See "More SoWhat stinky cheese"

My first comment:

Bill, the game will not be fixed, or unfixed, until officers of the court get taken to the mat for feigning public liability far beyond what is reasonable or even rationally explainable. The tram games should be viewed as merely illustrative of a routine pattern. It is the use of the THREAT of liability to [accomplish] indirectly that which cannot be accomplished directly as against the Equal Privileges and Immunities clause; and other limitations designed to protect the public.

The years of litigation resulting from termination of the tram [rim shot] in February would have yielded court opinions that would have helped protect the public for years to come. It is not too late even today.

Think too of the multi-tier future for CoP safety workers for future work. Is there a THREAT of liability that compels the CoP voters to create a closed class (first tier) going forward?

My second, but too long, comment would have been:

Cynthia,

The difficulty of proving subjective motivation is the saving grace for lots of theft. The Auditor can, under the pre-existing rules, refuse to place a name on the ballot where the filing is "spurious." That is, Blackmer could still have left Boyles' name off of the ballot if he indeed thought her filing was just to game the public finance scheme (spurious), just like Sten; which could be a reasonable inference from his arbitrary imposition of civil penalties beyond just a straight demand for return of the money.

Heck, my semi-effective participation in law school for three years (where I can/could only pretend, now as then, that I might be smart enough), rebel as I may be, is apparently less valuable than Mr. Gary Blackmer's pledge of loyalty to some outfit in Florida (a foreign corp. of a New York outfit, with a local affiliate), as a condition of placement of my name on the ballot for his very own election slot.

One of my arguments to Blackmer, and the city attorney's office, was that I could not plead ignorance of the law as some sort of excuse or justification for acting unlawfully were the DA or US Attorney to try to pin criminal, subjective culpability upon me; from their reasonable perspective. The idiocy/naive argument for Boyles' works equally well for the Auditor himself, in his own pecuniary self-interest. A pledge of loyalty to an out of state private outfit should definitionally be proof of his motivation, but then he hasn't read a battery of US Supreme Court cases dealing with loyalty oaths so he can be excused for his idiocy (but not the city attorney).

Try playing a game of Life or Monopoly with a Five-year-old, is it reasonable to expect to win?

The city attorney recently got a raise, BTW, and would perhaps feel out-of-place at Value Village looking for 99-cent green tags, as it would be beneath her status. Poverty, or the fear of being among them, is as strong a motivating force as that displayed by an image-conscious-teenager that refuses to set foot in a thrift store. The receipt of a check that has a more than 10 grand gross for a single month has a way of making the recipient think that they must deserve it, for their public service, otherwise they might have to view themselves as a thief. At least OHSU's head anticipated 10 Million as compensation for the, once-in-a-lifetime, sale of his soul on the TPG deal. Some folks are sure cheap, in comparison, on any measure of "moral character" that is attached to notions of professionalism.