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Washington Post political blog The Fix has bumped WA-08 up a couple notches to list it as the 17th most likely US House seat to flip parties this November:

17. Washington’s 8th (R): Every Republican strategist we talk to insists on the one hand that Rep. Dave Reichert is the only GOPer who could possibly hold this Seattle-area seat but on the other acknowledges that Reichert’s time may be up. Barack Obama at the top of the national ticket is bad news for Reichert, as the Democrats’ presidential candidate will roll up the vote in metropolitan Seattle. Darcy Burner, who took 49 percent of the vote in 2006 against Reichert, is, by all accounts, an improved candidate. The political environment is everything in this district. If Obama wins big in the 8th, he is likely to carry Burner along with him. (Previous ranking: 19)

Yeah, but then what do you expect from an amen blogger like Chris Cillizza?

The Seattle Times editorial board just loves the King County Sheriff’s Office’s crackdown on underage drinking, which resulted in 143 arrests or citations over the first weekend of its annual “Party Patrol.”

Every year, parents are nabbed in the act of willfully ignoring the party they know is being thrown in their absence. A few genuine idiots get caught trying to be the cool mom and dad who host an event and provide alcohol to minors.

Yeah, well, it was certainly a different era, but my mom and dad hosted a couple high school parties at our house where they provided the beer, and they certainly didn’t do it to be “cool.” I suppose you can argue with their judgment, but they were pragmatic enough to know that the kids where going to drink regardless of the party’s location, and they’d rather it happen under their close supervision.

Ironically, the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving was started by the angry mother of a classmate of mine, after my parents called her to pick up her daughter, who was in no condition to drive home. It wasn’t the first or last time I saw this girl get drunk, but it was the only time I saw anyone prevent her from getting behind the wheel of a car.

Illegal, underage drinking only became more normalized in college, where the university actually threw a kegger for us during freshman orientation, and the RA’s made a point of explaining which local bars served undergraduates and which did not. Attitudes started shifting near the end of my senior year (1985) after a study revealing a serious binge-drinking problem on college campuses (duh-uh) was reinforced by a string of alcohol related campus tragedies.

Ominous headlines led to crackdowns by both local university and law enforcement officials… but that only drove the parties off campus. In one memorable example of the media hysteria of the time, a group of Rutgers students held a clandestine end-of-semester kegger outdoors in a wooded area near campus, where the metal keg was subsequently struck by lightning, killing one student and injuring several others. Newspaper headlines the next day trumpeted “another tragic alcohol related death” at a local campus.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an advocate of underage boozing—especially of the binge variety—but having been a teenager myself I seem to recall that kids will be kids, and I find it hard to believe that arresting a few teens or their parents is going to have much of a long term impact on the problem. I hate to get all libertarian on you (that’s Lee’s job) but it strikes me that law enforcement provides exactly the wrong approach to what is at its core a public health issue, and thus I’d much rather the Sheriff’s office focus their resources on apprehending and punishing drunk drivers, rather than waste their time on efforts that may draw flattering headlines, but really do little to address the larger societal problem.

We, as a nation, have an unhealthy attitude toward alcohol and other drugs, that leads to the sort of binge consumption that truly puts our youth at risk. And I don’t think an annual police crackdown, or a couple of rah-rah editorials, does much to promote a thoughtful discussion on the issue.

SurveyUSA released the first poll of the season in the 8th CD race between Darcy Burner and Rep. Dave Reichert.

The poll surveyed 679 likely voters on June 16th and 17th, and showed Reichert leading Burner 51% to 45%.

As usual, I try to assess these poll results by a simple Monte Carlo analysis. I simulated a million fictitious elections between Burner and Reichert, using the observed percentages and the number of people polled.

Reichert won 948,339 of the elections and Burner won 48,199 times. In other words, the poll results suggest that, for an election held right now, Burner would have a 4.8% probability of winning the election and Reichert would win with a 95.2% probability.

Here is the distribution of outcomes (percentage of votes) from the million simulated elections (Reichert victories are those to the left of the red “tie” line, Burner victories are those to the right):

At risk of coming off as just another amen blogger, the poll results don’t strike me as particularly bad for Burner. Yeah…she is -6% down, but Reichert, as the incumbent, starts out with the advantage. The poll’s cross-tabs look reasonably positive for Burner. Among other things, of those who said they could change their mind, 50% were Reichert supporters and 39% were Burner supporters. Also, Reichert holds 35% of the pro-choice vote. It’s hard to imagine that the Burner campaign won’t make in-roads into that group.

