This will be very brief --thinkprogress has the story. Also, apologies to anyone else who beat me to the punch. The Lieberman-Kyl amendment, called, by Jim Webb, "Cheney's fondest pipe dream" has passed the senate, by the above noted margin.
The senate has clearly been stampeded on this. Webb thinks Cheney can/will torture the wording into an authorization to attack Iran.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, publisher of the magazine 'Tikkun' clearly sees the hand of the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC in the passage of Lieberman-Kyl, as, no doubt, do Mearsheimer and Walt, whose article in the London Review of Books, criticizing the 'pro Israel Lobby' in the US has created such a firestorm of criticism, with the accompanying cries of anti-semitism. Full disclosure: I am Jewish, the offspring of an immigrant father.
My own view differs here, and emphasizes the power of the Political Ghost of Ronald Reagan to strike terror into the hearts of Democratic senators, and to cause them to wonder, whether after all, they are themselves really true-blue genuine Americans.
Clearly an excorcism is needed. Meanwhile, can catastrophe be averted?