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My righty trolls like to point to individual incidents and use them as a means of branding the entire political opposition as violent, un-American, immoral degenerates. So turnabout is fair play. Take for example this piece from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World:

Douglas County sheriff’s deputies are investigating the reported beating of a Kansas University professor who gained recent notoriety for his Internet tirades against Christian fundamentalists.

Kansas University religious studies professor Paul Mirecki reported he was beaten by two men about 6:40 a.m. today on a roadside in rural Douglas County. In a series of interviews late this afternoon, Mirecki said the men who beat him were making references to the controversy that has propelled him into the headlines in recent weeks.

“I didn’t know them, but I’m sure they knew me,” he said.
…
He said the men beat him about the upper body with their fists, and he said he thinks they struck him with a metal object. He was treated and released at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
…
Mirecki recently wrote online that he planned to teach intelligent design as mythology in an upcoming course. He wrote it would be a “nice slap” in the “big fat face” of fundamentalists.

Of course, Mirecki intended to slap the fundamentalists metaphorically. At least two fundamentalists decided that was cause enough strike him back with fists and a metal object.

So much for “teach the controversy.”

Not that polls are all that meaningful a year out from the election, but the latest Rasmussen poll shows Sen. Maria Cantwell leading insurance industry flak Mike McGavick, 52% to 37%… for the second month in a row. While the head to head numbers haven’t changed, Cantwell’s favorable rating has climbed to a respectable 60%.

Cantwell has long been considered one of the most vulnerable Democratic senate incumbents in 2006, but these numbers suggest she’s nowhere near as weak as Republicans had hoped. It’s interesting to note that Sen. Patty Murray had also been considered vulnerable heading into the 2004 campaign season, but led George Nethercutt by a similar 52% to 37% margin as early as June of 2003. Murray went on to win by over 12 points.

The GOP had counted on an unpopular Cantwell being an easy target, but now it seems clear that McGavick is not only going to have to sell himself to WA voters, he’s going to have to make a strong case for tossing out Cantwell as well. And with Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, and the GOP leadership not far behind, it’s gonna be pretty tough making the argument that we need to give the president one more Republican vote in the Senate.

Perhaps this partially explains why his fellow Republicans aren’t lining up to challenge McGavick for the nomination?

From today’s Washington Post:

The House ethics committee, the panel responsible for upholding the chamber’s ethics code, has been virtually moribund for the past year, handling only routine business despite a wave of federal investigations into close and potentially illegal relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists.
…
The committee’s last formal action of note was its recommendation to admonish former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for the second and third times in 2004. Since then, the committee has been crippled.

Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) was ousted as the ethics chairman early this year by House GOP leaders. His successor, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), has been slow to take up the reins because of disputes between Republicans and Democrats over the panel’s rules. Hastings and Mollohan also feuded for months about the makeup of the professional staff.

It has been a year since Hastings took the reigns, and the House Ethics Committee still doesn’t have a chief of staff on the job, nor even begun the process of hiring investigators. During that time at least seven lawmakers have been indicted, pleaded guilty, or are under investigation for conspiracy, fraud, campaign finance violations, and other improper conduct. Last week Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif) resigned from Congress after pleading guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion, and the other Washington is abuzz with rumors of lawmakers, spouses, and aides entangled in the growing scandals surrounding lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon.

Government watch dog groups from across the ideological spectrum are decrying the Committee’s failure to act, and the erosion in public trust that has resulted.

“There is no ethics enforcement in Congress today, and it’s inexcusable,” sad Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative monitor of government ethics.

“No matter what level of corruption the members of Congress engage in, the ethics committees do nothing,” agreed Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a national embarrassment.”

This is Hastings’ committee, and by failing to act he is complicit in the corruption he is responsible for investigating and punishing. The citizens of WA’s 4th Congressional District deserve to know the crucial role their congressman is playing in preserving our Capitol’s crooked money machine. The citizens of the 4th District deserve a better congressman.