This poll comes on the heels of massive mailings of campaign flyers franked informational pieces from the Reichert campaign congressional office. The Burner campaign, to my knowledge, has not made any media purchases.

Furthermore, Reichert has recently gotten a lot of well-deserved publicity for eco-friendly votes. I say “well deserved” because, clearly, Reichert’s handlers have developed a brilliant strategy that has rendered the local media stupifyingly blind to Reichert’s strategy of full participation in Republican obstructionism in Congress during procedural votes, only to switch his vote when the results are certain passage. Daniel Kirkdorffer has meticulously documented this rather cynical strategy. It is hard to say whether Reichert’s people will be able to maintain their spell over the media through November.

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

Glenn Greenwald has the details on how House Democrats surrendered to the Bush Administration today, also reminding us why the Democratic-led Congress has a higher approval rating among Republicans than Democrats.

From the Roll Call votes, Adam Smith, Norm Dicks, and Brian Baird all voted to give the President greater powers, as Ryan Singel at Wired explains (emphasis mine):

Under the proposal, the intelligence community will be able to issue broad orders to U.S. ISPs, phone companies and online communications services like Hotmail and Skype to turn over all communications that are reasonably believed to involve a non-American who is outside the country. The spy agencies will not have to name their targets or get prior court approval for the surveillance.

Under the longstanding rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the government was free to engage in dragnet wiretapping outside the United States, but in order to tap communications inside the country, the government needed court approval and individualized warrants if an American’s communications would be caught.

Additionally, the bill grants amnesty to the nation’s telecoms that are being sued for allegedly breaking federal wiretapping laws by turning over billions of Americans’ call records to government data-mining programs and giving the government access to internet and phone infrastructure inside the country. The bill strips the right of a federal district court to decide whether the companies violated federal laws prohibiting wiretapping without a court order.

Obama’s response so far has been pretty pathetic, especially when compared to one of his opponents this November.

Of course, we could just spend all of our transportation dollars building and expanding roads, as Dino Rossi and Tim Eyman would have us do, or we could actually give commuters more options… you know, before steadily rising gasoline prices takes our only option away.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted

Also, Jonathan Gardner longs for the days of slavery

Not a problem:

Putting commuter trains on the Interstate 90 bridge will require protecting the structure against damage from stray electrical current and may require innovative ways to attach the rails to avoid damaging the span, a panel of experts told state lawmakers Wednesday.

A Sound Transit project manager said the trains would likely have to slow for a few seconds while crossing joints between the floating bridge and its approaches. And who would pay for what part of the project is still being worked out.

“This is very new to us, the idea of putting light rail on a floating bridge,” said state project manager Theresa Greco.

I think the idea of transit in general is new to our state’s Department of Highways Transportation. These guys see that center span as theirs, and they look at any project that doesn’t rely on cars or buses as suspect.

During the meeting, Rep. Judy Clibborn compared installing light rail on I-90 with The Big Dig. Really? Putting rails on a floating bridge is the same as the most ambitious public works project in American history? Making “Big Dig” comparisons is a sort of “Godwin’s Law” of transportation arguments: every project you oppose is the same as the “Big Dig.”

How can something be a “Big Dig” when we’re not even digging?

The Government Accountability Office has granted Boeing’s challenge of a lucrative refueling tanker contract, citing numerous errors by the Air Force.

Officially challenging the contract was widely considered to be a risky move on Boeing’s part, as the GAO is not known for lightly granting challenges, and Boeing risked its relationship with military officials. But the GAO decision now gives more ammunition to members of Congress seeking to overturn the $40 billion contract that largely went Europe’s Airbus.

I guess John McCain has some further explaining to do to WA voters.

Jim Webb (D-VA) is once again showing that he’s in a league of his own in the U.S. Senate. Tomorrow, he’ll be convening a hearing on the drug war and exploring the damage it’s doing to our country.

