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I was on the phone with Darryl from Hominid Views and we were looking over state Sen. Luke Esser’s PDC filings, when a curious anomaly jumped out at us: Esser’s campaign seemed to have incurred an inordinately large expense in “bank charges.”

So we looked at Esser’s expenditure reports in greater detail, and this is what we found for “bank charges” over the life of his current campaign:

VENDOR	DATE	AMOUNT	DESCRIPTION
BANK OF AMERICA	06/06/2005	$16.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	11/07/2005	$1,471.17	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	11/07/2005	$5.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	05/24/2006	$100.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	05/24/2006	$5.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	05/30/2006	$16.75	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	06/19/2006	$32.50	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	06/26/2006	$17.55	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	07/03/2006	$446.04	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	07/11/2006	$9.75	BANK CHARGE
AMERICAN EXPRESS	07/26/2006	$1.63	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	08/01/2006	$43.34	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	09/01/2006	$48.40	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	09/22/2006	$52.50	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	10/02/2006	$38.54	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/03/2006	$7.50	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/11/2006	$15.00	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/20/2006	$39.38	BANK CHARGE
COMPLETE CAMPAIGNS	10/27/2006	$30.00	BANK CHARGE
BANK OF AMERICA	10/30/2006	$4.25	BANK CHARGE
Total Expenditures for this report: $2,400.30

Hmm. Notice something unusual? We sure did.

Over the past two years Esser reports bank charges of between $4.25 and $52.50, except in November of 2005 and July of 2006 when he reports astonishingly high charges of $1,471.17 and $446.04 respectively.

For the most part the report makes sense. It seems quite clear that the charges you see are either monthly service fees or transaction costs incurred taking contributions via credit card. But the $1,471.17 charge in particular is almost entirely inexplicable as a normal cost of doing business.

In fact, assuming this expense was properly reported as a “bank charge,” the only thing I can imagine that could possibly account for such high costs would be interest and penalties on an outstanding credit card or line of credit debt. And yet during this same period Esser’s campaign reports no liabilities whatsoever.

Now, I don’t actually like to engage in speculation, but I’m more than willing to do so when given no other choice, and since Esser’s campaign has not returned my emails or phone calls, here’s my guess at one plausible explanation: the $1,471.17 charge represents interest and penalties incurred on a campaign credit card that Esser used to cover his personal obligations. Esser eventually paid off the principal, but billed the finance charges and penalties to the campaign.

And keep in mind that this hypothesis was not developed in a vacuum. As was widely reported, Esser recently avoided an October court date with credit-card giant MBNA (a division of Bank of America) by paying off an outstanding $6,556.15 debt.

Darryl did manage to reach Esser’s campaign manager, and while he refused to comment on these specific charges, he suggested that perhaps these were credit card transaction fees.

Uh-huh. But that’s not possible. Even at a usurious 4 percent transaction fee rate, $1,471.17 would represent over $36,000 worth of contributions, whereas Esser only raised a few thousand dollars during this period, mostly in the form of big checks from PACs. And besides, Bank of America charges a monthly fee for “merchant services” regardless of the number of credit card transactions — the lack of other bank charges prior to May of 2006 strongly suggests that Esser’s campaign was not equipped to accept contributions via credit card at that time.

Of course there are other possible explanations — perhaps the $1,471.17 represents wire-transfer fees on illegal drug-money Esser was laundering through his campaign? Or perhaps Esser merely ordered some really expensive checks. But again, assuming this expenditure was correctly reported as a “bank charge” (and Esser actually amended the return on June 8, so you know they’ve reviewed it,) I still think that my hypothesis is the most plausible.

Darryl is scheduled to meet with Esser’s campaign manager Monday morning, and he will be given every opportunity explain these unusual bank charges. I suppose I could have waited to post until then, but that would just reward the campaign for delaying their response until the day before the election, when it would be too late for other members of the media to follow up.

So there you have it. If the Esser campaign can explain these bank charges, they know how to get ahold of me, and I suggest they do so now. Otherwise, I’ll just continue to speculate until they provide evidence to the contrary.

UPDATE:
Turns out, the expenditure wasn’t correctly reported as a “bank charge.” It was a check he had deposited in his account that didn’t clear. Darryl has the details.

I think that pretty much says it all.

