Democrats continued to push for a wide-scale effort this fall, including covering the uninsured and creating a so-called "public option" for health insurance -- calling both critical to any hopes of reducing rapidly escalating health expenses.

"We've got to offer choice to bring down cost," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.).

On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) blamed "disinformation" for slumping public support for Obama's health plan, and he projected confidence that the president would ultimately prevail.

"I do not think it is in trouble," Specter said of the health bill. "I think it's in a period of analysis and re-analysis...I think we have a good chance to get bipartisan reform done."

by Christi Parsons

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- President Barack Obama heads to the island resort of Martha's Vineyard today for a family vacation likely to be interspersed with talk of - and work on - his drive to pass a health-care overhaul this fall.

The president, First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters are set to spend the week at the well-appointed Blue Heron farm, a private estate which they are renting from a family of Republican political donors.

The 28-acre spread affords the Obamas access to the sand and surf, along with something else they don't get much of when they travel as a foursome: privacy.

But the health-care debate won't pause this week. And signs are that the president, and his White House -in-residence, will keep working, if at a slightly more relaxed pace.

Aides to Obama say he is planning to keep in touch with lawmakers, especially members of the Senate Finance committee, by telephone. Advisors haven't entirely ruled out the possibility of a "town hall "-styled meeting before the family's vacation ends on Aug. 30.

Also, the island retreat is not far from the Cape Cod home where Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) has been spending a lot of time this summer, raising the possibility that Obama could pay a visit to the ailing senator, a longtime advocate of health-care reform who is battling brain cancer. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview on ABC News' This Week today that the absence of Kennedy, a master negotiator, has had an impact on the health-care debate.

by Mark Silva

Out on Martha's Vineyard, where President Barack Obama and his family will spend a week's vacation, tourism isn't all they are talking about.

At a forum billed as "Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama,'' Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., the scholar of black culture from Harvard whose arrest at his home by the Cambridge police stirred a national debate about racial profiling and presidential criticism, raised some new questions this week about how far the nation which elected its first African-American president last year has really come.

The setting was the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, an edifice erected by whaling captains in 1843 and a model of Greek revival architecture on an island that has its own rich heritage as a retreat for African-Americans, scholars and writers among them.

"If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our president, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our president, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying,'' Princeton University professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell said at Gates' forum, as reported by the venerable weekly Vineyard Gazette, nearly as old as the Edgartown church.

This island is Gates' home away from home, and he thanked friends who had helped him get off the fogbound retreat for a beer at the White House with Sgt. James Crowley, the officer who arrested him after a call to police that two men were forcing their way into Gates' home - the professor had come home from a long trip to China to find his door jammed. The police later rescinded the arrest, but Obama, at a nationally televised news conference, accused them of "acting stupidly'' in the affair - words which the president later acknowledged could have been better chosen.

The president, professor and policeman patched up their differences over a Bud Light, a Sam Adams and a Blue Moon at the White House."

How bad would that have been,'' if Gates had missed the beer summit, the professor said, as the Gazette reports, if "Officer James Crowley had been there and we'd been up here at the Inkwell, sipping chardonnay, covered by Fox News. That was not going to be too good."

But "this isn't about me,'' Gates told his Whaling Church audience. "I was in jail for a total of four hours . . . what about the people in jail for four days, or four months, or four years? It's about fairness under the law, race-neutral application of the law...

by Mark Silva and updated

The great health-care debate of August closes, from the vacationing president's perspective, with a White House attempt to dispell some of "the more outrageous myths'' that have built up around the health insurance overhaul the president is promoting.

It "should be an honest debate, not one dominated by willful misrepresentations and outright distortions, spread by the very folks who would benefit the most by keeping things exactly as they are,'' President Barack Obama said today, in his weekly Internet and radio address taped before he left for a week's vacation starting in Camp David this weekend and carrying him and his family to Martha's Vineyard on Sunday.

Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Georgia and physician before he became a politician, delivers the GOP's weekly response today with a suggestion that "folks of every political persuasion understand the imperative of reform. But they want reform that. keeps what's good with our current system - and fixes what's not working - without destroying our quality of care.''

The president insists care will improve.

"Today,'' Obama says in his address, "I want to spend a few minutes debunking some of the more outrageous myths circulating on the internet, on cable TV, and repeated at some town halls across this country.''

So here, from the president, are the Top Three outrageous myths of the health-care debate that Congress and the White House will face when they all return to work in September (the recessed Congress will return after Labor Day.)

-- "The false claim that illegal immigrants will get health insurance under reform. That's not true.''

-- "The charge that reform will somehow bring about a government takeover of health care. I know that sounds scary to many folks. It sounds scary to me, too. But here's the thing: it's not true.''

--"The source of a lot of these fears about government-run health care is confusion over what's called the public option... it would be just an option; those who prefer their private insurer would be under no obligation to shift to a public plan.''

