You’ve been reading about all the Republican sex scandals — and now it’s time for a Democratic one:
One of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson’s top organizers in rural Nevada resigned Thursday after the campaign learned he had worked for a brothel and was wanted on a felony arrest warrant in California.
“We did not know about all of this,” Richardson spokesman Josh McNeil said after the staffer’s record was brought to the campaign’s attention by The Associated Press. “We accepted his resignation today.”
Kristian Forland, the campaign’s eastern Nevada field director, is being sought by Los Angeles County authorities for failure to appear on four counts of writing bad checks……
Forland also was arrested twice, once last year and again last month, in his home of Elko, Nev., on a similar bad check charge out of Las Vegas.
In both arrests, Forland posted bail and was released. It’s not clear from court records if the case was resolved.
Forland also was investigated by Elko police after women working at Mona’s Ranch, a legal brothel, complained he was shorting them on their pay.
So he’s accused of screwing the brothel. MORE:
An investigator described Forland as “at best a manager of the property,” according to a June 2006 police report obtained by the AP.
Managing a brothel…working for a political campaign? We would not LOWER ourselves on this site to make a gratuitous joke about the similarities (politicians once in office often do to the public what brothel employees do to their customers — but we won’t say that).
No charges were filed.
Forland said the bad check charges have come out of business transactions gone bad. Forland said he has hired a lawyer who is working to resolve the California case.
Something is wrong in this story: it didn’t say he left to spend more time with his family.
UPDATE: Some other comment on this news story can be found at:
—Riehl World View, which has the commentary of the year: “And while there’s nothing illegal about working at a brothel and Liberals might forgive a California felony warrant for kiting checks and a few previous arrests, they will surely draw the line at his abuse of the … working stiffies?”
—Done With Mirrors (which has better headline than TMV does).
—Ed Morrissey sees a more serious lesson here.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.