Pastor Ted Haggard confesses:

Pastor Ted Haggard came out of his house Friday morning and admitted to 9NEWS that he bought meth from a gay escort in Denver. Haggard says he bought the meth from a gay escort, 49-year-old Michael Jones, after contacting him for a massage.

A “massage.” Um, yeah… massaging his penis.

Until yesterday’s scandal broke, Haggard was the pastor of a 14,000 member Colorado Springs mega-church, and the president of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals. He is also a close advisor to President Bush and the primary backer of Colorado’s anti-gay marriage amendment.

What with so many of our most prominent gay-bashers turning out to be closeted homosexuals, it’s almost getting to the point where straight men will start strutting their support for gay rights, as a sign of their own machismo. Fearful of being perceived as gay by bashing gays, men will start picking up women with slick lines like: “Hey babe, I support marriage equality for same-sex couples, how about you?”

(Actually, considering how my gay friends in college always had the most beautiful women hanging on them, I’ve often wondered if the most effective pick-up technique might be to actually pretend to be gay myself.)

Perhaps the most shocking part of these allegations is how unschocked most Americans seem to be about the news. A right-wing, gay-bashing evangelical preacher/politician outed as a meth-snorting closeted homosexual? Tell me something I don’t know. Jim West, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, the mule-fucking Rev. Neal Horsley… right-wing hypocrisy is now so commonplace it barely warrants a headline.

Still, you can’t help but believe that there will be political fallout from Haggard’s high-profile fall from grace as the Republican’s usually reliable evangelical base struggles to energize itself on behalf of a party that simply doesn’t practice what it preaches. I guess we’ll find out Tuesday.

Of course, the headline is a trick question, for it turns out Rep. Dave Reichert is both a liar and an asshole.

A few days back when I first posted on the Issaquah school bus driver who got fired for flipping off President Bush, I focused on the assholish side to Reichert’s personality… the fact that he’s so proud of his role in getting the driver fired that he made the incident a part of his stump speech. I wrote:

Flip off the President, lose your livelihood. That’s justice in Dave Reichert’s America, and shows you what a mean, sanctimonious, vengeful S.O.B. he can really be.

What could be more assholic than bragging about getting some poor bus driver canned for dissing the President? Hmm. How about fabricating your role in the entire incident?

In a bungled attempt at damage control, Reichert has recently attempted to minimize his role in the firing, telling KIRO-TV that he called the Issaquah superintendent a week after the incident happened because it was “bothering him.” But as David Postman reveals this morning, that’s not what Reichert told a crowd in August. Speaking at the King County Republican picnic, Reichert boasted about getting the driver fired:

And as the motorcade went by, the President and I drove by on I-5, the President was having a great time. He was waving at everybody, he waved at the kids. He got the biggest kick out of the kids leaning out the window to say hello to the President of the United States.

The sad part of it is though, we got to the last bus — and I won’t tell you which school district this was — the bus driver flipped the President off.

So the very next day, you know what I did? I called the superintendent of that school district and that bus driver no longer works for that school.

After raucous applause, Reichert told the crowd:

That’s the old sheriff part of me still around.

Really… cheering over somebody losing their job. What a bunch of assholes. (And if that really was “the old sheriff” part of Reichert, you’d think it would’ve taken 18 years for the driver to be fired.)

So Reichert tells a cheering crowd in August that he called the superintendent the “very next day”, but when the story blows up in his face he tells KIRO-TV that he waited a week to call. One way or the other, he’s lying.

And according to Michael in Postman’s comment thread, Reichert actually heard about the incident from a “school district insider,” prompting him to cook up his version as a stump speech crowd asshole pleaser.

So there you have it. If Dave Reichert really is such an asshole that his phone call led to the driver’s firing, then he lied to KIRO-TV in denying it. But if instead he lied on the stump, boasting about a role in a firing he didn’t really have… well, that just raises his assholosity to a whole new level.

Either way it doesn’t paint Reichert in a positive light. Unless of course, being a lying asshole is exactly the type of job experience you’re looking for in a congressman.

From Friday’s New York Times:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

Well, I don’t know about Iran, but I can certainly tell you that this is where I learned how to build my atom bomb. I’d already picked up some fissionable material at the local halal market and some aluminum tubes and other equipment at the Boeing Surplus Store, but I just couldn’t figure out the proper sequence for those damn nuclear firing circuits. Then the Bush administration put this handy-dandy how-to guide online, and I was well on my way towards making South Seattle a nuclear power.

