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"The people in Washington are saying, 'The people in Massachusetts are a bunch of fuck-ups who couldn't run a race for dog catcher,'" said one veteran Massachusetts Democratic insider. "This is someone they handpicked, filled the coffers with millions and millions of dollars, made it their number one race, and the people who are up here running it with every resource you would ever want are getting killed."

The Boston Herald broke the story April 27 that Harvard touted Warren’s Indian ancestry, and it’s been downhill since for the Senate hopeful. A genealogist has suggested Warren is 1/32 Native American, although the campaign has not provided documents backing her claim. Warren spoke in one interview of grandparents with “high-cheekbones.”

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The trick in the gimmick became clear this week when Brown announced that he was holding up his end of the pledge, agreeing to pay half the costs of an ad from a group called Coalition of Americans for Political Equality (CAPE PAC) and asking it to pull its Google ads promoting him. The group's website is now offline. Jeff Loyd, a Tea Party activist from Arizona who chairs the PAC, confirmed that his group spent all of $673.99 in pro-Brown online advertising with Google.

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The brainchild of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the left—yet prompted by Senator Scott Brown, the Tea Party centerfold who took Ted Kennedy's seat—the key enforcement mechanism is remarkably simple in its conception: the candidate favored in a third-party ad on TV, radio or online must make a contribution worth half of the ad’s costs to the opposing candidate’s charity of choice within three days of broadcast.

The negative air war that was predicted two years ago as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling could very well be thwarted in this one key race. It’s the little engine that could, nationally, but if the Massachusetts experiment in self-punishment proves enforceable here, it could catch on elsewhere, sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance against dirty politics, a yardstick that blunts the worst consequences of the high court’s decision.

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In President Obama’s speech in Kansas on Tuesday, he made a passionate reference to Richard Cordray, his nominee as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now the center of a fierce battle in Congress. “Nobody claims he’s not qualified,” the president said. “But the Republicans in the Senate refuse to confirm him for the job; they refuse to let him do his job.” That’s true enough. But the Death Valley of financial regulation is not a good issue for the president, no matter how atrociously the Republicans have behaved, most recently by their obstructionism on Cordray. Wall Street regulation is a dreary picture, and there isn’t an ounce of populism to be found in it.

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Thanks to Wall Street Occupier Jesse LaGreca, who didn't only show up the Fox reporter sent to embarrass occupiers, but also managed to get the OWS message across on a Sunday political chat show, which is essentially unheard of. So thanks to you, for bringing up economic justice to the ancient panel of crusty establishmentarians on "Meet on Press."

Thanks to Scott Olsen, the Iraq vet and victim of brutal police overreaction at Occupy Oakland, for showing the many forms that fighting for one's country can take. We're especially thankful that he's recovering from the coma induced by a tear gas canister fired directly at his head, and is well enough to give public statements.

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Cablevision's Optimum cable pulled the ad, which claimed that Tester voted against banning the EPA from regulating farm dust. The supposed EPA rule was completely imaginary and the vote was about Chinese currency manipulation.

I bet Crossroads is super embarrassed about this awful mistake, right? Of course they are:

Nate Hodson of Crossroads said in defense of the pulled ad, "It was a very small cable system. The four largest broadcast stations in Montana reviewed the facts supporting the ad and will continue airing it."

He said later, "We are communicating with the cable system and expect that the ad will be back up and running on cable soon."

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I admit that I was late in grasping Elizabeth Warren's potential mass appeal as a political candidate, but now that I've watched her in action for a few months, I'm increasingly tempted to brand her the Democratic version of Chris Christie: a formidable communicator with a knack for expressing the sentiments that animate her party's voters with unusual coherence and resonance.

She's also beginning to rack up the viral video hits. Her explanation of the social contract is a prime example, and now comes this: a confrontation with a man who crashed a Warren volunteer event in Brockton, Mass. and lashed out at her for supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement, claiming that the Tea Party is the real voice against Wall Street's excesses. Warren seemed to handle his outburst deftly, flustering the man and leading him to call her a "socialist whore" and storm out of the room while making a snide remark about Warren's "foreign-born" boss (Obama, I'd guess -- but maybe George Soros?). Anyway, here's the video:

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Right now, Democrats own a 53-47 majority in the chamber, but around ten of their seats are vulnerable or potentially vulnerable in next year's elections. Republicans, by contrast, will only have to defend ten seats in 2012 and almost all of them look safe for the GOP. Scott Brown's Massachusetts seat is one of the two obvious exceptions right now (Nevada is the other). So if Warren lives up to her hype, it could change the national math decisively.

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Warren will formally declare she's running on Wednesday, Kyle Sullivan, a Warren spokesman, said. She plans to greet commuters in Boston and make other stops during the day across the state.

"The pressures on middle-class families are worse than ever, but it is the big corporations that get their way in Washington," Warren said in a statement released Tuesday. "I want to change that. I will work my heart out to earn the trust of the people of Massachusetts."

Democrats have been seeking a major challenger for the seat long held by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy. Democrats hoping to keep their narrow Senate majority have made Brown a top target in the blue state. Kennedy's former seat has special significance for Massachusetts Democrats. Warren will join a crowded primary field but was heavily courted to join the race.

Warren is a Harvard Law professor who was tapped by President Barack Obama last year to set up a new consumer protection agency, but congressional Republicans opposed her becoming the director. She worked to set up the agency before returning to Massachusetts this summer.

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Well, maybe.

