Party-switching Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy wants to "take a sledgehammer to Albany and knock it to pieces and then rebuild it from scratch"—which is exactly what the mustachioed man is doing to the Republican Party. Since he entered the race, Levy has created a major rift among Republicans, according to Politico. Levy won the backing of state GOP chairman Ed Cox, but former Gov. Pataki and former Mayor Giuliani are backing Rick Lazio's Republican bid. Insiders say Levy will emphasize his fiscal responsibility and hard-line stance against immigration to run as a "Scott Brown-type candidate, not as a moderate," but his opponent is already trying to depict him as a liberal for supporting tax increases and calling President Obama's stimulus package "manna from heaven." more ›

In an ironic twist, formerly-obscure Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat occupied by the late Ted Kennedy from 1962 until his death in August, throwing into jeopardy Congress's most recent attempt to pass some kind of health care reform, Kennedy's most beloved cause. Brown's decisive 52-47 percent victory over Attorney General Martha Coakley has Republicans giddy and Democrats panicked—Brown doesn't think waterboarding is torture, opposes a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions, and posed nude for Cosmo. more ›

According to Boston.com, Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for the Massachusetts Senate seat, has 53% of the vote in the special election. Hope you like your health insurance— because you probably aren't going to be getting any help with that for quite some time! Update: the Brown campaign is saying that Coakley, the Democratic candidate, has already called to concede. more ›