Sure, it’s not much — ten, maybe fifteen kilotons tops — but I promise you, that’s the last time the District tries to close my daughter’s elementary school. (And if anybody from Sound Transit is reading this… you might want to consider putting the Graham Street station back on the Link Light Rail plans.)

All sarcasm aside, there’s a very serious point here, which can basically be boiled down to… what a bunch of clueless, blithering assholes:

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents

Tradesports is a UK-based online futures trading market (well… gambling site, really) where you can trade options on just about anything and everything from stocks to sporting events to political races. And look what race hit the most active list today:

Hmm. Ohio’s corrupt Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is currently down 20 points in the polls in his race for the governor’s mansion.

I don’t want to sound paranoid or anything, but you gotta wonder why anybody would want to bet anything on Blackwell, even at 20 to 1 odds… unless, of course, you thought you knew something. Kinda like those savvy investors who shorted American Airlines on September 9, 2001.

I’m just sayin’.

Who’s afraid of Darcy Burner? The Republicans, that’s who.

Yesterday the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) dumped another $750,000 into Washington’s 8th Congressional District, almost all of it on TV ads attacking Burner. That brings the NRCC’s grand total to $2,346,233.72.

I sure hope the DCCC is prepared to respond in kind.

UPDATE:
A little birdy tells me that the DCCC has booked $700,000 in airtime over the final week of the campaign. Tit for tat.

There’s been some gloating from the other side recently about the latest SurveyUSA poll that shows incumbent Dave Reichert leading challenger Darcy Burner by a 51% to 45% margin. Yet these results are at odds with the Majority Watch poll conducted around the same time that shows Burner leading Reichert 49% to 47%.

Of course, both polls are within the margin of error so technically, it’s possible both could be right. But I’m leaning towards the Majority Watch figures, and not just because I want to believe them.

The key number that leaps out at me from the SurveyUSA crosstabs is the stunning fact that Burner holds a comfortable 8 point lead with the one quarter of respondents who have already voted. And this number is not an anomaly. Reliable sources now tell me that both candidates’ internal polls show Burner leading with early voters, though I have no idea by how much.

As one longtime observer of Eastside elections recently explained: “Show me a Democrat leading in early absentees, and I’ll show you a winner.” And he’s not the only one to view early ballots as a meaningful statistic. Despite a plethora of polls showing Republican John Kyl with a steady lead over Democrat Jim Pederson, the DSCC just bought gobs of airtime in Arizona after internal polling showed Pederson leading Kyl by 4% with early voters in that Senate race.

That said, there are other numbers which I find suspect. SurveyUSA shows Reichert leading with both women and independents, results at odds with both the Majority Watch survey, and… well… my intuition. I am particularly struck by Reichert’s purported 10 point lead with independents, a result that defies national trends showing independents breaking towards Democratic candidates by wide margins. Usually, independents tend to split fairly evenly between the two parties, but as Stuart Rothenberg points out today, this isn’t your usual election.

“There just aren’t any independents this year,” joked one Republican strategist I talked with recently. “There are Republicans, Democrats and soft Democrats.”

I dunno. Perhaps 8th CD independents really are different from their national counterparts. Perhaps Reichert’s reputation as “the Sheriff” — deserved or not — really does make him immune to the national Democratic wave. But… I don’t think so.

If it wasn’t already obvious, this is why our good friend Stefan and many of his fellow Republicans so bitterly oppose King County’s proposed move to all vote-by-mail balloting:

Republican candidate Mike McGavick thinks his chances of unseating Cantwell are enhanced by the fact that Democratic-leaning King, the state’s most populous county, hasn’t yet switched to all-mail ballots. The Cantwell camp agrees that McGavick has a point but says it won’t help him nearly enough.

Voter turnout is generally higher in the 34 counties that now vote solely by mail than in the five counties — King, Pierce, Island, Kittitas and Klickitat — that still use polling places as well as mail ballots.

Secretary of State Sam Reed predicts a statewide voter turnout of 67 percent, a record for an even-year, non-presidential election. But for King County, election officials forecast a turnout of only 59.5 percent, with two-thirds of those voting by mail. Reed expects 88 percent of the votes statewide to be absentees.