Warren is certainly popular among progressive activists who follow Washington closely, who see her as an unusually smart, principled and assertive thorn in Wall Street's side. Of course, Senate Republicans fear her for the same reason, which is why President Obama opted not to nominate her to run the CFPB. As a candidate for office, it's likely that Warren would enjoy significant financial support from her national fans.

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McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay's brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He's a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible "governing" on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells' memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

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The context for the exchange came when McHenry requested that Warren stay late at the hearing to answer a few more questions. Warren responded the she had another engagement, and asserted that McHenry knew this and had already agreed that she only needed to be present at the hearing for an hour. McHenry denies that there had been any prior arrangement and tells her:  "You are making this up."

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But so far as I can tell, the Thursday announcement by Elizabeth Warren that she is appointing two former Wall Street bankers and a former Freddie Mac official to top positions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau hasn't elicited a single peep.

The appointees are Raj Date, formerly a managing director at Deutsche Bank, Elizabeth Vale, a managing director at Morgan-Stanley, and Zixta Martinez, from Freddie Mac.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the hiring's received hearty approval from Wall Street's premier lobbying organization.

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In the very next paragraph, the newspaper reported that Bachus "later clarified his comment to say that regulators should set the parameters in which banks operate but not micromanage them." But the damage was already done. Bachus' quote rocketed around the lefty blogosphere, and on Monday night the 62-year-old congressman earned a coveted "Worst Person in the World" award from Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Countdown."

The candor of Bachus' initial statement is eyebrow-raising, no doubt about it, but the fuss and bother over his revelation is a little bit disingenuous. We don't need to listen to the Alabama Republican's words to understand just which master he intends to serve -- all you need to do is watch his actions. Together with his fellow Alabaman Republican, Sen. Richard Shelby, the powerful ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, he's part of a dynamic duo of market fundamentalist crusaders who will likely set the tone for how banking reform and regulatory oversight aimed at Wall Street are implemented for the next two years.

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Rep. Scott Garrett, who hopes to chair the capital markets subcommittee, took a hard-line stance Wednesday, calling on the administration to dismantle the new consumer bureau before it is even started.

"We don't need a CFPB," he said. "That would be a great first step for this administration if they want to start showing how they are willing to work with us, to say that, 'We recognize the failure that this doesn't do anything to address the problems so let's start unwinding that.'"

Spencer Bachus, in line to take over the House Financial Services committee, has already signaled his intentions to tinker with the CFPB's funding. Under Dodd-Frank, the CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve, thus insulating it from congressional pressure. Bachus wants to make CFPB's funding part of the regular congressional appropriations process -- so he can exert pressure on it.

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The House passed the bill a couple of times, but it has languished repeatedly in the Senate, until it mysteriously zipped through via "unanimous consent" on September 27 -- the last day of the most recent Senate session. Mysterious because it just so happens that the country is currently in the middle of a major, and growing, scandal involving improper documentation associated with foreclosures. In thousands upon thousands of cases, executives at mortgage servicers were "robo-signing" foreclosure documents without actually reviewing the paperwork. Those documents were then shipped off to notaries who simply took it on faith that the facts attested to by the documentation were correct. Critics of the bill believe that, behind the scenes, banks and mortgage lenders pressured their allies in the Senate to pass the notarization bill in the hope that it might provide some ex post facto protection for them from the avalanche of law suits that is about to pound the mortgage industry.

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Warren is clearly one persuasive lady. But what hath the mild-mannered Harvard professor wrought? In addition to committing us to creating an entire new bureaucracy at a cost of $500 million (and rising) a year, her brainchild gives us all yet another excuse to avoid taking responsibility for our own actions. Instead of being prudent with the amount of personal debt we take on, instead of reading carefully the documents we sign -- be they for new credit cards or new mortgages -- and instead of learning how to live within our means rather than light years beyond them, we can now continue to blame others for our own failings. This is not progress.

Yes, some people who have lost their homes were victims of fraudulent mortgage brokers and shady lenders. But the vast majority of those who held the billions of dollars in mortgages now foreclosed on knew exactly what they were doing. And one of the dirty little secrets of the financial crisis is that one homeowner after another signed mortgage-loan documents that were filled with inaccurate information about his or her net worth, assets, salaries and ability to make monthly mortgage payments. Why would someone sign a loan document knowing full well the information on it was inaccurate and the mortgage could never be repaid? That's the kind of question Elizabeth Warren should give some thought to while she's constructing her empire.

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"Fine print obscures the cost of credit and makes it impossible for families to compare products. Too often, families come to understand the legalese only when they get bitten by it," said Professor Warren. "Streamlined disclosure can level the playing field and give families better tools to make better choices. This is particularly true in the mortgage market, where borrowers receive stacks of incomprehensible paperwork when they're looking for a loan."

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"Geithner and I agree she is the best person to stand up the agency," said the president, after outlining his vision of the bureau as "a watchdog for the American consumer." He said that she would "oversee all aspects" of the agency's creation, including its staffing and agenda. And, in an aside that will no doubt disappoint Warren's fans, he said she "will help me decide who the best choice to run the agency" will be.

The Huffington Post's Shahien Nasripour reported earlier today the possibility that Warren might "pull a Cheney" and decide that she herself was the best choice to run the agency, just as Dick Cheney ended his search for a vice-presidential candidate by picking himself. The odds of that seem low, however, which raises the question: While it was nice to see Warren standing next to Obama, just how much satisfaction should we take from it?

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