The Curse is broken, and exactly 40 weeks from now there'll be a baby boom in New England, children born with the unfortunate names like Curt, Trot, Johnny and such.
We begin with a story about the College Republicans, who have been using an "aggressive and misleading" fundraising campaign on old people to raise $6.3 million, with all the money being plowed back into fundraising. The guy at the center of the scandal is Scott Stewart, who's running Bush/Cheney operations in the battleground of Nevada.
David Postman and Jim Brunner:
"Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks - sometimes hundreds and, in at least one case, totaling more than $100,000 - to groups with official sounding-names such as 'Republican Headquarters 2004,' 'Republican Elections Committee' and the 'National Republican Campaign Fund.'
But all of those groups, according to the small print on the letters, were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks.
And little of the money went to election efforts.
Of the money spent by the group this year, nearly 90 percent went to direct-mail vendors and postage expenses, according to records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.
Some of the elderly donors, meanwhile, wound up bouncing checks and emptying their bank accounts.
'I don't have any more money,' said Cecilia Barbier, a 90-year-old retired church council worker in New York City. 'I'm stopping giving to everybody. That was all my savings that they got.' "
At a joint appearance in front of the Rotary Club of Seattle, candidates for attorney general Rob McKenna and Deborah Senn were asked which cartoon character they most resemble.
Stuart Eskenazi:
As the campaign season draws to a close, questions get repetitive and candidates give programmed answers. But attorney-general candidates Rob McKenna and Deborah Senn both were caught off-guard yesterday when they were asked something straight out of the funny pages.
'If you were a cartoon character, which one would you be, and why?' The written question came from within the audience of Seattle Rotarians, one of only two queries during an event advertised as a debate but truncated into more of an oddity.
'Linus,' answered McKenna, because the Peanuts character is serious but with a sense of humor, and others seek him out for advice.
'Supergirl,' answered Senn, who revealed she was barred as a girl from reading comic books and had to sneak over to a friend's house to peruse the pages of 'Superman.' "
Linus?
Here's a nice profile of McKenna.
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