Saipan *hearts* Doug Dixon, Uh, Duncan

[MountainLaurel]

In politics, you never know where you might find new friends. Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, for instance, turns out to be a pretty popular guy on Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, about 7,770 miles from Rockville.

Who knew?

As The Washington Post reported last week, while Duncan was busy planning the new Strathmore concert hall and pushing for construction of the intercounty connector, five business people in Saipan were so taken with this man's achievements that they felt compelled to send him buckets of their hard-earned dollars. Duncan pulled in $20,000 from Saipan.

snip

And now Duncan is giving back the money from the good people of Saipan. Something about how the companies that donated the 20 large were connected to Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist who, before he was sentenced to five years in the slammer, had lots of friends in Congress and other powerful places. Abramoff apparently did favors for some of those friends, and, well, it's the sort of thing that keeps prosecutors employed, and we should all be grateful for that.

Whoops.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/31/AR2006053102244.html

[Stinky The Clown]

1. "whoops" indeed

So .. he got the bux in 1999, found nothing unusal in 20K coming from an island he never heard of and now has found religion. Is that the story?