Via The Other Side Online, a photo of the Rossi signs that have been popping up all over Eastern Washington.  Notice there is no “paid for” notice as required by law, allowing Rossi to deny responsibility, but really… we all know these professionally printed signs are as much a part of the Rossi campaign as the BIAW’s multi-million dollar media blitz.

But you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  If it’s okay for Rossi to stoke anti-Seattle passions in Yakima, while the media covers for him back here, then I think Seattle voters deserve to see the same message, paid for by equally anonymous benefactors.  So I’m going to anonymously check out what it costs to put up this sign on a prominent billboard in downtown Seattle, and then anonymously launch an anonymous fund drive to pay for it.

I made it out to last night’s debate between Goldy and Grover Norquist at the South Lake Union Outback Steakhouse. The event was videotaped by the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) and will be available sometime next week. I was hoping to live-blog as it was happening, but there was no available wi-fi for me to use. So instead I drank some Toohey’s and enjoyed the spectacle.

My take on the debate was that Goldy had an advantage in that he knows Norquist much better than Norquist knows Goldy (and Washington State politics). Goldy used this edge to provide some local examples of why Norquist’s ideas of taxation being antithetical to freedom don’t quite match up with the history of this region, while Norquist could only respond with some lame strawman arguments and occasional outbursts of yelling that gave his appearance an unhinged quality at times.

I imagine the EFF folks who were in attendance saw things differently, but Norquist looked bored and annoyed while Goldy generally made his points and easily responded to the wild accusations from Norquist that people on the left are parasites.

Probably the most striking point that Goldy made was pointing out that Norquist’s support for having government provide money to families to use towards school choice seemed to fly in the face of his overall opposition of wealth re-distribution. Even following the debate, a group of EFF members continued to argue this point, totally unable to grasp it. One man in his twenties finally tried to make the point that educating kids could conceivably be a matter of national security. Thankfully, none of the EFF people stuck around long enough to ride that train of thought to its logical conclusion and watch their entire ideology unravel in front of them.

Norquist was also there to plug his new book “Leave Us Alone.” The title of his book certainly sounds like a political sentiment I can go along with. I strongly feel that government at all levels in this country has gotten too big and has accrued far too much power for its own good. I worry that we don’t exercise enough oversight over how government spends our money and that we’re starting to believe in false choices between security and freedom that will end up with us having neither. But Norquist sees both demons and virtue where none of either exist. It’s hard to take seriously a man who helped elevate the current Bush Administration into power but is still convinced that the threat of big government is unique to the political left.

Even during the debate, there were a number of issues that Norquist brought up that I agreed with (and even Goldy made it clear that he agrees with Norquist on our sugar policy), but by seeing those on the left as “parasites,” he remains lost in a world that exists only in his own mind. Yes, there are unions backed by the left that don’t act in the best interest of the greater public and screw taxpayers. But there are corporations backed by the right who do it as well. And in recent years, corporations that have acted irresponsibly have screwed taxpayers out of far greater sums of money that every single welfare recipient in the country combined.

Both sides of the political divide in this country are driven by interests that – when left unchecked – can end up with attempts to curtail our freedom or to divert taxpayer money towards foolish or dangerous things. Believing that a desire to use taxpayer money in the first place is inherently foolish is the false notion that leads Norquist (and not to mention Jonah Goldberg in his recent laughable book) to conclusions that fall far outside the realm of common sense. Norquist wants to equate the desire for 51% of the population to enact a levy to the desire for 51% of the population to strip individuals of a particular moral choice or to subjugate a subset of the population. When it comes to regulating an economic system that everyone must share, the system’s rules must be determined by the aggregate of the population’s moral outlook, whether that means more government involvement or less. However, when it comes to individual liberty, that should never be subject to a “tyranny of the majority.”

This distinction is crucial for understanding why those, like Norquist, who view taxation as being akin to prison, seem unconcerned and oblivious to the fact that the people who’ve been promising lower taxes for years have now built up the largest prison system in the world. I’m sure he’s convinced himself that the people being locked up are just parasites and need to be taken out of society. When one believes that only the other side is a threat to our freedom, it just makes it easier for his side to become the greater threat to our freedom. This is Norquist’s legacy, and it’s why he’s gone from being a key political player in this country to getting slapped around by a local blogger in a small room at the Outback Steakhouse.