Congressman pleads guilty, and Red Cross better off

Good things can come out of bad, which is one way to look at how the Inland Northwest Chapter of the American Red Cross has an extra $2,500 because U.S. Rep. Bob Ney is a crook.

The local Red Cross office got a check for that amount on Friday from Rep. Cathy McMorris, who took the same amount money from Ney’s political action committee during the 2004 campaign for Eastern Washington’s 5th District.

The campaign fund was named the American Liberty PAC, but after a guilty plea last week, it seems that the biggest liberties Ney was taking involved ignoring federal lobbying laws, taking illegal contributions from clients of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and trying to cover it up. He also took a fair amount of liberty with the truth in recent months, insisting he hadn’t done anything wrong. Pleading guilty last week, he said he was sorry, which was nice, but probably not liberating, considering that he faces up to 10 years in prison. He had earlier withdrawn from his district race for re-election.

In her race against Democrat Don Barbieri two years ago, McMorris got help from Republican leaders like Ney, who have what they call leadership PACs to spread around money to new candidates who are less well-connected than say, a House chairman. (Ney was chairman of a key subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee.)

It wasn’t the first time one of those contributions has gone south on her. McMorris gave $1,000 to the local food bank last year, an amount equal to what she received from Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham’s PAC, after the California Republican pleaded guilty to taking bribes from defense contractors.

The day Ney pleaded guilty, the campaign of McMorris’ current Democratic opponent Peter Goldmark sent out a press release calling for her to give back the money. So did the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a group whose job it is to help Democrats like Goldmark take seats away from Republicans like McMorris.

Will she “do the right thing and return the tainted cash?” the DCCC wondered in print.

Whether returning cash to a crook is the right thing might be debatable, but McMorris campaign manager Dan Beutler insisted the donation was not prompted by Goldmark and the DCCC. They’d written the check to the Red Cross earlier in the day.

“This is not us responding to any call by our opponent,” Beutler insisted. Goldmark hadn’t called or dropped them a note on his views, so the only thing McMorris’ troops knew about his statements was what they’d heard from the news media.

McMorris also received $5,000 from Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who is fighting legal battles of his own. Her campaign is still waiting on a decision on that money, pending the outcome of that action.

Feeling our pain at the pump

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell called last week for a federal investigation into why gas prices are so much higher in Eastern Washington than Western Washington. Seattle drivers could get regular for $2.70 a gallon last week, she said, while Spokane drivers were paying $3.04 and as much as $3.46 for diesel. That’s arguably more painful over here, because the diesel is going into tractors and combines, not some snooty European sedan.

Cantwell has been kicking the shins of the oil companies over high gas prices for years and has suggested price-gouging investigations before.

It remains to be seen whether this will scare the oil companies into dropping prices sooner than they were going to. But if she gets this hearing, it might be the first official investigation into that most enduring of all state phenomena, the Cascade Curtain.

Timing can be crucial

There are several curious things about the Spokane County Republican Party’s decision to declare Brad Stark “not one of us.” But the most curious is timing.

The party’s executive committee met and decided that Stark was unworthy of a capital R after his name on Wednesday evening, and announced it late Thursday afternoon. The primary election, for those of you who have forgotten, is Tuesday.

A few years ago, an announcement like this before the last weekend of the campaign might have been great strategy, because it would still be rattling around in the minds of voters when they went to the polls. But with mail balloting, more than half of the ballots might have already been marked, stamped and dropped down the mail chute before anyone got the word.

That leaves some loyal Republicans wondering why their party honchos didn’t cancel Stark’s membership in the Elephant Club before they voted for him.

It also might send a signal to some Democrats and independents – the ones who’re thinking there’s nothing on the Democratic ballot near as interesting as the Republican sheriff’s primary – that if they’re going to take a GOP ballot, it’d be OK to vote for Stark.