With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts last week, our party’s fears of hemorrhaging House and Senate seats in the 2010 cycle were drastically exacerbated.

President Obama, who attempted to salvage Coakley’s flagging candidacy with an eleventh hour visit on the weekend proceeding Tuesday’s election, has moved to centralize control over his party’s strategy for November, recruiting former campaign manager David Plouffe to oversee all House, Governor and Senate races, apparently a slap on the wrist for DNC head Tim Kaine, who so far hasn’t enjoyed a successful tenure (as Democrats are continuously outraised by Republicans on a month-by-month basis). This is a high stakes move for a President who often prefers compromise (though largely by necessity) to rolling the dice on more controversial, left of center measures (as he proved by quickly abandoning the public option). (more…)

Dems: Don’t freak out.

If you have read my posts on this blog with any regularity, I probably have begun to ring hopelessly optimistic. I like to think of myself as an optimistic realist, but really, who cares?

Anyway, we’ve just a tough election cycle coming up that won’t get any easier, especially with the departure of Senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan. Bill Ritter’s exit in Colorado has Democrats afraid that Ken Salazar’s caretaker, Sen. Michael Bennett may be facing a politically toxic environment on the western front. (more…)

While the U.N. conference in Copenhagen fell flat in yielding substantive commitments in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the Democrat’s Cap and Trade bill is dwindling on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, likely headed for a landslide defeat in Britain’s June elections, has unveiled a two-pronged approach to employ “smart” power throughout the country. By placing smart energy meters in every British home by 2020 that read consumption levels and calculate costs in real time, along with a smart grid system that connects the entire country and estimates energy demand and production, affording U.K. consumers the ability to be energy and cost efficient. British Gas estimates that the company will create 2,600 jobs by 2012 by converting to smart meters. (more…)