Gov. Patrick's administration won't release details about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's welfare benefits.

Reason given: privacy.

Rush Limbaugh, yesterday:

Tamerlan and his bride and their three-year-old daughter all have been on welfare as recently as last year.  Isn't that wonderful?  I was wondering where they got the money to buy all this stuff.  The whole family's on welfare.  So we have another great example of your tax dollars at work. Your tax dollars helped to pay for the explosives, as well as Tamerlan's at least two trips back to Dagestan, his late-model Mercedes, his $900 shoes... How could welfare pay that much money?  How can welfare pay for all this?  Okay, let's say welfare didn't pay for all of it.  If they're able to get this other stuff, what are they doing on welfare in the first place, is the question?

Senator Kirk.

Replacing Senator Kennedy.

... Mr. Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and his sons, Edward M. Kennedy Jr. and Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, had urged Mr. Patrick to appoint Mr. Kirk, who worked for Senator Kennedy in the 1970s, and later served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee....

Mr. Kirk, 71, is chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston. Several friends and associates described him as low-key and laconic, a shrewd political strategist who could have run for office himself but decided he preferred a behind-the-scenes role.

Teddy Kennedy's death will be used to rekindle the old argument that we need to shut up and hurry up about health care reform.

So I assume.

But now the Democrats are short a vote in the Senate, and Democratic Governor Deval Patrick can't just appoint a new Democratic Senator for Massachusetts, despite the fact that Kennedy himself, less than a month ago, urged state legislators to change the law of successsion and give Patrick the power to appoint a Senator, because back in 2004, anticipating that John Kerry would win the presidency, Kennedy was instrumental in getting state legislative change designed to wrest the power from the Massachusetts governor, when the governor was the Republican Mitt Romney.

So there are 2 questions: 1. Is the death of Teddy Kennedy a sufficiently powerful event to counter the opposition to the health care bill? and 2. Is the death of Teddy Kennedy a sufficiently powerful event to overcome the embarrassment of changing the Massachusetts law back to what it was before it was changed to thwart a Republican?