"We get thousands of checks from thousands of people and we just wouldn't have any way of knowing something like that is happening."

Mayor Boughton's response to his acceptance of James Galante alleged bundled campaign contributions

Sources told the Hartford Courant (the Weekly's papa paper) that Galante gave $8,000 to Boughton's People over Politics PAC in eight separate thousand-dollar donations—a grand being the legal limit for an individual—through friends, family and employees in October 2003, with promises of favors or reimbursement. Boughton told the Courant, "I was absolutely unaware that there was anything wrong with any donations."

People over Politics only received a total of eight donations of $1,000 in that reporting period.

Four checks are from the family of Paul Dinardo, Galante's brother-in-law and a longtime employee of his trash business, who got 21 months in prison in September for conspiracy to inflate hauling prices through extortion and threats. He gave $1,000. So did his father Anthony Dinardo, the father-in-law of James Galante and a resident of Putnam County, N.Y., where Automated Waste's operations stretched. The other Dinardos were Paul's brother Robert, a Danbury police officer, and his wife, Jackie, a teacher and guidance counselor in the city's public schools.

[...]

If People over Politics got $8,000 from Galante, the trash magnate provided about one-third of the $24,287 the PAC raised in 2003 and half of the $15,750 from "individuals," as opposed to business or organizations. The PAC listed $9,750 as its total contributions from individuals from Oct. 24 to Dec. 31, meaning, without that $8,000, People over Politics would have collected $1,750 from actual people. Of the eight $1,000 donations, six arrived on Oct. 26 and the other two on Oct. 23 and Oct. 30.

So no one at People over Politics thought it strange that individuals bolstered their cash stash by $8,000 within eight days, with half of it coming from the heavily Galante-connected Dinardo family in a city like Danbury, where the political and business establishments are small enough that everyone knows everyone? (Boughton certainly knew Galante, who hauled the city's trash and owned its minor-league hockey team.)

[...]

And as HatCityBLOG pointed out, this was not the first time the same group of people stuffed Boughton's piggybank. Within a five-day period in January 2003, Walkovich, Seri, Paul DiNardo and his wife (Galante's sister) all gave $1,000 to his reelection fund, as did Maria Rullo, of New Fairfield, who pled guilty to tax fraud in July in a case related to United States v. Ianniello, aka Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello of the Genovese family, which has alleged ties to...James Galante.

There are at least 15 possible candidates for governor, and getting really excited about any of these candidacies is like buying one of those pet turtles from Woolworth's, in the sense that any one may very well be dead in its little plastic dish by the time you get back from the store with the delicious shrimp flakes.

In 1987, the early Democratic presidential field was called "the seven dwarfs," which was both a reflection on their unimpressive sameness and a reminder that the extremely tall Bill Bradley was not running.

Here in 2010, the sheer number of candidates would be less daunting if we gave them catchy dwarf names. Henceforth then, they are Crazy Eyes, Big Stupid, Robot Man, Overbite, Rich Uncle Pennybags, M-Fed, Oz, Jar-Jar the Mango Man, Grampa D, Puppetmaster, The Anti-DiBella, The Bald Avenger, Universal Man and Nobody Could Possibly Think of a Catchy Nickname For Gary LeBeau. Collect them! Trade them!

Now that I've listed them, I have to admit they seem less like dwarfs and more like a coalition of third-rate comic book characters. The Legion of Run-Down Superheroes. I'm also refusing to provide any key that would identify all of them, just to cut down on libel actions. I also acknowledge that at least one of those appellations is deeply unfair. Boo-Boo would be a perfectly acceptable catchy dwarf nickname for Gary LeBeau.

Based on Colin Enroe's post, which nickname best describes Mark Boughton
	Crazy Eyes
	Big Stupid
	Robot Man
	Overbite
	Rich Uncle Pennybags
	M-Fed
	Oz
	Jar-Jar the Mango Man
	Grampa D
	Puppetmaster
	The Anti-DiBella
	The Bald Avenger
	Universal Man
	Nobody Could Possibly Think of a Catchy Nickname For Gary LeBeau
	I still like "the last honest man in Danbury"
Free polls from Pollhost.com

• ...the Republican members of the City Council already held their caucus, which is normally scheduled a day before the City Council meeting, AND



• multiple sources say that Registrar of Voters Mary Ann Doran has been working the phones people making sure that people attend the mayor of DANBURY'S "surprise" gubernatorial announcement...which by the way is being held in BETHEL, THEN

If you stated in the media IN JANUARY that you've made a decision regarding whether you were running for governor, why did you wait a month to tell the public and make such a hissy fit when the purchase of your web domain and gubernatorial website became public?