Two brief items combined in one diary here. First, in case you don’t obsessively track Seven Days’ online presence, I direct your attention to a funny, disturbing Reporter’s Notebook from Andy Bromage. Subject: the paper’s attempt to get a photograph of Vermonters First moneybags Lenore Broughton.

As you may know, Miss Daisy is a shy, retiring sort, but she does fulfill at least one civic function, as a member of Burlington Telecom’s Cable Advisory Council. Well, 7D couldn’t find a photo of Broughton anywhere, so they sent photographer Matthew Thorsen to a CAC meeting.

When he got there, Thorsen says, two members of the board had already arrived, but not Broughton. They asked who he was and what he was doing there, and Thorsen says he replied that he was taking pictures for the paper. Broughton showed up a few minutes later, Thorsen says, and asked the same question. Thorsen repeated who he was, at which point, he says, Broughton said, “No, no,” put her hands across her face and bolted from the building.

Yipes. Considering that Broughton was attending a public meeting, Thorsen would have been well within his rights to simply start snapping, but he was more polite than that. In fact, he left the meeting rather than cause further disruption. After he departed, Broughton returned from her spider hole and the meeting went on.

This is the oddball who’s trying to buy our elections.

After the jump: Vince Illuzzi has raised a lot less money than you think.

On to the second item. Earlier this week, I reported (along with many others) on the mid-October campaign finance reports. And all of us, looking at the raw totals, said that Vince Illuzzi had raised a total of $74,527 for his campaign, while Doug Hoffer had raised $47,427. A significant discrepancy.

What we failed to report, as Doug the numbers guy points out, is that Vince’s total includes a $25,000 loan to his campaign, plus $17,000 he rolled over from his State Senate campaign fund. Take out that money, and Vince has actually raised — in the manner of getting people to give him money — a little under $32,000. Hoffer’s total includes a $10,000 loan to self, making a total of $37,447 in funds actually raised from others

So, if you look only at actual fundraising performance, Doug has actually outdone Vince. In spite of Vince’s vaunted political connections and lifelong insider status. (Generally speaking, all the statewide Republican candidates have done consistently poorly in  fundraising, from Randy Brock on down.)

And, as I did accurately report earlier, Vince has spent quite a bit more of his pile. He has about $5,000 left in the bank, while Doug has $13,000 on hand.

Let the record show…