Follow the money
The Portland City Auditor's office has done an amazing thing. It has put on line (as pdf douments) all the campaign finance reports of all the candidates in the upcoming municipal elections. It's a gold mine of information about who's financing political campaigns in these parts (and in many cases, who's buying access to the occupants of City Hall).
You political junkies of Portland, the fun starts here. Click on over and see for yourselves.
b!X has started entering some of the data onto his blog. I'm hoping somebody puts all of it into an Excel (spreadsheet) file so that it can be sorted in more meaningful ways than the chronological presentations that the report forms give. Then we could really have some fun.
Another batch of reports will be out in early May -- one hopes, before the dedadline for mailing in those ballots.
Thank you, City Auditor's office. We've waited a long time for this. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but are any of these forms filed electronically? And would it be possible for interested residents to get a copy of the electronic files?
| Posted at 1:55 AM | Permalink |
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Comments (9)
I see our pal Homer Williams has given Randy Leonard a couple grand. I've gotta see who else he's donated to.
Posted by Rob Salzman | April 27, 2004 9:06 AM
Wow. Randy got a lot of moola from the Police Association & even from Kroeger.
And some cash from Clearchannel. The rest looks like a who's who of developers!
Posted by Rob Salzman | April 27, 2004 9:10 AM
A spreadsheet or database would be helpful, yes. There's an enormous amount of cross-referencing to be done that gives me a headache just to think about.
Williams gave to others as well, although somehow it didn't make it into my endless comment thread. See, that's why Jack's right about needing this in a nice browsable, searchable, x-refable, electronic format of some kind.
Posted by The One True b!X | April 27, 2004 9:57 AM
Jack, I think you just got a taker for your "commercial posting" fee!
Posted by Matt | April 27, 2004 10:49 AM
Matt beat me to it. I want to see the Jack legal machine go into action!
Although I do have a question about it. Quoting: "you hereby agree to pay me $100 per day for every day until the comment is removed, up to a period of 100 days."
Aren't you the only one who can remove it? If so, how would one avoid the 100 days/$10,000 result?
Posted by Scott | April 27, 2004 11:49 AM
Has b!X run out of dough again? I can't click through to the Communique.
Posted by Jeff | April 27, 2004 12:45 PM
Scott's right, Jack. Don't you have to mitigate your damages?
But I would think your Request for Production No. 1 would be "Produce any any all emails between Defendant on the one hand and Plaintiff and/or Plaintiff's internet provider on the other hand, specifically including but not limited to any "bounce-back" notification or other indication that Plaintiff's "inbox was full" at any time previous to April 27, 2004 at 9:43 a.m. PST.
Posted by Matt | April 27, 2004 3:58 PM
Thanks for the heads-up, readers. I've deleted the spam comment. I'm too tied up right now to try to chase down the schmuck at 68.163.229.238 who posted it. If anyone would like to pay me $100 on that person's behalf, however, please let me know.
Posted by Jack Bog | April 27, 2004 5:17 PM
"Has b!X run out of dough again? I can't click through to the Communique."
Heh. Near as I can tell, while I was having coffee, my cat somehow managed to unplug my router from the power strip.
Posted by The One True b!X | April 27, 2004 5:33 PM