They are the probes U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. is conducting into the alleged use of public funds for personal gain by D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5); the alleged failure of the 2008 campaign of council Chairman Kwame Brown to report contributions and expenditures of more than $270,000; and the alleged engagement of Vincent C. Gray’s mayoral campaign in a scheme in the run-up to the 2010 Democratic primary to have Sulaimon Brown, another mayoral candidate, attack then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty.

But Beck stuck the racist label on the conservative Tea Party movement. Predictably, its members are hopping mad, and you don’t have to be a Tea Partyer to see why.

Since the scandal broke two weeks ago, the media has provided near-daily accounts of the woes and agony suffered by Penn State wide receivers coach Mike McQueary, who told a Pennsylvania grand jury that he witnessed former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky raping a boy, possibly 10 years old, in a university shower in 2002.

At a minimum, the package should: abolish “constituent service funds”; prohibit those corporations and lobbyists engaged in business with the city from contributing to political campaigns; reduce the salaries of council members; increase the penalties for failure to report or substantiate campaign contributions and expenditures; require council members to publicly disclose all items received whose value exceeds $20; and substantially increase the number of staff auditors and investigators with the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics.

One is unfolding far from our shores; the other, here at home. Both speak to us — or at least they should — because these events represent gross violations of universal rights.

’Course, I’m not. And this is no game.

Ten months in, the tenure of Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and the Kwame Brown-led D.C. Council has been a political debacle. The city’s executive and legislative branches are operating under a cloud. It doesn’t help that the city’s so-called independent chief financial officer, Natwar Gandhi, is embroiled in a lawsuit related to the D.C. lottery that alleges that he wrongfully terminated and retaliated against a whistleblower, Eric Payne, former contracts director in the CFO’s office. A Gandhi spokesman, David Umansky, declined to comment on the lawsuit, but he told The Post’s Mike DeBonis, “The procurements were transparent, open and done strictly according to the law.” Gandhi may end up in the clear, but the lawsuit only adds to the picture of a city out of ethical control.

Some current members of the council have made spectacles of themselves. Sadly, they are too self-absorbed and too obtuse to know it.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech did not spark an “aha” moment, causing the South to repudiate segregation in all its ugly forms. Neither did the march ignite an “Arab Spring” in America in which a majority of white Southerners launched revolutionary waves of strikes, demonstrations and rallies against the homegrown system of racial inequality festering in their midst.

But I concluded from reading between the lines of our conversation that Willoughby is pursuing the July 2010 request by the city’s then-attorney general, Peter Nickles, for an investigation of the D.C. Council’s involvement in the award of the city’s $38 million lottery contract.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge the chief executive a little time off from the Oval Office.

That same day, the officer made a $1,000 contribution in his own name to the reelection campaign of Sen. Edward Kennedy, and he asked three company colleagues to contribute a total of $4,000 to the Kennedy campaign, for which he immediately reimbursed them.

— Rush Limbaugh, radio talk show host, July 25

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