Wow. Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper has a guest column in The Seattle Times (originally published in the LA Times.) And… well… wow.

Sometimes people in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I’m a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they’ll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle’s police department.

But no, I don’t favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

This is an issue that has troubled me a lot recently… one on which my personal views have nearly travelled a full 360 degrees over the past twenty-five years.

I started from a quasi-libertarian position grounded in my personal experience of the relatively harmless recreational drug use that surrounded me in college (I myself smoked a little pot, but quickly outgrew the vice.) While a strong streak of uptight prudishness kept me clean, I had close friends who did a lot of illicit drugs. I didn’t approve — and I let them know it — but I understood at the time that a drug conviction would cause far more harm than the drugs themselves, resulting in expulsion if not imprisonment, and costing them all the privilege and opportunity that our Ivy League education afforded us.

Over time though, my stance hardened, perhaps out of concern over the destructive scourge of crack cocaine, maybe just out of a need for consistency with my strong views on restricting access to tobacco. I was never a huge supporter of the so-called “War on Drugs” and its focus on interdiction — and I’ve never understood our nation’s irrational demonization of marijuana — but I also didn’t favor outright legalization. That, it seemed to me, would be giving up on a very real public health crisis. While my college friends were lucky enough to dodge a life of addiction, many other drug users are not.

But… in recent years I’ve come back around to my original position, not out of any shift in my view on drugs, but out of sheer utilitarianism… as Stamper points out, prohibition simply does not work, and in fact causes more societal harm than it seeks to prevent.

It’s not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and ’90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We’re making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?

I’ve witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs

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Jonathan Singer has an interesting piece on MyDD, presenting a model for Democrats taking back the House of Representatives in 2006. And what is that model? The overwhelming Republican sweep in WA state back in 1994.

Going into the 1994 midterm elections, Washington state Democrats appeared poised to continue their dominance. In both 1988 and 1992, the Evergreen state had thrown its electoral votes behind the Democratic candidate, and the state had not elected a Republican Governor since 1980. Looking more closely at the 1992 election, the Democrats won eight of the state’s nine House seats, winning the overall House vote by a 56 percent to 41 percent margin, and House Speaker Tom Foley, a Spokane Democrat, was at the peak of his power.

But come November 6, 1994, the Democrats’ fortunes reversed. Republicans won the statewide House vote by a 51 percent to 49 percent margin, defeating the Democrats in seven of the state’s nine districts for a net pick up of six seats, and GOP Senator Slade Gorton was handily reelected with 56 percent of the vote. What happened on election day, and the months leading up to it, should serve as a stark warning to Republicans who believe they are set maintain control of the House in 2006 and should further provide lessons to Democrat hoping to win back the lower chamber.

Singer notes that the GOP picked up seats in four Democratic-leaning districts in WA in 1994, and 16 Democratic-leaning districts nationally. He concludes that Democrats should not shy away from targeting Republican-leaning districts in 2006, particularly in Ohio, which somewhat mirrors WA in 1994.

Personally, I remain hopeful that Democrats will target the three Republican-leaning districts in WA state. Everybody knows that freshman incumbent Rep. Dave Reichert is vulnerable; the 8th District continues to lean Democratic in statewide and Presidential races, and should be within reach of a strong challenger (and I’m not yet convinced that either of the declared candidates, Darcy Burner and Randy Gordon, are up to the task.) But given the right circumstances, the right challenger — and enough money — Democrats could have a shot in Eastern WA too.

Representatives Cathy McMorris and Doc Hastings have voted with the Republican leadership 98% of the time — often against the interests of their Eastern WA constituents — and each has their unique vulnerabilities. While McMorris has done little to distinguish herself during her freshman year, Hastings is finally making a name for himself as the do-nothing chair of the House Ethics Committee at time his own party appears to be collapsing under the weight of its own corruption.