The president allows that "the insurance companies and their allies don't like this idea, or any that would promote greater competition. I get that,,'' he says. "But this one aspect of the health care debate shouldn't overshadow the other important steps we can and must take to reduce the increasing burdens families and businesses face..''

Price, however, asserts that the initiative the Democrats are promoting will put government in everyone's health care, and they won't like it.

"Having navigated federal health care programs for two decades,'' Price says today, "I can tell you that Washington is incapable of processing the personal and unique circumstances that patients and doctors face each and every day. That is why a positive solution will put power in the hands of patients, not insurance companies or the government.

" Unfortunately, the plan being promoted by the White House would give Washington the power to make highly personal medical decisions on behalf of patients - on behalf of you. ''

See the president's address above, the Republican response below, and read the texts of each below the fold:

by Mark Silva

It's been a quiet week on Martha's Vineyard, where they are battening down the beaches for Hurricane Bill's pass, all the coves are good-looking and all the presidential vacations are above average.

"South Beach in Edgartown was closed to bathing today at noon, due to high surf,'' the old Vineyard Gazette reports. "South Beach and all of the beaches on Nantucket will be closed until Monday morning.''

Yet come Sunday, the pace of the isolated island resort off the coast of Cape Cod should pick up a little -- if only for the media circus in search of an elusive story. Isn't that Geraldo Rivera behind that rock?

President Barack Obama and his family, holed up at Camp David in the Maryland mountains tonight and tomorrow while the storm passes in the Atlantic, plan to land Air Force One at Cape Cod Coast Guard Air Station Sunday morning and then chopper to the vineyard.

Hurricane Bill is expected to pass about 150 to 200 miles offshore. But this is an island long accustomed to the fuss stirred by Hurricane Bill - Clinton visited the island during all but one of the years of his presidency. Crowds greeted his arrival. Obama's will be more discreet.

"In sharp contrast to previous presidential visits, the public will be shut out when Barack Obama and his family arrive on the Vineyard somewhere in a five-hour window on Sunday afternoon,'' the Gazette reports of planning at Martha's Vineyard Airport.

"It will be what's called a closed arrival," airport manager Sean Flynn tells the Gazette. "There will be no opportunity at all, really, for the public to view it. That's the straight up, honest answer. You won't catch a glimpse of anything."

"The Obamas' stealthy approach bears comparison to those of the last presidential family to regularly visit the Island, the Clintons,'' the Gazette's Mike Seccombe notes.

"For their first visit, in August of 1993, thousands of flag-waving Islanders clustered at the airport and lined the roads. Edgartown school children stood on the tarmac to greet the president and his family, and a group of children from the Boys' and Girls' Club held a red, white and blue banner and sang Happy Birthday to the president. White House staff planned the public details long in advance and sought the cooperation of local media in publicizing them....

"While the possibility of some spontaneous interaction between the Obamas and locals cannot be ruled out, it does not look likely, going by intelligence filtering back from those few local officials who have been slightly informed of plans,'' our island colleague reports.
"No official engagements have been scheduled; the suggestion is that the first family will sequester themselves at their rented vacation house on Blue Heron Farm (The 28-acre, $20 million estate that the first family is renting for their weeklong stay - departing one week from Sunday.

"The only suggested activities off the farm were a couple of possible golf dates for the president and perhaps a private dinner or two.

"The lack of wider access maintains a pattern set in Mr. Obama's previous couple of visits to the Island, before he became president,'' the Gazette notes. "In 2007, when candidates Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards all visited in quick succession, the Clinton and Edwards campaigns held low-cost fundraisers -- Mrs. Clinton's drew several thousand people at $50 a head for the biggest ever event at the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle -- while Mr. Obama held only a $2,300 per-person, private event.

"If, as appears to be the plan, the Obamas lie low for the duration of their vacation, they will leave a growing media circus with no headline act.

"It is understood most of the major networks and cable channels plan extensive coverage,'' the Gazette adds. "Only yesterday it was revealed the Geraldo Rivera show, on Fox, plans to broadcast from the Island on Saturday evening.

Just to make Obama feel more presidential, perhaps, Cindy Sheehan,, the peace activist whose son Casey was killed in the Iraq War and who camped outside of former President George W. Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas, on his vacations, plans a series of events -- including a peace vigil in Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs.

And for those counting Obama's vacation days in this, his first summer in the White House, it's worth noting that Bush spent a year's worth of weekends and vacation days at that Crawford ranch during eight years in the White House, the ranch house far out of sight of the slumbering media in Waco.

So it should be another quiet week in Martha's Vineyard.

(The old beach cottages above at Oak Bluffs catch the last light. The way most tourists get to Martha's Vineyard is via the ferry to Vineyard Haven from the mainland above. Once there, a sma