Even as Republicans and conservatives approach giddiness and near euphoria over the state of the special election campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, the results of a special election in northern Virginia yesterday should remind them not to take anything for granted.

In a major upset, Democratic Delegate Dave Marsden outspent his opponent by almost 2-1 and squeaked by GOP nominee Steve Hunt to capture the last remaining GOP seat in northern Virginia. Winning by just 317 votes (out of 23,569 cast), Marsden took the seat by 50.62 - 49.28 percent.

Democrats now control the Virginia state Senate by 22-18.

Just for the record, according to the Rule 5(a)(1) of the Republican Party, "The chairman or co-chairman may be removed from office only by a two-thirds (2/3) vote of the entire Republican National Committee."

There are 168 members of the Republican National Committee -- a state party chairman, a national committeeman and a national committeewoman from each of the 50 states, and the same three officials from the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. (Yes -- odd as it may seem, an RNC member from Guam has the same voting rights and the same influence as an RNC member from Maryland, even though Guam has neither a representative in the House, nor a senator in the Senate, nor an electoral vote in the Electoral College. Go figure.)

With 168 members, a two-thirds vote requires 112 votes to pass.

Michael Steele won the RNC chairmanship by a vote of 91-77 on the last ballot against Katon Dawson, the former South Carolina Republican Party Chairman who was his last rival standing.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is in the headlines again, this time for taking time out from his supposed-to-be-full-time gig as RNC chairman to go on a book tour promoting sales of his new manifesto, "Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda."

Already under fire for taking time away from his full-time gig to give paid speeches at up to $20,000 per speech, Steele now finds himself in trouble for publishing a GOP manifesto without letting other GOP leaders know in advance, and for lining his pockets with earnings from book sales for a book he wrote sometime in the last year -- when he was supposedly working full-time as the RNC chairman.

Said one GOP congressional staffer to the Washington Post, Steele should be promoting the book as "Citizen Michael Steele selling Citizen Steele's book, not RNC Chairman Steele selling Citizen Steele's book."

On this matter, at least, his critics are jumping the gun. They're assuming that his interest in selling books is wholly commercial.

ABC News The Note just revealed that Michael Steele has canceled a scheduled appearance on "Top Line." The interview was scheduled for noon today, live at ABCNews.com.

According to Rick Klein's Twitter feed, at 11:15 a.m. the noon interview was confirmed; 15 minutes later, the RNC canceled, claiming that Steele was called into an "emergency meeting."

On another front, the Washington Post reports that Republican congressional leaders say they did not know Steele was publishing a book until it was released this week, and they had no input in drafting what Steele is promoting as the blueprint Republicans should follow to win back power.

The release of Steele's book, "Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda," surprised Republican congressional leaders, some of whom first learned of the book by watching Steele's television appearances this week, three top GOP congressional aides said Friday. The staffers would only describe their bosses' communications with the Republican National Committee chairman on condition of anonymity.

If I were a Birther, or a Bircher, or Mel Gibson playing Jerry Fletcher in "Conspiracy Theory", I'd be convinced that Andy Martin's campaign is being secretly funded by allies of GOP rival Mark Steven Kirk.

Kirk, of course, is the liberal Republican congressman who represents Illinois' 10th Congressional District -- Chicago's North Shore suburbs (which you've seen in the background if you ever watched "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" or "Risky Business" or the CBS summer replacement series "Swingtown") -- and is now running for the GOP nomination for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama.

Martin, for those readers outside the listening range of Chicago radio stations WLS, WGN, and WBBM, would be described properly as a "gadfly," except that I actually know and like some gadflies, and I wouldn't want to insult them.

He is a perpetual candidate for office whose Wikipedia entry is so wildly amusing that three weeks ago, he filed a lawsuit against -- wait for it -- Wikipedia itself, claiming that it is "a tax-exempt protosocialist scam that seeks to harass Republicans, conservatives and Obama opponents."

The Marco Rubio vs. Charlie Crist smackdown in Florida has claimed its latest victim: Jim Greer, current Florida GOP state chairman and a close ally of Gov. Crist, announced his resignation on Tuesday, effective Feb. 20.

And with that move, a primary contest in Florida could impact the selection of the next president of the United States.

For weeks, Greer had been under fire from conservative activists and grass-roots GOP leaders. The charges: mismanagement of the party's finances, and an unfair tilt of the state party apparatus toward Crist in his Senate primary contest against Rubio.

The final straw for Greer -- who even up until just a few weeks ago had insisted that he would remain in his position, counting on strong backing from Crist -- was a letter delivered last week, signed by a dozen prominent GOP donors and bundlers, declaring that they would have difficulty raising money until Greer was gone.

"How much did that interview cost someone?"

So asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs this morning, in response to a reporter's question asking for comment on Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele's charge Monday that Democrats are "flipping the bird" to the American people by pushing through health care overhaul the way they have.

Gibbs' riposte laid to rest any doubts that Ralph Hallow's front page Washington Times blockbuster -- revealing that Steele has been regularly accepting speaking fees of up to $20,000 for speeches given while he's serving as RNC chairman -- would be overlooked in the crush of Christmas week reporting on the politics of health care overhaul by journalists as desperate as senators to leave town and get home for the holiday.

And it shows how devastating such behavior can be to a party chairman's credibility as a message-carrier. Any time you do something that allows your political opponents to score points off you while at the same time dodging a question, you've done something wrong.

