For several hours on Wednesday, the re-election campaign web site of D.C. Shadow Sen. Paul Strauss, paulstrauss.org, displayed the message, pictured at right, that it had been "taken down due to a lack of payment." We asked Strauss about it, and by the time he got back to us, the message had been removed. Several hours later, a new splash page, this time with the message "Site under construction," appeared. Then late last night, the web site was restored to its original state.

We couldn't get the web developers responsible for paulstrauss.org to talk to us on the record about the situation, and for his part, Strauss responded to an email asking what the story was only by saying that he is "in the process of looking for a new vendor" for the site because he needs "to transition the page from a campaign web site to a more incumbent content based site." Still, the "lack of payment" splash page sends a pretty clear message that Strauss still hadn't paid for his campaign web site, for the election that happened on Nov. 4, as of Dec. 3. Hopefully the fact that it's back up now means the designers have since been paid.

The whole story is a good lesson for any local politico who may not be totally web savvy: remember that hiring a developer to build a campaign web site and then leaving them in control of the domain and hosting means that if you don't pay them, they have weapons at their disposal.