The Freep asks about October surprises; Progress Michigan says, "Got one!"

by: Eric B.

Tue Oct 02, 2012 at 11:25:52 AM EDT

I caught an ad over the weekend in a local state House race between Mike Huckleberry and Rick Outman. Casually in the Outman ad, the revelation was dropped that Huckleberry once paid late taxes. The revelation was hidden after a bunch of stuff and before they had a still photo of Obama creep out of the side of the ad, so my guess is that they don't actually think it was all that bad a thing to have happen. Or, maybe it was something else.

Before he attempted to defraud the voters of the 76th House District of their sacred right to a free and fair election, Speaker Bolger was busy racking up over $100,000 in unpaid taxes and being sued for defrauding a creditor.

In 1997, Bolger opened a collections agency. They received five separate liens totaling over $100,000 in unpaid taxes from three different government entities in the first few years after they were incorporated. 

Then, in 2001, Wachovia Bank sued Summit Credit Services - Bolger’s business - for a breach of fiduciary duty, fraud and embezzlement. This lawsuit stated that Bolger “willfully and fraudulently misappropriated sums of money which belong to the Plaintiff.” It was settled out of court.

They have documents posted to the Internet that appear to back up at least some of this.

It's ... well ... quite damning, if it's all true. There are a couple of places where the story could easily go off the tracks, like if there were multiple James Bolgeres running around southern Michigan in the mid- to late-90s and early parts of this millenium; or, I don't know, a couple of other places. The story certainly demands running down, and the fact that there are documents that appear to back it up means that it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference where the allegations are coming from. That is, the story here isn't that Progress Michigan says this, but that documents say it, and that the documents tell you where the story is, not Ari Adler's stock line that you can't believe anything that Progress Michigan says because it's a progressive group. Even if the Democratic Party dug this up and released it through Progress Michigan, it wouldn't be the fault of Democrats that he did any of this.

Personally, I don't know anything about the House Speaker's personal history.  It could be common knowledge that he owned a company called Summit Credit Services. It could be history he thought successfully covered up. It could be that the documents Progress Michigan are elaborate forgeries intended to live only long enough to doom Bolger as an elected official. The point is that there is now something that demands careful media scrutiny about this guy's personal history and not the usual he said/she said crap coverage that might have allowed this to skate by in the first place.

By the way, assuming that any of this is true, isn't it always the way things go that the people most bitter about government invariably turn out to be people who were caught doing things they shouldn't have been and are the sort of people who always blame the person who catches them for their own misdeeds?