Last night, by a vote of 7-6, the Judiciary Committee of the New Jersey state Senate voted to send a same sex marriage bill to the floor, where it will be considered and voted on Thursday, in a lame duck session of the legislature.

Two Democrats voted against -- Committee Chairman Paul Sarlo, and Committee Vice Chairman John Girgenti -- which should have been enough to kill the bill, given the committee's 8-5 Democrat-Republican split.

But Republican state Sen. Bill Baroni, who represents the state-employee-heavy (read: heavily Democrat) 14th District, proudly upended the partisan calculus, declaring to a standing ovation, "I will be the first ever New Jersey legislator in this state on the question of marriage equality to say the following: I vote yes."

Today is the 78th birthday of Edwin Meese III, the nation's 75th attorney general and a former counselor to President Ronald Reagan.

Meese entered public service as a law clerk in the district attorney's office in Alameda County, Calif., in 1958, and joined Gov. Reagan's staff in 1967. For the next 21 years -- in other words, through the entirety of Reagan's two terms as governor of California and two terms as president -- he devoted his life to helping Reagan.

Through the course of those tumultuous two decades, Meese was at Reagan's side at critical points -- advising Gov. Reagan on how to handle student protesters at Berkeley, ousting John Sears as Reagan's campaign manager in the 1980 campaign shakeup that saved Reagan's campaign, becoming one-third of the "Troika" (with James A. Baker and Michael K. Deaver) that guided Reagan's first term as president, and then serving as attorney general during Reagan's second term.

He was one of the few inner circle senior advisers to Reagan who shared his boss's ideological conservatism, and he could always be counted on to play the role of honest broker and make sure Reagan had considered all sides of a question before coming to a decision.

"There's no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

That slogan, emblazoned on a small bronze desk plaque that sat on Ronald Reagan's desk in the Oval Office, formed the basis of Reagan's approach to public service and politics, and served as the means to Reagan's ends -- he was perfectly happy not merely to share credit, but to give it away freely, in pursuit of his larger goals.

Imagine, then, how disappointing it must be for Reagan Republicans to read in the news that a senior Republican National Committee staffer was sacked because RNC Chairman Michael Steele "didn't feel he was getting enough credit for the GOP's electoral success earlier this month."

I don't know if this is the real reason now-former RNC communications director Trevor Francis left the committee on Monday.

All I know is that he is gone, that he is "unsure" of his future plans (a tip-off if ever there was one), that the RNC is denying it, and there are two unnamed "Republican strategists familiar with the situation" who say it is so.

Yesterday afternoon, Chris Cillizza broke the news that Republican National Committee communications director Trevor Francis had left his job. Shortly thereafter, the buzz generated by the Francis departure was replaced by new buzz -- veteran GOP media consultant Alex Castellanos, it was leaked, would be signing on as a "senior communications adviser" for the duration of the 2010 campaign cycle.

And then my email inbox filled up faster than 11-year-old girls lining up for the first screening of the latest "Twilight" installment.

A new Marist poll released yesterday suggests that a Rudy Giuliani vs. Kirsten Gillibrand matchup for a U.S. Senate seat from New York would go to the former New York City Mayor, by a hefty margin -- he leads her by 54-40 percent in a hypothetical 2010 contest, according to the latest survey.

Meanwhile, the same poll shows Giuliani trailing potential Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo by a margin of 53-43 percent in a hypothetical 2010 contest for governor.

This backs up the argument I made in this piece yesterday, that Giuliani's apparent decision to pass on the Governor's race -- and give up a chance at a job for which he would be well suited, to run instead for a job that would likely drive him crazy -- is largely a function of his belief that he would have an easier time winning a contest for the U.S. Senate than for the governorship.

Does anybody at the Republican National Committee understand how insurance works?

Based on the events of late last week -- when the RNC acknowledged that for the last 18 years, its standard benefit employee health insurance plan had covered abortion services, and RNC Chairman Michael Steele moved to get ahead of a brewing pro-life storm by ordering that the insurance policies be amended to drop that particular coverage -- it's a fair question.

Let's back up a moment.

On Thursday, Politico revealed that since 1991, the Republican National Committee had offered as a part of its standard employee benefits package a health insurance policy that included coverage for elective abortion services.

Writing about a well-researched subject is a daunting task. How can you, as an author, find something new and/or interesting to say about something that’s been written about a dozen, or several score, or even hundreds of times?

Craig Shirley has definitively answered that question: Give them the back story — and the back story on the back story.

In other words, sometimes, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

In “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” Shirley goes where, at last count, roughly 900 authors — including Lou Cannon, William F. Buckley Jr., Martin and Annelise Anderson, Steven Hayward, Richard Reeves, Paul Kengor, Andrew Busch, and Peter Schweizer, among others — have already gone.

Well, Chris Christie’s campaign today demonstrated, yet again, its tactical brilliance.

Unfortunately, for Republicans who want to capture the New Jersey’s governor’s office again, it did so at the cost of demonstrating its strategic lunacy.

As anybody who’s paid even the slightest attention to the race over the last few months is now aware, the meta-story of the campaign is that incumbent Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine — who, based on upside-down personal favorables and job approval numbers, entered the campaign year trailing in every poll known to man — and was running so far behind just a few weeks ago that there was informed speculation Democrats would try to remove him from the ballot — has now scratched and clawed his way back into a statistical dead heat.

With four weeks left in the campaign, it’s a tossup.