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I’ve known fellow blogger Lynn Allen of Evergreen Politics for well over a year, but though we have spent many hours in deep conversation I never knew until now that she was at Ground Zero on 9/11.

Our reaction to the events of 9/11 is very personal for me. Five years ago, I was at Ground Zero, teaching a class in the Marriott Hotel, WTC 3, the third building on the World Trade Center Plaza.

After what felt like a huge earthquake, we were ushered out of the building by the Marriott staff and stood watching in fascination the fire burning in the upper reaches of WTC 1. It was hard to believe the story that was circulating: A helicopter had crashed into the building on this very clear morning. Then we saw the second plane come in, belly angled slightly toward us, and crash into WTC 2. This was a terrorist attack! We bought water and talked strategies for survival. We decided to head toward the Brooklyn Bridge and began making our way through the people running in every direction.

Just as we began going up the ramp to the bridge, WTC 2 collapsed, sending clouds of debris and hundreds of screaming people in our direction. We continued on, single file, covered in a fine, gray dust, like refugees in a war zone. Eventually, we reached Brooklyn and sunshine, and the beginning of a new phase in our personal and national history.

Lynn has an excellent guest column in the Sunday, September 3 edition of the Seattle P-I [“Is more violence and less safety what we want?“], in which she muses on an alternative way we could have responded to the tragedy of 9/11… a path in which we fought to bring the world closer together instead of tearing it apart.

Read the whole thing.

In a desperate attempt to stay relevant by keeping up with the savvy new management over at the Seattle Weekly, I announced last week a new regular HA feature: Ask a Secular Jew Who Married a Shiksa and Lives Near Two Orthodox Synagogues. Welcome to the first installment.

Dear Secular Jew,

I’m a goy married to a JAP, I need your help. She says that the midrash says that the toilet seat must be down. Is that true?

Harry

Harry… your wife is wrong. Stretching the limits of my Reformed Judaism education, I believe the midrash is actually an irritating fungal infection most frequently caught by inadvertently sitting on the rim of a dirty toilet. (As opposed to a footrash or a headrash.) So I guess in practice, your wife is right: keep the toilet seat down.

Dear Secular Jew,

How come Jewish Guilt Complexes are so, so much funnier than Catholic Guilt Complexes, which are really just kind of sad/scary?

CB

CB… you’re asking the right guy — as a secular Jew who married an Irish Catholic shiksa, I’m a bona-fide expert on guilt.

Indeed the Jews and the Catholics are both very guilty people, the difference being that while Catholic guilt is based on sin, Jewish guilt is based on shame. Sin is derived from God, while shame is derived from… your mother.

For example, take sex. When we first started sleeping together my shiksa and I both felt incredibly guilty about sex. The difference was that she felt guilty because she thought it was wrong, whereas I felt guilty because I thought I was doing it wrong.

So in answer to your question, let me ask you… which one of us really has the sadder/scarier guilt complex?

Hey Secular Jew,

Who do I have to sleep with to get a good bagel in this town?

BL

BL… it doesn’t really matter who you sleep with, as long as the bed is in New York City.

[If you have a question about Jews or Judaism, and you think a secular Jew who married a shiksa and lives near two orthodox synagogues might have the answer, just ask your question in the comment thread of this post. Remember, I will not answer simple, Jew-baiting death rights — it must be posed in the form of a question.]

Jerry Cornfield of the Everett Herald gets the prize for being the first to unearth the police report from Mike!™ McGavick’s 1993 DUI, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. And surprise… it also catches Mike!™ in a couple of Lies!™.

Lie number one comes from his misty-eyed mea culpa, where he remorseful explains: “I was cited for DUI when I cut a yellow light too close in 1993.”

Cut a yellow light too close… yeah, right. We all just assumed that was merely a feeble and disingenuous way of saying that he ran a red. (You know, a lie.) Well, now we know that he ran a red light, and a steady one at that.

The police report states the officer observed a car “drive through a steady red signal” at an intersection a couple miles north of the District of Columbia, where McGavick, then 35, worked for the American Insurance Association.

Of course, his defenders might argue that you can’t expect Mike!™ to remember all the details because it happened thirteen years ago and, well… he was Drunk!™. But according to the police report, it turns out Mike!™ has a history of lying about drunk driving.

When McGavick rolled the window down on his white Mazda Miata, a strong odor of alcohol greeted the officer, according to the report. McGavick told the officer he had “two, maybe three beers” during the previous five hours.

