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Daniel K suggested that I do the EffU thing on the President’s Bellevue speech. Here it is.

Ezra Klein:

One other bit of McMegan’s post that bugged me was her elevation of single-payer as goal in and of itself, as if what interests reformers isn’t the health of the populace or the sustainability of the system but the aesthetics of the financing structure. “Look at that funding mechanism,” we’ll one day whisper in awe. “It’s just so redistributive.”

You get this occasionally from libertarians, and it’s always struck me as an availability bias error: Because the shrinkage of government is an end unto itself for them, they assume the expansion of government is an en unto itself for liberals. Liberals are just libertarians, but backwards, and without the “rtarian.”

That, however, isn’t true. Liberals want greater public involvement in health care because they’ve concluded the profit incentive doesn’t create optimal outcomes in this particular case. You can’t comparison shop during a myocardial infraction. You can’t walk away from the table while on a gurney. You don’t want to be in the position of second-guessing your doctors. You don’t want your neighbors going bankrupt because they failed to adequately save in their HSAs, not suspecting they’d get cancer at 32.

Health care isn’t like flat screen televisions — if I don’t have the former, I can die. If I lack the latter, I’ll be watching Entourage in slightly lower definition. On the other hand, I really wouldn’t want the government taking over the provision of flat screen televisions, as there the market works pretty damn well. The relevant variable isn’t the economic theory, but the good in question.

What she said.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. If Jane Hague shows up, the drinks are on me.

Not in Seattle? Liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. A full listing of Washington’s eleven Drinking Liberally chapters is available here.

Oops.

King County Councilwoman Jane Hague has been hit with a new problem that, like her recently revealed drunken-driving charge, could be damaging politically as well as financially.

The staff of the state Public Disclosure Commission, in an administrative complaint Friday, accused her of multiple violations of campaign-finance laws.

It said the Bellevue Republican was late, sometimes by more than 13 months, in filing numerous reports of campaign contributions, expenditures and bank deposits; failed to disclose occupations and other required information about contributors; and accepted contributions in excess of the allowable limit of $700 from eight donors.

The complaint said Hague also violated laws governing surplus funds accounts, which are strictly regulated accounts for leftover campaign funds. It said she illegally filed several expenditure and fund-transfer reports late, some by as much as 15 months, and reimbursed herself for expenses — including campaign contributions to other politicians — for which surplus funds can’t be used.

The charges arose from and largely affirmed a voluminous complaint filed against the veteran politician by her election opponent, Richard Pope, a lawyer and perennial candidate who is running as a Democrat but without Democratic Party support.

He has brought successful public-disclosure complaints against previous election opponents but has never won an election.

And when our friend Richard Pope loses this election, I suggest the PDC hire him as an independent investigator to look for all the disclosure scofflaws the PDC doesn’t currently look for. He could probably make a good living just off commissions from the fines. That is, if he loses this election. At some point voters may just grow so fed up with this shit, they’ll throw Hague out of office regardless of her opponent.

And when she was arrested on the drunken-driving charge in Bellevue on June 2 — in an incident that wasn’t publicly known until Aug. 21, — an obscenity-spewing Hague reportedly blamed the arrest on her husband, Ed Springman. He was a passenger in her Mercedes convertible.

A state trooper said in a written report that Hague, 61, “became irate and (used) expletives” and “said it was her husband’s fault that she was in the back of a patrol car and being treated like a criminal, and her husband would have to find the best attorney” for her.

When the officer suggested she could speak to a public defender if her husband — a wealthy Eastside developer — couldn’t find her one, Hague reportedly “stated she would not talk to any second-rate attorney.”

A separate report written by a county sheriff’s deputy who arrested her said she declared in a slurred voice that he was wasting his time. He said she exclaimed, “This is fucking ridiculous, don’t you have rapists to take off the street?”

After she failed several roadside sobriety tests and the deputy transferred custody of the handcuffed councilwoman to the state trooper, the deputy’s report said she complained, “This is fucking ridiculous, I don’t need handcuffs.”

Too bad no quality Dem had the balls to file for this race. It would be a gimme.

On a curious side note, my good friend Stefan (fondly known by his pals at the local diner as “Mr. Pink“) has apparently been too busy defending his honor to read the papers, for I haven’t seen (u)SP mention Hague’s DUI even once. Odd for a blog that describes itself as a “sound commentary on current events in Seattle, Puget Sound and Washington State,” especially considering his hard stance on drunk driving, repeatedly mentioning state Supreme Court Justice Bobbe Bridge’s DUI, calling her a “drunken embarrassment,” and tenuously using the incident to attack Chief Justice Gerry Alexander.

Hmm.

Now that Idaho Senator Larry Craig has finally been discovered hiding in his closet, it’s becoming more and more obvious that there’s a segment of the Republican Party whose main motivation in politics appears to be making laws that are an attempt to keep themselves from their particular dysfunctional behaviors. We saw it with Mark Foley, who actually introduced legislation to punish the kind of behavior he engaged in. And strongly anti-gay Republicans like Ed Schrock and Jim West have supported and even pushed anti-gay legislation as they sat quietly in their closets.

As David Kurtz points out here, a website for the Idaho Values Alliance contains a remarkably familiar warning about what homosexuals do underneath a picture of family values champion Senator Craig (emphasis mine):

One of the tragic characteristics of the homosexual lifestyle is its emphasis on anonymous sex and multiple sexual partners. It is a little-acknowledged secret that many active homosexuals will have more than 1,000 sex partners over the course of a lifetime (the average among heterosexuals is seven – still six more than we were designed for). This sordid fact of homosexual life surfaced yesterday in an AP article yesterday that reports on the number of arrests police have made for indecent exposure and public sex acts in the restrooms at Atlanta’s airport, the busiest in the world. The increased restroom patrols, begun to apprehend luggage thieves, instead uncovered a rash of sex crimes. Airport restrooms have become so popular that men looking for anonymous sexual trysts with other men have advertised their airport availability on Craigslist. One such ad was from a man saying he was stuck at the airport for three hours and was looking for “discreet, quick action.”

