Republican Senate candidate Rich Tarrant has no problem writing $450,000 checks to his self-financed Senate campaign. For a while, it seemed like he was penning a check for another 450Gs to his campaign warchest every two weeks. Then, after his investment in Tarrant for Senate reached $4.35 million on June 15, the checks stopped coming.

A sign he was running out of dough? Hardly. An indication he was discouraged by polling showing him still far behind the incumbent-apparent, Bernie Sanders. Not so, said his staffers.

Any skepticism about Tarrant's will to win based on the pace of money he was investing in his campaign was silenced this week with the revelation that, in the last seven days, he wrote not one but two checks for $450,000, bringing the Tarrant total campaign donation to $5.25 million. It's all there in his Federal Election Commission file http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00412825.

Why the lull? Tarrant campaign manager Tim Lennon said the campaign had slacked off on taking in Tarrant checks over the summer so it would have a minimal amount of money on hand on primary day, Sept. 12. When some new bills came due, it was decided to get some of Rich's riches switched over to the campaign coffers. Other than that, everything is steady-as-she-goes on the good ship Tarrant.

"We're still on plan," Lennon said Tuesday. "Everything is going according to plan."

--Sam Hemingway