Ooops. I guess that counts as lie number two, especially when you consider the fact that in interviews after his surprise revelation Mike!™ admitted that he knew he shouldn’t have been behind the wheel the minute he saw the flashing lights pulling him over. So, either he lied to reporters that he knew he shouldn’t have been driving, or he lied to the police when he said he’d only had “two, maybe three beers” during the previous five hours.

Uh-huh.

As it turns out, he probably had at least a dozen drinks that night as the police report shows he blew a stunning 0.17 at the police station, a full 90-minutes after he was pulled over. That suggests his blood-alcohol level was likely in excess of .20 at the time he climbed staggered behind the wheel.

How Drunk!™ was Mike!™?

When McGavick rolled the window down on his white Mazda Miata, a strong odor of alcohol greeted the officer, according to the report. […] The officer had McGavick get out of the car for sobriety tests. The report described McGavick as having a flushed face, slurred speech and a swaying body. His demeanor was described as polite, cooperative and sleepy.

McGavick failed sobriety tests in which the officer moved his finger side to side and up and down. McGavick did better when he was asked to walk heel-to-toe on a line and stand on one leg.

After the tests, the officer handcuffed McGavick and drove him to the Bethesda, Md., police station. McGavick fell asleep while waiting to have his blood alcohol level measured, according to the police report.

I would imagine that if I were being arrested and processed, I’d be pretty stresed out. But Mike!™ actually fell asleep. Man… that’s pretty damn Drunk!™

Looks like the only thing with more spin than his calculated, preemptive confession, was Mike!™’s head that drunken evening back in 1993.

UPDATE:
Here’s a PDF of the police report courtesy the Rich Roesler and the Spokesman-Review.

Sources have confirmed to HA that Safeco Insurance is indeed the unnamed “Firm 1” in a Washington Insurance Commissioner’s Office study of the abusive use of credit scoring to cancel auto-insurance policies. As first reported in the Seattle Times, Safeco has asked the Thurston County Superior Court to block release of the information.

According to sources familiar with the investigation, the controversial practice was initially pioneered in WA state by Progressive Insurance. Sources say that Safeco was actually late to embrace the practice, but did so aggressively under former CEO Mike!™ McGavick’s leadership, far and quickly exceeding the scope and impact of its competition. As the Times initially reported:

The study cited “Firm 1” for relying on credit scoring to cancel auto policies, as opposed to simply raising rates, which the other companies did. It said Firm 1’s decisions disproportionately impacted minorities, divorced women and low-income residents.

Many of those terminated by Firm 1 had clean driving records.

“Over one-quarter of those cancelled for low credit scores” by Firm 1 “had no ‘incidents’ in the insurer’s records, though some had been with the insurer for more than 10 years,” the 2003 study said.

“Seventeen percent of apparently accident-free cancelled policyholders were minorities.”

When the story first broke Monday I thought it would be easy to find a cooperative source inside an office Democrats have held for years, but extracting relevant information turned out to be harder than squeezing blood from a stone. Commissioner Mike Kreidler has called credit scoring “a form of redlining” and thinks it “should have been banned,” yet he has adamantly refused to disclose the identity of the firms in question until the legal issues are resolved.

This has apparently led to much consternation in and outside his office by those who complain that Kreidler is not doing enough to help fellow Democrats. But while I personally wouldn’t mind if Kreidler were a bit more partisan, I fully admire the respect he has shown for his office, and am somewhat reminded of similar complaints from GOP stalwarts who attacked Secretary of State Sam Reed for not doing more to help fellow Republican Dino Rossi come out on top of our excruciatingly close 2004 gubernatorial election.

Still, this was a study conducted by a public agency, paid for with taxpayer dollars, and so the public has a right to know its details. Thus if you are one of those Insurance Office insiders who think Kreidler should be more partisan, I urge you to act on your convictions and please leak me any relevant documents. I promise to maintain your anonymity, and once again affirm my pledge to go to jail before ever revealing a source.

Perhaps you’ve heard about it, but if you haven’t yet seen Keith Olbermann’s commentary yesterday on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, watch it now.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that — though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism – indeed.

Finally, a journalist with a large national audience courageous enough to say out loud what many of us have been warning for years. It’s almost enough to make me call up Comcast and order cable. Almost.

Instead, I sent an email to MSNBC thanking them for putting Olbermann’s Countdown on the air.

