Have you checked out Doonesbury recently? Yesterday’s cartoon was too close to home. As a friend wrote in an email, “This isn’t funny, it’s personal.”

HB 1212, which would close off public disclosure of consumer complaints filed about licensed professionals, is scheduled to be heard by the House Judiciary Committee this afternoon at 2:05 p.m.

This would mean that consumers would not have any way of knowing about the history of complaints before hiring a professional. It’s a bad idea which puts the public in a terrible position. Click on the link above to see the agenda, which also explains how to submit testimony.

Yesterday afternoon I did a quick search for the status of other bills relating to sunshine and campaign issues. The lists include the bill number (I had to insert a leading zero in the bill numbers to get them to sort properly), committee referral, current status, and introducers.

Here are links to the Sunshine bills and the separate Campaign Spending bills. I doubt these are complete, but they are the best I could do on short notice.

A story in CQ Politics lists Gov. Linda Lingle as one of the governors considering a run for another office.

• Hawaii’s Republican governor, Linda Lingle , represents her party’s best chance of challenging longtime Democratic Sen. Daniel K. Inouye in 2010. Lingle is term-limited in 2010 and has yet to state she will not challenge Inouye.

And I admit to being quite disappointed by Larry Geller’s recent entries regarding campaign spending bills, which made it as far as Daily Kos. I consider Larry a very thoughtful guy who often has keen insights on issues which he shares at his blog, Disappearednews.com. But in Saturday’s diatribe, he abandoned any pretense of thoughtful analysis of campaign finance issues and instead waded into a swamp of name calling and crudely overstated political stereotypes. Perhaps its my Quaker ties, but I don’t think vilification of those we disagree with is a good substitute for careful analysis.

Larry is capable of much better than that blistering screed.

Did you catch any part of yesterday’s sunrise? It was pretty spectacular. It started with color and stayed that way until well after the sun made its appearance.