so with Weld gone Ed Markey should get in okay.

now. It won't change the make-up of the senate. Also, on some bills coming up like immigration there isn't really a good side for a repub. It they vote yes, it will distance them from conservative voters and if they vote no they will lose the immigrant vote. Better to sit it out and wait for 14 where it will be more beneficial.

Scott Brown understands this because it whacked him up the side of the head only a couple of months ago. Plus, this seat is up again in 2014 making it doubly hard for Republicans. Now wonder people like Weld have no interest.

William Weld is one of the last of a dying (if not dead) breed: a largely-centrist Republican who didn't consider it a cardinal sin to work with the other side.

There is no way the Tea Party/Limbaugh crowd would allow him to be elected.

One of the better Republican governors we had over the years and during his time was considered to be the kind of governor who knew how to get things done as a "true" conservative compared to what makes up the party now. He's a respectable Republican, something that's incredibly hard to say. He's the only one I ever crossed party lines to vote for years ago.

He always seemed to be rational and one who weighed all the options, rather than just being a raging ideologue.

I live in Michigan but I am originally from Indiana (a blood-red Republican state if there was one), and the former senior Senator from Indiana, Richard Lugar, was kind of like that too. Even though we didn't agree on a lot of things, I corresponded with him regularly and he was always an old-school gentleman to me.

Of course, the Tea Party ousted him in the primaries for the cuckoo Richard Mourdock...which ended up with the seat going to a centrist Democrat, Joe Donnelly! Surprised the hell out of me!

and like Deval's thinking on naming a temp, I wish the one who wins the next two years just governs and then someone else devotes all the time and money into running in 2014.

(like a Kennedy IMHO.)

Nothing will be accomplished between now and the general election in 2014. The Massachusetts GOP knows this, and would rather run against a do-nothing democratic incumbent in a year's time, than have a democrat run against their 2013 candidate, provided they won.