Both deserve strong challengers who can make the 2006 election a referendum on George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom Delay, Bill Frist and the rest of the Republican leadership. If Eastern WA voters are in the mood to throw the bums out next November, Democrats need to be prepared to offer them a viable alternative. There’s a chance McMorris may draw a strong challenger in Peter Goldmark, but Hastings seat has thus far drawn little interest from Democrats.

As Singer points out, the lesson both parties should learn from WA in 1994, is that Republican domination is not safe in any part of the country right now. Democrats have a shot at retaking the House… but only if we mount strong challenges in Republican leaning districts.

Okay… I didn’t actually post until 12-03… but I was busy. So deal.

Uh-oh… looks like our friend Stefan is huffing more of the fumes that fueled his paranoid fantasies about King County Records & Elections. This time he thinks he’s caught me an a scandal regarding the leak of confidential documents. I think it’s time for an intervention.

But the weirdest thing about Goldstein’s post is that it links to a document containing confidential legal advice given to the canvassing board under attorney-client privilege.

The ultimate leaker of the privileged communication is most likely Dean Logan himself. Several of the document’s pages were printed from Logan’s own e-mail account, and the document was faxed from Logan’s office (296-0108) —

We owe our thanks to the wonderfully clueless David Owngoalstein for compromising his source by posting this document with the original fax headers intact.

Um… I don’t so much mind Stefan’s insinuation that I am shiftless… but really, you’d think that after a year of having my boot print firmly embossed on his buttocks in terms of credibility and impact, he might finally come to terms with the fact that I am not stupid.

Whatever.

Anyway, as usual, Stefan has jumped to conclusions, reading scandal and conspiracy into some unrelated tidbit, and choosing to adopt an aggressively confrontational stance by burdening taxpayers with yet another frivolous public records request… instead of, um… say… asking nicely. If he had bothered to ask me, I would have told him that I had heard from a media source that KCRE had distributed these documents to reporters, and so I emailed Communications Specialist Bobbie Egan and asked for a copy. I further would have explained that the reason the document appeared to be faxed from Logan’s office is that Egan in fact, faxed it to me from Logan’s office. (As a service to taxpayers, I have posted a PDF of the cover page, so that Stefan can drop his unnecessary public records request.)

In this friendly conversation, Stefan might also have learned that I noticed the confidentiality statements on the documents, and emailed Egan back, asking for confirmation that confidentiality had been waived, and that I was free to post the documents in whole or in part, to which she replied:

Dean has waived A/C privilege and it is considered a public record.

Now, this whole incident is really very petty, but I think it’s a great illustration of the kind of sloppy and paranoid methodology that has plagued Stefan’s work from the start. He uncovers “facts” — like say, that I posted a confidential document — and then spins it into some nefarious tale of corruption and incompetence, without bothering to follow through on the research to back it up. This is why people who got their coverage of the election contest from (un)SoundPolitics are so grossly misinformed about what actually transpired.

And… this is why real reporters are so distrustful of bloggers like us. Especially, bloggers like Stefan.

The shoes continue to drop at Entercom, and BlatherWatch has the scoop: KTTH has apparently axed conservative talk-radio host Mike Siegel. Siegel will be replaced by his former producer, Dave Boze and Michael Medved’s producer, Dan Sytman. Siegel’s other listener was unavailable for comment.

UPDATE:
Just a note to those of you trashing BlatherWatch’s reputation as a source, KTTH has now updated their home page to announce their new morning show with Dan Sytman and Dave Boze.

I vividly remember from my youth, the morbid routine of watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news, and seeing the daily casualty count from the Vietnam War. This is the type of nostalgia I can live without.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Ten U.S. Marines conducting a foot patrol outside the Iraqi city of Falluja were killed in the explosion of an insurgent bomb on Thursday, the U.S. military announced on Friday.

In a statement released in Falluja, the military said another 11 Marines were wounded in the blast caused by an “improvised explosive device” fashioned from several large artillery shells.

The attack is one of the worst single incidents to hit U.S. Marines in the war.

