Is the giving of the promise of leverage of one's five dollar bill the giving of a "thing of value" with the intent to induce any person to "be [] a candidate" or "[c]ontribute [] to any candidate[?]"

See ORS 260.665(2)-(3) and 260.993(2); class C felony. See Oregon Republican Party v. State of Oregon 78 Or App 601 (1986). (I wouldn't want to waste a stamp, to the Secretary of State.)

"A person may not solicit or accept [this] thing of value as an inducement to [be a candidate or contribute to any candidate]." ( ORS 260.665)

The importance of the characterization as a violation subject to ORS 260.993 is amply described in ORS 260.345.

This is distinct from the ORS 260.432 issue of prohibited public employee activity.

Hell arrives in Greenburgh:

The town is pushing a program that would let seniors work part-time, for $7 an hour, to help pay off some of their property taxes.

"People shouldn't have to sell their house, move away to a place with less taxes, leave behind their family and friends," said Town Supervisor Paul Feiner.

He envisions retired doctors mentoring schoolchildren, retired accountants helping with the town's finances, retired lawyers offering their services for a discount. But there are plenty of less-skilled jobs that need doing, he said.

(Inspired by this.)

Given that domain names with a "us" at the end must -- by federal law -- have a valid visible address I can think of such domain name registration as a cost saving substitute for the 50 dollar repeating fee for maintaining an assumed name with the state.

For example: PDXAuditor.us. (or SunRiseParty.us.)

How about a charter amendment, or ordinance, that reserves the mayor position to Sam Adams? Anyone that wants to run can simply change their name to Sam Adams.

We can also have a Sam Adams Party that can either support or oppose Sam Adams as a candidate for the non-partisan mayor position. A petition for formal recognition only takes signatures from one and one half percent of the electors in the last governor election, within an electoral district, to form a minor party. ORS 248.008. (The city can even seemingly waive this signature requirement just as they did for the official taxpayer-funded campaigns party and when they delegated exclusive dual-nomination-and-veto-power for auditor-candidates to a foreign corporation.)

Naw . . . just meet Sam Adams (the beer company) Half-Way and delegate to them exclusive dual-nomination-and-veto-power over the mayor position if they also cover the cost of publicly funded campaigns, in the spirit of public-private partnership.

Bernie Neil and Ted

Too long a comment:

I am more interested in the "novel" argument from Giusto about the irrelevance of certification as to elective office. It has application in many contexts. For example, the OSB replied to an inquiry by me about the AG and their power relative to certification to compel the elected AG to comply with some particularly described duty imposed by law (not to mention oath of office). They disclaimed such power over the AG. (Novel indeed?) Ted's position does not even require certification for his office. Some lawyers had tried in the past to argue that all legislators must be members of the bar. (What a thicket that would be?) The "novel" argument is the only one available to the City of Portland Auditor to remain in office. (The unelected city attorney had an independent and affirmative duty to address any illegality in the refusal to place my name on the ballot for the position of auditor . . . wholly without regard to whether I brought/bring legal action or not. It was the OSB's own support of the "novel" theory as to the AG that guided my filing for the Auditor slot to begin with.)

You must look at the comments to "Spreading the gospel on the taxpayers' dime"

How about we mandate that all public debt (including all forward promises beyond the terms of any city council member) be reduced to zero no less frequently than once every twenty years? Then remix. It could be that simple.

Pro-anti-development and pro-anti-sprawl are two different but related inquiries. Less development reduces the pressure to consider sprawl as one way to accommodate supposed demand. If the ultimate consumer of the final product of a developer had to cough up the full cost of a project (UP FRONT without borrowed easy money), including the cost of public improvements demanded to accommodate the same, would this restrain development and thereby restrain the urge to sprawl or to restrain "sprawl?"

"We're On A Road To Nowhere" -- In Riverside County the collapse of the construction boom threatens the 25 percent of the employed population who's jobs depend upon more construction booming, for the sake of booming construction and no other. (The only Sustainability consideration is more growth at any cost and maintaining a lag time in discovery that the only thing in its wake is economic desolation.)

The transfer of the present costs of development to both public and private debt is like a cancer in that it is an economic policy that has lost the capacity to self-destruct. (In Federal Reserve banking terms it is a "credit" market and liquidity "problem.")

See "What's really needed in the graffiti war"

My comment:

"These owners . . ."

I think you all are talking about the quantity and quality of gnats.

You need to separate semi-artists from opportunistic vandals.

The vandal would find a bic lighter just as useful at creating mayhem.

Is there a sense of impossibility of even trying to picture oneself as becoming a member of the community with something, anything, at risk from "vandals?"

Given the tag team of franchise-style corporate ownership of all things "corporate" by pensions and insurance companies (making monopoly power, and unearned extractions, the norm rather than the exception) combined with authoritarianism from their partners in government I picture the number of dissolutioned youths only increasing.

