Sen. Brown clearly supports the discriminatory federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), but tries to change the subject instead of directly admitting it.

Incumbent Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R) currently holds a nine point lead over Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, according to a new Suffolk University poll.

The Senate map for 2012 is just inherently awful for Democrats. They have to defend incumbents in 23 states, while the Republicans only need to defend 10. Even if there is a relatively strong national Democratic turnout in 2012, the party will likely still have a net loss of Senate seats. With that factored in, though, the prospects for the Democrats at least narrowly holding on to the chamber have been improving.

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor, consumer advocate and candidate for US Senate in Masachusetts, said today that the Federal Housing Finance Agence (FHFA) must increase their actions on behalf of homeowners, including principal reductions, something that the agency has resisted to this point. Speaking along side Barney Frank, Mike Capuano and MA AG Martha Coakley, Warren’s message was aimed straight at FHFA’s Ed DeMarco, who’s been stalling on principal writedowns.

I was struck by the way in which President Obama’s State of the Union speech was structured, with each issue laid out inthe same pattern: start with the conservative talking point, then move to the progressive positionas though the progressive-leaning positions were being given the rhetorical back seat. Only when the speech spoke of unity of worthwhile purposes did it capture what makes a nation great.

The last time Patrick McHenry, the Billy Zabka of the House Republican caucus, held a hearing with a member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it didn’t turn out too well. He called Elizabeth Warren a liar and generally tried to bully her, and received quite a backlash in the process.

The assumption for the MA Senate race is that the Big Money Boyz will lard up Scott Brown with oodles of cash, allowing him to run a scorched earth campaign that decimates Elizabeth Warren. But Warren has consistently raised a lot more money than Brown, most of it from small donors, since she entered the race.

In a welcome development, Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has posted a strong statement of support for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

It was inevitable that some apologist would claim that Martha Coakley actually holding banks accountable for following the law would stunt the nation’s recovery and cause us all to queue up on soup lines. That ignominious honor goes to Liz Peek of the Fiscal Times (a Fox News contributor). I apologize in advance for the fifth-grade writing level of this excerpt.

If Elizabeth Warren were no threat to the established order, they wouldn’t get around to any effort to stop her ascension in the Massachusetts Senate race until much later in the cycle, if at all. But her surge over Scott Brown, and the possibility that she would have an even bigger perch from which to articulate her agenda for the middle class, clearly has Wall Street spooked. So much so that they’re already marshaling forces against her, with a year until the general election.