It would be overly simplistic to draw too many parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq wars, but one of those long drawn by the president’s defenders is embodied in the not-so-subtle attack on the media and war opponents, implicit in the warning against “losing the war at home.” No doubt, had I merely posted the clip above without editorializing, I would have generated numerous angry comments in the thread, assailing my patriotism, my courage, my morality, and my motives. (No doubt, I still will.)

But in all the recent chatter over strategies for either victory or exit, and the growing realization by the American people that the rationale with which our President sold us a preemptive war, was largely based on a relentless campaign of lies, the Bush apologists fail to understand the true cause of the steady decline in support for the war. The public’s growing discomfort with this war is not primarily due to propaganda coming from either side of the debate, but rather is an inevitable result of the White House’s biggest pre-invasion lie of all: that the war would be quick, painless, and decisive.

The American people were told that our troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and candy, much like the victorious GI’s marching through the joyous streets of liberated Paris. Yes, American soldiers would die bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, but we were promised that the cost in both blood and treasure would be relatively inexpensive… that reconstruction would be financed by Iraqi oil revenues, and that American forces would quickly bring order to a nation grown tired of conflict and oppression. This naive optimism was confirmed and reinforced mere months after the invasion, when the President proudly proclaimed “mission accomplished.”

Two and a half years later, the violence not only continues, it is escalating, and there is no end in sight. Now a new generation of children is growing up watching TV reports of other family’s sons and daughters dying in a far off war, financed by an enormous national debt that they themselves will be burdened with repaying. As the Iraq war drags on beyond expectations, is it any wonder that support at home would decline?

Fifteen years ago the President’s father promised a quick and decisive war in Iraq, and pragmatically delivered by controversially claiming victory short of Baghdad. Perhaps the second President Bush actually believed the pre-war fantasy he foisted on the nation — perhaps he still believes it. But if he loses the war at home the blame cannot be placed on the intrigues of his domestic enemies, but rather on his own failure to prepare the American people for a long, expensive, and drawn out struggle.

Apparently, both The Stranger and I got fed the same story this afternoon, and to Eli Sanders’ credit, he got it online first. Check out his piece on Slog about Republican backed voter registration challenges in Summit County Ohio. Or read the contemporary reporting on MyDD:

The Summit County Board of Elections abruptly threw out 976 challenges of voter eligibility by the Republican Party today after Barbara Miller, the challenger, revealed that she did not have any personal information about the eligibility of any of the challenged voters.

Sounds eerily familiar, huh? Only these challenges occurred over a year ago, just days before the 2004 general election. As Sanders points out, Lori Sotelo’s challenges did not occur in a vacuum.

During the 2004 presidential election, in hotly contested Ohio, Republicans issued hundreds of flawed voter challenges that ultimately failed for exactly the same reason that King County Republican Lori Sotelo’s challenges failed this year

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According to the FBI, their number one domestic terrorism priority is combating animal rights extremists and eco-terrorists. Yeah… that’s right, in an age when a widely-read fascist propagandist like Anne Coulter publicly calls for executions to “physically intimidate liberals,” the FBI worries about the “escalation in violent rhetoric” coming from a handful of fringe whackos.

In fact, while the FBI works to demonize the broader animal rights and environmental movements, it virtually ignores a domestic terrorist campaign that has been waged with quiet ferocity and frightening success for over thirty years. Of course I’m talking about the anti-abortion terrorists, whose relentless campaign of violence and intimidation has made legal abortion an unavailable option across broad swaths of the nation.

Over the last 20 years, anti-abortion terrorists have been responsible for six murders and 15 attempted murders (see Lake of Fire), according to the National Abortion Federation. They have also been behind some 200 bombings and arsons, 72 attempted arsons, 750 death and bomb threats and hundreds of acts of vandalism, intimidation, stalking and burglary.

That was from a 1998 report by the Southern Poverty Legal Center, and the campaign of terror continues unabated, including what has proven to be a highly successful strike near our state Capitol.

