"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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Snowe is not seeking reelection because the Republican Party wholly merged with the conservative movement and then began enforcing much stricter party discipline than it had in the past, and she would likely lose a primary election to a more right-wing candidate. But in her high-minded version of what happened, she is leaving because of "partisanship," an evil spell cast on the formerly fraternal and cooperative United States Senate by comity-hating wizards.

This is how bad things have gotten: President Obama hasn't called her in almost two years!

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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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You've probably already heard about Senator Scott Brown's gaffe this morning. Asked about a statement by Elizabeth Warren, his likely Democratic opponent next year, that she (unlike Brown) hadn't posed nude to help pay her way through college, Brown replied: "Thank God."

Needless to say, it's landed Brown in some hot water, with Democrats blasting him for engaging in "frat house" chauvinism and media outlets across the country picking up the story. This comes at a bad time for Brown, whose once-mighty standing in Massachusetts has eroded and who is now running even with Warren in polls, and could be particularly damaging since it threatens to undermine what has been the key to his popularity in blue state Massachusetts: His personal likability.

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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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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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"It's a priority for us," Guy Cecil, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told the Boston Globe when he made a two-day trip to the Bay State earlier this month.

But the DSCC received some bad news this week when a poll it commissioned found that Brown's popularity is soaring. The survey, which has been seen by at least one D.C. insider and was detailed for Salon, measured Brown's approval rating at 73 percent -- easily surpassing the scores for Barack Obama and the state's two top Democrats,  Gov. Deval Patrick and Sen. John Kerry. It also found him running over the magic 50 percent mark against every potential Democratic challenger, and crushing the strongest perceived Democrats (Reps. Michael Capuano and Ed Markey and former Rep. Marty Meehan) by double-digit margins. The results only grew closer when respondents were primed with negative information about Brown.

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In his forthcoming memoir, "Against All Odds: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks, and Second Chances," Brown makes a powerful case for his book's hardscrabble title. He details the beatings he and his mother received at the hands of his stepfather, describing how at age 6 his stepfather "pounded my head, my back, and plowed into me with those massive knuckles and flat, sandpapery palms until I was shaking and sobbing and snot was pouring out of my nose" and threatened to kill him. He discusses being 8 and having a local teen menace him with a knife and order him to perform a sexual act -- and how he escaped. And he writes of a counselor at his religious camp who sexually abused him. "I was standing there with my pants down and he came right up next to me and asked me if I needed help, and then he reached out his hand," he writes, adding that the man told him "that if I told anybody, ever, he'd hurt me badly." In an interview for Sunday's "60 Minutes," Brown cryptically reveals, "Fortunately, nothing was ever fully consummated, so to speak, but it was certainly, back then, very traumatic." Surely adding to the trauma was the counselor's warning that, as Brown says, "If you tell anybody I'll kill you. I will make sure nobody believes you." And so, Brown says he kept the secret all these years, telling Lesley Stahl that his mother will learn of the incident for the first time when she reads his book.

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The Republican senator from Massachusetts made the revelations in an interview to air Sunday night on the CBS program "60 Minutes."

Brown says the camp counselor threatened to kill him if he disclosed the sexual abuse.

"He said, 'If you tell anybody ... I'll kill you. I will make sure nobody believes you,'" Brown said in the interview.

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"I think that there will be a primary challenge," Christen Varley, president of the Greater Boston Tea Party, told the Boston Globe last Friday. "There’s enough of an underground movement in the Tea Party movement as seeing him as not being conservative enough. There probably will be multiple people who attempt to run against him."

Brown's latest (supposed) crimes against conservatism include his support for the New Start treaty and for repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in the Senate last week -- this after he voted for Wall Street reform over the summer and a jobs bill back in February.

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This outcome was hard to imagine just a week ago, when -- not for the first time -- repeal proponents were unable to muster 60 votes to end a GOP-led filibuster of a Defense Authorization bill that included repeal language. But immediately after that failed cloture vote, Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins announced their plans to file a new, stand-alone repeal bill. The House then swung into action, passing an identical repeal bill on Wednesday, and now four moderate Republicans -- Collins, Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown and Lisa Murkowski -- are indicating they'll support the new measure. On paper, that means there are now 61 votes for repeal (counting Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat who says she missed last week's cloture vote because of a dentist appointment).

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Meanwhile, three former service members have filed suit in federal court arguing that the policy is unconstitutional. And the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network has two more lawsuits in the pipeline. Repeal via the courts looks more likely now than it ever has before. While Republicans might enjoy that, because it would give them a chance to complain about activist judges, the Pentagon -- and lawmakers like Sen. Lieberman -- would much prefer legislative repeal to judicial repeal.

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Nothing better illustrates the moral vacuity of the United States Senate than when a broadly popular measure receives a majority of votes but still fails because senators who claim to support the measure vote to block it for process reasons. (Besides, I guess, when something horrible passes with broad bipartisan support.)

Thankfully, Senate comity could still prevail! Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins decided to bring a stand-alone bill on repealing the policy to the floor as soon as possible, which, in Senate time, means not that soon. Harry Reid says he'll get it done before the end of the year, but a stand-alone bill would have to be passed by the House and go through conference committee and our "moderate" GOP friends could still come up with serious reasons to delay the vote for just a little bit longer.

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"I’ve been to many funerals, unfortunately, in my home state, for those soldiers," Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, told Pentagon leaders at a Senate Armed Services hearing. "And one thing I never asked was: Are they -- are they gay or straight? It never even crossed my mind, to be honest with you. I just wanted to know if they -- if they gave their limb or their life, you know, with pride and with honor for our country.’"

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Scott Brown’s triumph in Massachusetts' Jan. 19 special election, the first Republican victory in a Bay State Senate race since 1972, was the first clear, indisputable evidence how toxic the combination of soaring joblessness and total Democratic control of Washington could be for the party this year. That combination resulted in the GOP’s takeover of the House on Tuesday night, with the party gobbling up around 60 Democratic-held seats, and its significant gains in the Senate -- a pickup of six seats, it appears. Republicans also gained numerous governorships and state legislative chambers.

But, curiously enough, there’s one place where they didn’t do much winning on Tuesday night: Massachusetts.

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(Assuming the House approves this, that is, after they return from recess. Unless they revolt over something like the fact that the bill is funded in part by rolling back food stamp benefits and gutting a renewable energy investment fund.)

Republicans -- who "support" state aid, as long as it's paid for -- then tried to kill this paid-for state aid with the usual rules tricks, but that failed. And now everyone is moving on to making grandstanding speeches about Elena Kagan, which should be entertaining. (Like, here's Roland Burris! Enjoy every minute of this, Roland.)

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