As noted in The Olympian, The Daily World and on Postman's blog, Washington, DC-based Progressive Majority has dumped $100,000 into the Kyle Taylor Lucas primary campaign to unseat moderate Democrat Sen. Tim Sheldon. The money was funneled through an Astroturf PAC "Working Families Who Have Had Enough". The money has been spent on TV ads, mailers and most Astroturfy of all ... paid doorbellers. Where does Progressive Majority get its money? Much of it comes from out-of-state billionaires.

Perversely, as an out-of-state political committee, Progressive Majority has laxer requirements for disclosing its donors than do in-state political committees. They file hard copy, not electronically, and donors aren't entered into the searchable database. Thus in-state activists with donorrhea (e.g. environmental hazard Peter Goldman ) can use out-of-state committees to stuff more money into in-state campaigns with a lower profile. The threshhold for reporting out-of-state donations is $2,500. Smaller donations are not disclosed. Finally, out-of-state committees have significantly more time to file their reports than in-state committees.

Here's a copy of Progressive Majority's latest disclosure statement.

Its list of out-of-state donors reads like the Forbes 400 -- $600,000 from insurance billionaire Peter Lewis of Ohio/Florida, $50,000 from billionaire currency speculator George Soros of New York, $20,000 from Richard Rockefeller of Maine, son of billionaire David Rockefeller. Among the sub-Forbes-400 gazillionaire donors are Schlitz beer heiress (and campaign finance scofflaw) Lynde Uihlein of Wisconsin ($200,000) and trust fund playboy Stephen Bing of California ($50,000).

I'm trying to contact some of these tycoons to learn why they're so interested in electing Kyle Taylor Lucas to our state legislature.

N.B. (To get out-of-state disclosure statements from the PDC, visit this form, enter the group's name (e.g. Progressive Majority) in the "FILER NAME" field and hit "Send Query". Click on the top entry in the output list to see the most recent report. To see all out-of-state committee reports, instead of entering the filer name, enter C5 in the "FORM TYPE" field)