When an arsonist torched their clinic nearly a year ago, Eastside Women’s Health Clinic owners Nancy Armstrong and Shelly Pacheco vowed not to let fear keep them from providing abortions.

But when they reopen the clinic Monday, after a year working out of a double-wide trailer in the parking lot, there will be no more abortions.

It wasn’t the arsonist who stopped them, but their insurance company.

After the Jan. 9 fire, which burned through the roof of the building and destroyed much of the interior, the clinic’s insurance company canceled its coverage. Other insurers quoted them rates more than 10 times what they had been paying.

“The insurance companies think, “Oh, you had an arson because you do abortions. We’re not going to insure you,’ ” Armstrong said. “Then the arsonist thinks, “Oh, it works.’ “

And it does work. To get an insurance rate the clinic owners could afford, they had to agree to not perform abortions. Chalk up another victory for the terrorists.

Terrorists have forced abortion providers to shut down clinics nationwide, either out of fear for their lives and those of their family and employees, or as in the case of the Olympia clinic, by making it economically impossible to continue. What anti-abortion forces have been unable to achieve via legislation or the courts, they are achieving through brute, physical violence.

And with the eliminationist rhetoric spreading from the right-wing fringe into the mainstream, where Coulter can call for executing liberals, and anonymous posters in my own comment thread (though not as anonymous as they might think) routinely and publicly welcome such a violent fate for me, it would be foolish not to imagine this culture of terror creeping further into our political discourse. How many arson attacks against the houses and cars of liberal bloggers and other political activists before insurance companies deny us coverage? (…Or refuse to pay claims, citing the provision that they are not responsible for damages suffered by a policy holder engaged in a civil war?) How many progressives would no longer choose to speak out in the wake of a handful of targeted, high-profile assassinations?

For the FBI to imply that the greatest domestic terrorist threat facing America today comes from the largely unarmed and nonviolent left, is a joke, a sham, and a frighteningly complicit signal to the anti-abortionists that the federal government will continue to look the other way as they continue their campaign of terror. Even in Olympia, the capitol of a blue state, violent, right-wing thugs are denying women their constitutional right to control their own bodies. It begs the question… what will the terrorists target next?

Yay… Bush has a plan!

Two and a half years after the American invasion of Iraq, President Bush laid out Wednesday what he called a strategy for victory, vowing not to pull out on “artificial timetables set by politicians” but at the same time offering the first glimpse of his plan for extricating American forces.

Um… I’m no military expert… but shouldn’t we have had a “strategy for victory” before we invaded Iraq?

I’ve had the opportunity to meet King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng, and found him rather likable and reassuring, in a grandfatherly sort of way. One of the last of the old-style moderates who used to dominate the state GOP, he’s the only Republican to win a majority in King County in any statewide or countywide race since at least 1998. I don’t remember if I voted for him the last time around, but it’s safe to say I was not the only Democrat who felt comfortable with Maleng serving in an office that demands competence and integrity over partisan political allegiance.

And so it was with great disappointment that I saw Maleng join his party yesterday in grandstanding on the issue of voter registration challenges.

Republican challenges to hundreds of King County voters’ registrations have exposed a “serious flaw” in voter rolls statewide that needs to be fixed quickly to restore public trust, county Prosecutor Norm Maleng said Tuesday.

He called on the attorney general, secretary of state and Legislature for help, and said his office is prepared to investigate voters who persist in maintaining registration addresses at private-mailbox businesses and other locations where they don’t live.

“It is not acceptable that these incomplete and illegal registrations are allowed to stand without being corrected,” the Republican prosecutor said at a news conference.

No, what is needed to “restore public trust”, Norm, is for you and your party to stop cynically distorting the performance of elections officials for cheap, political gain. On the day when King County certified its results, reporting a remarkably well-run election with perhaps the fewest discrepancies ever, you decide to step on the good-news story by staging a press conference that dishonestly implies that there are hundreds of illegal voters on the rolls. And you say your goal is to restore public trust?

