US President Barack Obama's honeymoon with American voters has come to a grinding halt.
The Democrats' resounding loss in this week's Massachusetts Senate byelection is, in Australian terms, the equivalent of Labor being trounced in Newcastle.
Observers are tipping that Obama's precious health-care reforms (or what was left of them after fierce lobbying by the powerful medical and health insurance lobbies) may be a casualty of his party's loss of comfortable control of the Senate.
Just what if anything the small but highly significant shift in the balance of power might mean for international affairs will take some time to analyse.
Obama can hardly avoid seeing the vote as a referendum on his performance during his first year in power. He already had more than his fair share of opponents on the political right. Now it appears that some of his erstwhile supporters in the centre and on the left may have become disenchanted with his leadership.
Perhaps that isn't surprising. The little-known winner of the byelection, former male model Scott Brown, made his biggest impact by parking a truck in New York's Wall Street financial district, profiting from the widespread perception that the fat cats who caused the global economic meltdown have been rewarded for their misdeeds while ordinary Americans have been hung out to dry.
While Wall Street bankers are still paying themselves hefty bonuses the US unemployment rate is above 10 per cent even on official figures. An estimated one in seven mortgages is in arrears or default and record numbers of American citizens are queuing for food aid.
Obama, contrary to expectations, has hardly wound back his country's overseas military operations, making his award and acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize into something of an embarrassment.
It's hard to avoid the feeling that the President has simply discovered some home truths about the limits of the power of his office and the immense clout of entrenched lobby groups with vested interests in preventing change, both at home in the US or abroad.
Weed beaten
IN 2001 most people believed the noxious marine weed caulerpa taxifolia would run rampant throughout Lake Macquarie, much as it had done in other waterways across the world.
At the infestation's peak the weed thought to have been introduced from discarded aquarium contents covered more than 10 hectares of lake bed.
But instead of spreading, the weed has been stopped in its tracks. The achievement is a tribute to efforts by the NSW Department of Fisheries and also to community members, such as then-schoolgirl Emma Lodge, of Toronto, who won widespread acclaim for developing a technique for killing the weed using rubber matting and salt.
In the event, salt appears to have been the decisive factor. Hardly less important, however, was the community's determination and willingness to experiment with novel control techniques.
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