Good God.

Less than a year after it passed from the comfy embrace of the Sulzberger family into the frigid hands of some ghastly Florida-based financiers, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat has sold again, according to an announcement posted on the paper’s Web site today.

And who has bought the stalwart publication? A group of investors led by none other than Doug Bosco, former Congressman representing the North Coast. In partnership, of course, with a shady lobbyist/developer type, and, again, of course, with parties unknown.

Bosco, we will recall, represented the then-First Congressional District from 1982 to 1990, at which point voters booted him out in favor of the (very) marginally less unpalatable Republican Frank (“Rank Pig”) Riggs. After this defeat, it emerged that Bosco had previously been in the habit of kiting checks all around Washington, D.C. and leaving the public to pay the bill — the so-called “House Banking Scandal” that rocketed Newt Gingrich to fame and fortune.

Congressman Overdraft tried to stage a comeback four years later, but even the party establishment was sick of him by this time. No matter; there were plenty of perks for the picking on the dark side of California politics. He went on to establish himself as an all-around lawyer/moneyman/political-insider, as chair of the California Coastal Conservancy and as one of the principal investors in the Northwestern Pacific, Inc., which today holds a 100-year exclusive lease to run freight along the (public) North Coast Railroad Authority right-of-way. This contract was negotiated behind closed doors between Bosco and his own former Capitol Hill aide, Mitch Stogner, now the NCRA’s executive director. Northwestern Pacific Inc. paid a grand total of $0.00 to acquire the 100-year lease.

So now Bosco and what appear to be equally noisome elements own the largest remaining newspaper north of the Golden Gate. Dark days.