Protein wisdom: Diversity Nation: how the affirmative action activist protects the program by keeping the facts at bay

Request for data is denied. The conclusion seems not to be in doubt.

If 43 percent of black law students do not become lawyers what then becomes of them as they face huge student debt? Debt that has special significance because it was incurred to obtain an education and is tied to attemding only an ABA-accredited institution that insists on diversity even at the risk of increasing the number of aspiring soles that are left with huge debt and no reasonable way to repay. I think it has to do with salary increases and the inflation of educational costs at twice the rate of inflation.

See “Affirmative Action Backfires”:

Finally someone is starting to use a few of the correct characterizations of the pension gifts. Illegal gifts.

There are two different worlds. The legal and the PR. When hints of the rationales from the legal world finally start making appearances in the news editorials then this is itself newsworthy.

Sacramento Bee

http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/315785.html

Daniel Weintraub: Orange County considers taking back pension hike
By Daniel Weintraub - Bee Columnist

Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, August 9, 2007
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7

Ever since the Legislature, former Gov. Gray Davis and local governments across California boosted pensions for public employees amid the stock market boom early in this decade, critics have been looking for ways to reduce the cost of those benefits to the taxpayers.

When being rich is enough to warrant getting gifts so that you can stay rich, relative to the non-rich, then the notion of risk has surely been purged from the very core of our so-called Capitalist economic system. Let those who have made bad speculative bets suffer their own demise. Its the way things are supposed to work.

Instead, we get this crap . . .

Central banks' good intentions may have backfired

The European Central Bank, Federal Reserve and Bank of Canada all signalled their willingness to come to the aid of financial markets.

And so they should, because that's part of their job.

But in seeking to calm the jangled nerves of investors, they may have inadvertently made a bad situation worse.

What sort of business might someone with a large fine to pay go into? Perhaps the lucrative junk debt business.

Would they display more ethical behavior? Would their attorney just go with the flow to get a cut of the take?

Division of Criminal Justice

Office of the Insurance Fraud Prosecutor

Peter C. Harvey, Attorney General

Vaughn L. McKoy, Director

Greta Gooden Brown, Insurance Fraud Prosecutor

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

July 15, 2005

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

John R. Hagerty

(609) 984-1936

NEW JERSEY ATTORNEY GENERAL & INSURANCE FRAUD PROSECUTOR OBTAIN OVER $3.5 MILLION IN CIVIL PENALTIES FROM CORRUPT

MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS

Court Upholds Constitutionality of State Insurance Fraud Prevention Act

Morris County Health Care Company Charged With 650 Violations... Former Passaic

Samizdata quote of the day

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

- Thomas Jefferson

Someone studied their economics.

Farnsworth concludes with a question:

But probably the most interesting question for my current audience is this: to what extent are lawyers professional rent seekers, and to what extent are they something more worthy of admiration and encouragement?

The answer to that depends on what kind of law they practice. The non-parasitic type of lawyer can help businesses succeed, help advance policies which advance economic growth, or (possibly by teaching) help train young lawyers to see the wisdom of not falling into the "rent seeking" trap.

This piece by Stephen Bainbridge made me realize that lots of parasitic lawyers will soon be waking up to the fact that Global Warming looms large as another rent seeking scheme:

See Gun-Totin' Foster Parents

My comment:

Green says -- "There's no right to be a foster parent,"

Would any conduct by any state agency (even under the color of law) be recognized as "state action" subject to application of any of the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment? Of course it would. Pick nearly any factually-describable-category as a topic.

There is no right to public funding of candidates either.

"Colorado contends that because the power of the initiative is a state-created right, it is free to impose limitations on the exercise of that right." . . . to which the court answers . . . "That reliance is misplaced. [because . . ]" Meyer v. Grant, 486 US 414 (1988) (felony for payment to gather signatures on an initiative in Colorado, to remove mere temptation to pad petitions for placement on the ballot).

The Welches Con Man (possibly?)

I tried to post the following comment but it seems to be missing:

I had previously asked the AG's office to deal with the "FOUNDATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COMMUNITY HEALTH CARE" for their solicitation of funds in advance of completing the formation of a non-profit. (It was a flawed original filing in any event because there where no articles of incorporation with a declared public purpose, just an assumed business name for an individual . . and nothing else. With unmistakable intent to deceive.)

The AG's response (via Victoria) was that in the absence of an offering of tax deductibility to the donor that they had no "jurisdiction."

See bojack: Just say no

Isn't a call to end "judicial activism" just a way to make the court do little more than nod it's collective head in a search for congressional intent, and not toss out legislation or otherwise interfere with any act of the executive branch. To be functionally invisible (like this guys google search results). It is similar to a threat to pack the court to keep it from invalidating congressional legislation to ban child labor. Except that today the rise of the multi-national artificial corporation has already seized control of D's and R's alike, and the country.

Consider this Volokh Conspiracy: Farber on the Ninth Amendment. (Listen at 43 to 45 minutes on his view of the application of the bill of rights to corporations.)