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.

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.

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.

Elizabeth Warren’s success and the enthusiasm around her campaign has knocked every potential challenger in the Democratic primary out of the race. She has the ability to stay competitive with the Wall Street-backed Brown in fundraising, and the attacks put forward by the likes of Karl Rove have been laughable. Warren is still a neophyte candidate and a lot can go wrong; she probably needs to improve among independents, and you could see some gaffes and distortions of her record coming into play. But at the moment, she is well-positioned to enter the Senate.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley plans to sue the five biggest banks in the mortgage business over “unlawful and deceptive conduct” in their foreclosure operations. A news conference is scheduled at 1pm ET to detail the charges, which were filed in Suffolk Superior Court.

If you wanted an indication that Scott Brown was in any way nervous about his impending re-election matchup against Elizabeth Warren next year, he has now officially endorsed Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that was the brainchild of his future opponent.

Another poll confirms that the Massachusetts Senate race is currently shaping up to be one of the closest races in 2012 and could potentially be the race that decides which party controls the chamber. According to a new UMass Lowell-Boston Herald poll of registered voters, incumbent Republican Scott Brown holds a narrow 41 percent to 38 percent lead over Democrat Elizabeth Warren, and that gap can easily close.

U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) has been dodging questions about his stance on the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA, S811). ENDA would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. He also mistakenly thinks Massachusetts already took care of this.