On Tuesday, at around 5:00 PM, I donated $100.00 to Peter Goldmark’s campaign, and challenged you all to give what you could to Peter and Darcy Burner by the midnight, August 30th reporting deadline. I’m thrilled to report that over the past 55 hours, 55 of you answered my call and donated a total of $3,535.00.

While we fell a bit short of yesterday’s goal of doubling the number of contributors to my ActBlue page, we far exceeded my expectations for total dollars raised. I’d only hoped to average about twenty bucks per donation, and maybe a couple thousand dollars tops. But your generosity blew that target away.

Netroots fundraising is still in its infancy, but it’s obviously more mature here than virtually anywhere else. 120 HA readers have now contributed a total of $6,778.36 to Goldmark and Burner via my ActBlue page. With average daily traffic of about 2400 unique visits a day, that’s an astounding response rate of 5 percent… a response rate most direct marketers wouldn’t dare dream of.

Compare that to the National Netroots ActBlue page, which has leveraged a combined readership of over 600,000 readers a day to raise about $620,000 from 7,600 donors. That’s respectable, even impressive, but on both a donor and dollar per reader comparison, HorsesAss readers kick ass.

I want to thank you all for your generosity and support. With your help we can take back Congress this November, and finally bring some accountability back to the other Washington.

24 hours ago I challenged my readers to double the number of donors to Peter Goldmark and Darcy Burner from my ActBlue page by today’s midnight reporting deadline, and while I’m blown away by the $2505.00 raised thus far, I’m a touch disappointed that with 6 hours remaining, only 39 of you have responded to the call, bringing us little more than halfway towards our 72-donor target.

Perhaps I was too ambitious. Or perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.

The more individual contributors each candidate can report, the easier it will be for them to attract big-money donors and independent expenditures during the final weeks of the campaign. That means even a FIVE BUCK donation, if that’s all you can afford, can be leveraged to help raise the cash Peter and Darcy will need to get their message out and win this November.

That’s all I’m asking — a $5.00 donation. I’ll probably log another six to eight hundred readers between now and midnight… surely, 33 of you can afford to pony up five bucks each?

Please give now. Thanks.

UPDATE:
Still don’t know much about Peter Goldmark? Lynn has a typically excellent interview with Peter up on Evergreen Politics.

Let the caption contest begin.

Since launching my challenge late yesterday afternoon, 33 readers have donated $1945.00 to the Goldmark and Burner campaigns via my ActBlue page. That’s fantastic, but still 39 donations shy of my target of 72 by midnight tonight.

Peter and Darcy need you to prove your grassroots support, and the more contributors they have, the easier it will be for them to pull in the big donors. Just a 5 buck donation can make a huge difference come November. So please give now.

KING5/SurveyUSA: Sen. Maria Cantwell 56%, Mike!™ McGavick 39%. Check out the crosstabs. Just a robo-poll, but nothing for the McGavick folks to cheer about.

Oh, and on a somewhat related topic, TPMmuckraker reports that the US Senator who put a secret hold on a bill that would have created a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts (you know, making it easier for taxpayers to figure out how their money is being spent,) turns out to be none other than Mike!™’s good friend, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Hmm.

Just this past week Mike!™ wrote on his own campaign blog:

This is a sad state of affairs when a senator (or senators) secretly prevent legislation to remove secrecy. The American people have a right to know how their money is being spent. We need senators who are willing to hold their colleagues accountable for this sort of thing, regardless of party.

So… the best way to hold Sen. Stevens accountable is to, um, elect his friend Mike!™ to the Senate?

Ted Drinks!™ to Mike!™ at Alaska fundraiser

UPDATE:
Fixed the numbers. It’s 56-39, not 53-36.

Man, us lefties sure are a bunch of pussies. Sure, we’re liberal. And yeah, most of us drink. But last night not a single one of us managed to get what the kids these days call Mike!™ McGavick drunk. (Or the popular shorthand: Drunk!™)

Joining me in an all too sober discussion of the issues of the day were Will, Mollie, Geov and Carl. Topics of discussion included the relatively warlike tendencies of the various world religions, the Katherine Harris crazy comments of Katherine Harris, what the hell the Democrats are going to do if they actually take back Congress, the human, political and military disaster that is Iraq, the human, political and non-military disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, the Seattle Weekly’s transition from Mossback to Wetback… and Republican US Senate candidate Mike!™ McGavick’s curious revelation that he once got pulled over for driving Drunk!™

The show is 51:33, and is available here as a 38.7 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for producing the show.]