Are some voters improperly registered at mailboxes? Obviously. Is there a single scrap of evidence that this is due to anything but an innocent error by voters or elections officials, or that a single one of these voters is otherwise ineligible vote? No. But when Maleng comes out and starts talking about “illegal” registrations, people are going to think he’s talking about “voter fraud”, and that’s just plain wrong… and Maleng knows it. Rather than working with Logan to address the issue, he’s decided to cynically join his party in turning it into an adversarial process.

Earlier this week the Canvassing Board voted 2-to-1 to reject a majority of the registration challenges because Lori Sotelo failed to provide the voters’ actual addresses as required by statute. Maleng calls this legal reasoning “strained” and is asking Attorney General Rob McKenna and Sec. of State Sam Reed to impose a less rigid interpretation. But in doing so, Maleng is actually going against the legal advice of the elections experts in his own office.

In a series of memos and emails (PDF) to the Canvassing Board, Janine Joly — the Sr. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney assigned by Maleng to advise King County Elections — addresses the legal issues in depth, and lays out the grounds for dismissing insufficient challenges.

“The challenger’s failure to allege an actual address either in her challenge form or at the hearing is a fatal flaw and should invalidate the challenge. Any other decision would be contrary to the plain language of the statute even if it appears from the other evidence provided that the challenged voter is not registered at a valid residence address.”

Joly also advises that indeed, according to the WAC, “a mailbox facility could be a nontraditional address since it is an identifiable location,” and if a voter deems this to be his residence he should be “registered and precincted based on the location provided.” In reaching this conclusion Joly addresses an apparent contradiction in the WAC:

“Though the WAC could be read to require those with nontraditional addresses to be registered at public buildings, that interpretation would conflict with one of the purposes of the voter registration statutes and rules, which is to ensure that voters only vote for the candidates and measures that correspond to the area in which they reside and consequently affect them. […] Based on this principle which has been incorporated in Washington State election laws, the apparent contradiction in the WAC should be resolved in favor of registering a person to vote where he resides — the nontraditional address or mailbox facility.”

The irony of Maleng’s grandstanding is that it was Dean Logan and Dow Constantine who followed the Prosecutors Office’s legal advice, and Maleng’s own representative on the Canvassing Board, Dan Satterberg, who ignored it. Thus in asking Repubicans McKenna and Reed to issue an opinion that would leave the door open to future, poorly researched, mass challenges, Maleng is not only siding with his party against the rights of voters, he is also siding with the GOP against the attorney in his office whose job it is to interpret election statutes.

No doubt Maleng has been under great pressure from members of his own party, but if this entered his political calculus, he may have made a huge mistake. Nothing he does can possibly shore up his support amongst the rabid right that is seizing control of the KCGOP leadership. And he is sending a clear message to moderate Democrats and independents that we no longer enjoy a political climate where we have the luxury of electing centrist Republicans, without the risk of unforeseen political consequences.

Maleng will never draw fervent support from the activists in his own party, and his recent actions will surely turn off some of the Democratic swing voters to whom he owes his previous victories. If the Democrats field a strong challenger in the next election, Maleng could easily find himself joining the likes of Dan Evans and Ralph Munroe, on the outside looking in at more radical, more mean-spirited, and ever smaller Republican Party.

And it will be his own damn fault.

UPDATE:
The Seattle P-I editorial board basically agrees with me, saying that “Maleng has actually turned the partisan volume not down, but up.”

King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng is right in saying that it’s time for political parties to “lower their voices” over disputed voter registrations. So why raise his own voice on the issue?

Maleng is a respected public official, but he is a partisan politician. The Republican Party has tried to criminalize election issues by alleging that nearly 2,000 voters violated the law by registering at mailboxes and mini-storage units.

In the wake of Rep. Randy Cunningham’s tearful confession to taking at least $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for lucrative military contracts, the NY Times editorial board takes the House Ethics Committee to task for its failure to… well… do anything.