You just can’t make this stuff up.

I’m heading off to Darcy Burner’s “Send a Message” Virtual Town Hall on Iraq, and this is the kind of performance I don’t expect to see:

Go to www.darcyburner.com at 3PM PST today and tune in to a real leader conducting a real forum on dealing with the mess in Iraq. And while you’re there, please put your money where your heart is. We’re only about $7,000 short of our ambitious $100,000 goal, but we’re trying to reach 3000 Act Blue donations by the end of the day.

So please do your part by joining 114 other HA readers in sending the message to Republican incumbents nationwide that they will not profit by toeing the Bush line on Iraq. Just five or ten bucks speaks volumes.

I was wrong. The big story today will be the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The question is, will Bush attempt to make a recess appointment? Can’t imagine he’d want to appoint anybody the Senate would want to confirm.

The big story today will be President Bush’s $10,000/person Bellevue fundraiser for Rep. Dave Reichert, but the real story behind the big story probably won’t make it onto the evening news or into the next morning’s headlines. Oh, you’ll see the usual pictures of rich folk lining up for a few seconds with the president, while protesters wave banners outside in a carefully quarantined “free speech zone.” And of course, there will be the traffic. Lots of traffic. But the real news will be taking place a few blocks down the street in a small conference room at the Westin, where Darcy Burner will be breaking new ground in the realm of electronic campaigning.

You’d think maybe, in one of the most tech-savvy regions of the nation, our media might recognize history in the making when they see it. But no, our newspapers, TV and radio have all but ignored the extraordinary new standards Burner is setting with her virtual town hall and the netroots fundraising drive that has organized around it.

Displaying the vision, leadership, boldness and technical expertise that have made her a netroots favorite, Darcy and her staff have used Bush’s visit as an opportunity to send a message on Iraq by creating an innovative “virtual town hall,” and attracting participants of national stature like Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton and Ambassador Joe Wilson.

Meanwhile, the netroots have seized on Darcy’s efforts, organizing around them an unprecedented $100,000 online fundraising drive intended to send a message of our own, that Republican incumbents won’t prosper by toeing the Bush line on Iraq. You will not find a single member of the political establishment who thought we had a snowball’s chance of coming anywhere near our goal, but in the first three days of the drive we have raised over $75,000 from over 2000 donors. Over a weekend. In August. Fourteen months out from the election.

If that’s not breaking new ground, I don’t know what is. And still, our local media refuses to take notice, even as history is being made in their own backyard. Go figure.

Well, somebody will notice… some national journalist will read the headlines at Daily Kos or Atrios today and scoop the Times and the P-I by recognizing that something special is unfolding in Seattle… that the dynamics of political campaigning are changing right before our eyes. Darcy isn’t just another Democrat, she’s a Democrat v2.0. Welcome to the future of politics.

So let the old guard media willfully ignore Darcy’s virtual town hall — you are invited to help us make history with or without them. Go to www.darcyburner.com, submit your question, and sign up to view the live stream. And if you haven’t already contributed via our Burn Bush Act Blue page, please join the 102 HA readers who already have. Let’s blow through our $100,000 target and give the political and media establishment the fright of their lives.

UPDATE:
Howie Klein has a great post on Darcy over at DownWithTyranny!

UPDATE (– Goldy):
In all fairness to Stefan and his reputation as a cheapskate, he paid for the pitcher. (Though I’ve got no idea what, if any he tipped.)

Here are a few videos to ease you into the new week…

• Bill Moyers takes a look at some of the smaller stories coming out of Iraq:

• The political situation in Iraq takes on a strange new twist as an American right-wing lobbying firms is being paid big bucks to undermine the government of Nuri Al-Malaki and promote Ayad Allawi:
  
• A Ted Nugent video clip was mentioned on The David Goldstein Show this evening. Here is the clip, showing Nugent saying that Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should suck on his machine guns. Ted…still motherfucking insane after all these years. But hey…he just may be the next governor of Michigan.
  

Discuss.

Tonight on “The David Goldstein Show”, 7PM to 10PM on News/Talk 710-KIRO:

7PM: Is President Bush coming to town to raise money for the Democrats?
President Bush is coming to Bellevue tomorrow for a high-dollar fundraiser for Dave Reichert, but there’s a good chance he could end up raising more money for Democratic challenger Darcy Burner than for the Republican incumbent. Burner will be in the studio with me to talk about her Virtual Town Hall on Iraq she’ll be holding tomorrow, just down the street from the President, and the $100,000 netroots fundraiser that’s been organized around. Panel moderator and Daily Kos front page blogger Joan McCarter will join us be phone, as will retired Major General Paul Eaton.

8PM: Primary wrap-up; general election preview
Democratic consultant Christian Sinderman and Republican consultant and former WA State GOP chair Chris Vance join me by phone for wrap up on Tuesdays primary and a look forward to the November general election. Will the Republicans continue their slide? Will voters approve roads and transit? Tune in and ask the experts.

9PM: TBA

Several witnesses have confirmed to me that they once saw Stefan Sharkansky beat a homeless man to death with a tire iron. And if Stefan denies it, he and his wife are free to sue me for defamation.