Late yesterday afternoon I challenged my readers to double the number of donors on my ActBlue page from 72 to 144 by midnight tonight. Since then, 17 generous readers have donated $935.00 to the Goldmark and Burner campaigns.

That’s great, but we can do better. Candidates are judged not just by the money raised, but by the number of individual contributors, so even a $5.00 donation can make a big difference in attracting big donors during the final, crucial few weeks of the campaign.

Let’s show the nation that WA’s netroots are doing their part to take back Congress and bringing accountability to the other Washington. Please give now.

The Seattle Times’ latest editorial is neatly summed up in its headline: “Pull the ad, Mike“:

Mike McGavick’s latest radio ad is a politician’s version of highway robbery.

The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate is appropriating the issue of sales tax deductibility as his own and using it to attack incumbent Maria Cantwell. Problem is, Democrat Cantwell might as well be known as Sen. Sales Tax Deductibility. Both she and Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver, have been leaders, in their respective houses of Congress, on the issue of first restoring, then keeping, the right of residents in Washington and seven other states to deduct their state sales tax from the federal tax bill.

[…]

McGavick’s radio ad attacks Cantwell for voting against the sales tax deduction

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Yesterday I put $100.00 on my credit card and wired it over to the Peter Goldmark campaign via my ActBlue fundraising page, and then I asked all of you to follow suit. Since then six of you have contributed a combined $790.00 to the Goldmark and Darcy Burner campaigns via my ActBlue page… an astounding $132.00 per contribution!

Thank you for your generosity.

But did you know you don’t need big bucks to make a big difference in the upcoming election?

The pre-primary reporting period closes tomorrow at midnight, and that’s the figure the DCCC and various PACs and big donors are going to use to help them decided which campaigns have the wherewithal to warrant further investment. But they don’t just local at the amount of cash raised… they also look at the total number of contributors as a powerful indicator of a candidate’s grassroots support.

So here’s what I want everybody to do. Even if you don’t have much money, I want to go to my ActBlue page and donate whatever your can to Peter and Darcy… even if it’s only $5.00.

Of course, if you can give more, please do… but five measly bucks can make a big difference when it comes to convincing the big money to take the campaign seriously.

We have only a little more than 24 hours before the reporting period closes, and as of now a total of 72 donors have contributed through my page. Let’s prove again how powerful the local netroots are, and see if we can double that number before midnight tomorrow.

5 bucks. That’s all I’m asking. Please give now.

The Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally meets tonight (and every Tuesday), 8PM at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E.

Assuming somebody brings along a breathalyzer and a 200-pound man, I intend to run a little experiment to see exactly how many drinks it takes to get “Mike McGavick drunk”. I’ve got a free copy of Sen. Byron Dorgan’s new book, Take This Job and Ship It for the first person to show up with a functioning breathalyzer, and 8 or 9 free drinks and ride home for one lucky volunteer.

Washington liberals will also be drinking tonight in the Tri-Cities. Here’s a full run down of WA’s ten Drinking Liberally chapters:

	Where:	When:	Next Meeting:
Burien:	Mick Kelly’s Irish Pub, 435 SW 152nd St	Fourth Wednesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	September 27
Kirkland:	Valhalla Bar & Grill, 8544 122nd Ave NE	Every Thursday, 7:00 pm onward	August 31
Monroe:	Eddie’s Trackside Bar and Grill, 214 N Lewis St	Second Wednesday of each month, 7:00 PM onward	September 13
Olympia:	The Tumwater Valley Bar and Grill, 4611 Tumwater Valley Drive South	First and third Monday of each month, 7:00-9:00 pm	September 4
Seattle:	Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Ave E	Every Tuesday, 8:00 pm onward	August 29
Spokane:	Red Lion BBQ & Pub, 126 N Division St	Every Wednesday, 7:00 pm	August 30
Tacoma:	Meconi’s Pub, 709 Pacific Ave	Every Wednesday, 8:00 pm onward	August 30
Tri-Cities:	Atomic Ale, 1015 Lee Blvd, Richland	Every Tuesday, 7:00 pm onward	August 29
Vancouver:	Hazel Dell Brew Pub, 8513 NE Highway 99	Second and fourth Tuesday of each month, 7:00 pm onward	September 12
Walla Walla:	The Green Lantern, 1606 E Isaacs Ave	First Friday of each month, 8:00 pm onward	September 1