It was a symbiosis between an ethically challenged lawmaker, who resigned on Monday, and easy-money boosters that might still be under way had San Diego newspapers not discovered a suspicious home sale by the congressman that concealed a payoff.

It was federal prosecutors – and certainly not any Congressional ethics monitors – who followed the rent-a-lawmaker trail. As Congress mulls over the larger lessons of the Duke’s demise, it should begin with the House’s ethics process, which has been shamefully locked into immobility for the past year while scandals have arisen as predictably as the new moon. The Republican majority has already seen its leader, Tom DeLay, indicted. The influence-peddling schemes attributed to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff are said to be unraveling, with prosecutors reported to be focusing on the dealings of at least a half-dozen lawmakers in both houses.

Where is Congress’s resolve to show the public that it can police itself? Something far better than passive denial was writ large in the first sentence of the Contract With America – the campaign tract that helped Republicans take power a decade ago – with its promise “to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives.”

No doubt Delay elevated Rep. Doc Hastings (WA-4) to Chair the House Ethics Committee exactly for his well-earned reputation of doing nothing in Congress… and he hasn’t disappointed the Republican leadership. Under his control the Committee has sat in gridlock as scandal has erupted around them.

Common sense would dictate that it would be a waste of resources for Democrats to challenge Hastings in his bright red, Eastern WA district… but a profound aversion to political corruption is one issue that unites both Democrats and Republican voters alike, if not their respective party leaders. Hastings deserves to pay a price at home for his political toadyism in the other Washington, and we need to find a way to extract it.

2006 is already shaping up to be a disastrous year for the GOP. It’s possible we could be looking at the makings of a 1994-like shift, and if the Dems manage to field a credible challenger, Hastings could be vulnerable.

The WA state GOP continued its self-destructive lurch to the right today, when state Sen. Bill Finkbeiner announced that he was resigning his position as Senate Minority Leader. Amongst other reasons, Finkbeiner said he wanted to spend more time with his family. Uh-huh.

“Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day,” said Finkbeiner, R-Kirkland. “There is a significant time commitment that comes along with the honor of representing your neighbors in the Legislature. When you add to that the tremendous time it requires to lead and represent a legislative caucus, there is sometimes little left over for other things that are equally or even more important, including work and family. To be honest, I was being pulled in many different directions and was stretched pretty thin.”

Mostly he was stretched between the interests of his relatively moderate constituency and the demands of the ultra-conservative Republican Senate Caucus. I’m sure Finkbeiner really does want to spend more time with his family, but in political talk, that’s usually just a face-saving euphemism. Finkbeiner barely survived a leadership challenge last spring, and he likely faced another tough battle before the coming session.

As far as Republicans go, Finkbeiner is one of those most in touch with mainstream WA voters… which means he’s totally out of touch with the mainstream of his own party’s leadership. First elected to the state House as a Democrat in 1992, he switched parties to run for the Senate in 1994, but his core ideology apparently never bothered to switch with him. Last session he angered many fellow Republicans by breaking ranks on a stem cell research bill and the controversial transportation improvement package (recently affirmed by voters in rejecting I-912.)

The transportation vote was one “I feel really good about,” he said. “We were able to keep that issue bipartisan.”

Which is exactly what the rest of the GOP didn’t want, and payback was inevitable.

Oh well. It’s not like a man with a “latte liberal”, environmentalist wife (and recent author of “The F Word: Feminism in Jeopardy“) was ever going to win the hearts and minds of the current WA GOP.

In the long run, I’m guessing Finkbeiner is better off politically disassociating himself from the right-wing of his party. Outside the leadership he can better serve a district that continues to trend Democratic, and enjoy the freedom to consistently vote his own conscience… both of which will serve him well if he ever wants to run for higher office. Indeed, freed of the burden of leadership, don’t be surprised to see him vote his conscience on HB 1515 (prohibiting discrimination based on sexual preference) when it is reintroduced in the coming the Legislative session.

I look forward to following his political evolution, and remain hopeful that Finkbeiner can grow into the kind of Republican I can respect.