Our friends over at The Albany Project make note of an online offensive by the republicans, and that in turn requires some comment.

Maybe it's a variant of Sun Tzu that I've missed so far, but one doesn't normally pick battles where one is weak. And the simple fact is that in the online world, New York republicans are spectacularly weak.

The state of play is as follows: the republican Senatorial campaign committee has put out a web site, NYinJeopardy.com, which takes aim at a raft of Democratic incumbents in the State Senate. What's interesting about the content is that the attacks made on their various targets come mainly from the left - for example, Liz Krueger is painted as being soft on women's health issues. Simple observation: you're not going to beat the Senate Democrats from the left, and that you try says everything that needs to be said about your underlying weakness.

The greater weakness, however, is in the correlation of forces online. Simply put, it's no contest: New York has a thriving, independent, linked and networked Progressive blogosphere - networked not just locally and statewide, but nationally. There is nothing on the other side of the aisle that can even be compared to what we have, independently of the party, built up over the last few years - nothing.