“Most of those counties (that vote by mail) are Republican-leaning areas,” Dan Brady, McGavick’s campaign manager, said Wednesday. “To us, it means thousands of votes for Mike because it’s easier for people to vote when (the ballot) is sitting in front of them at home than it is to go to their polling place.”

If as many counties voted by mail in 2004 as are voting by mail this year, “Dino Rossi would probably be governor,” Brady said.

It is about nothing more than naked partisan advantage. Their goal all along has been to delay the implementation of vote-by-mail in King County until at least after the 2008 election, so as to give an advantage to Dino Rossi.

The Washington State Republican Party, having been seized by corporatist and right-wing fundamentalist factions, simply cannot win statewide elections on the issues. That’s why their candidates run these cynical, wishy-washy, issueless, faux-moderate campaigns. And that is why they focus so intently on voter suppression and intimidation.

I mean, I don’t blame them for wanting to suppress voter turnout in their opponent’s strongholds. I blame them for actually acting on their want.

Notice something interesting about the race between Democrat Peter Goldmark and Republican Cathy McMorris in Washington’s 5th Congressional District? Go ahead, look closely. Figure it out?

Goldmark is doing 3 points better in the rural parts of the district than he is in urban Spokane. Sure hope the Dems are pulling out all the stops in their GOTV efforts in traditionally Democratic urban areas. If Goldmark can win Spokane, he can win the district.

Hell, Israel started a war over a kidnapped soldier, but the minute we feel pressure we just pull up our checkpoints and abandon one of our soldiers in the hands of the Shiite militia. Republicans talk about how we need to win the war in Iraq, but the truth is, we’ve already lost it. It’s time to bring the troops home.

FYI, that’s House Majority Leader John Boehner defending the Rumsfeld and blaming the deteriorating situation in Iraq on the generals on the ground.

How disastrously ill-conceived is I-933, the “pay or waive” initiative that seeks to fatten developers by gutting Washington’s land use regulations? Well for example, it could end up costing Spokane County its largest employer:

A stream of military and aviation officials lined up last week to urge Spokane County to adopt regulations that would prevent additional residential development around Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport.

Residential development can encroach upon airfields, both in noise complaints from homeowners and with safety issues, when people are living near the area where plane crashes are most likely to occur. Proponents of Fairchild cite “encroachment” as the No. 1 reason why air force bases nationwide get shut down during periodic federal evaluations.

But if I-933 passes, property owners surrounding Fairchild could file claims demanding the county either waive any regulations passed since 1996, or pay property owners for their lost value. This shows up I-933 for what it really is: legalized extortion on a massive scale. Spokane County taxpayers would have to choose between forking over hundreds of millions of dollars, or risk losing 5,500 jobs and the $1.2 billion Fairchild annually pumps into the local economy.

According to Ed Neunherz, a retired air force officer and ex-chairman of the Spokane Regional Chamber Commerce’s armed services committee: “If encroachment is allowed to continue around Fairchild Air Force Base, the base will be closed and our region’s largest employer will go away.”

That’s the conclusion of military and civilian officials nationwide — residential encroachment on military bases leads to almost certain closure. And yet Rep. Cathy McMorris, who the Spokesman-Review congratulated for adding “a strong and helpful voice in protecting Fairchild through the last round of base closures,” has officially endorsed I-933.

Once again McMorris has embraced inflammatory right-wing rhetoric over sound government policy, and you’d think the Seattle Times and the S-R, which both oppose I-933, might hold her accountable. Eh… apparently not.

UPDATE:
I’ve just been forwarded a piece from todays Whidbey New Times on this exact topic:

Since Whidbey Island Naval Air Station was placed on a base closure list in 1991, Oak Harbor and Island County officials have enacted a range of planning measures to protect the base and its long-term viability.

But such past and future planning efforts could be undermined by Initiative 933, the sweeping property rights initiative that’s on the ballot next week.

“It would mean turning back the planning clock, and in my mind, we’ve done some really good planning,” Oak Harbor Mayor Patty Cohen said.

It’s an interesting article that gives a real-world example of the type of land-use restrictions we’re talking about, and how they potentially impact both the property owner and the community at large.