Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Just noticed this Oregon Media Insiders post which says that the Oy request for free legal representation also was posted to a Portland Peak Oil group, and to ORSig, an Oregon homeschoolers group.

We’ve also found it on a group for Henry Condo Dwellers, and on a group about Portland’s parks.

Lynn, of the OMI site, seems to think we shouldn’t “be too hard” on Oy’s daughter, who is responsible for the Internet operation of the campaign. “She’s only 16,” she writes. “[H]ow savvy were you when you were 16?”

For one thing, today’s sixteen-year-olds are going to be amongst the most Web-savvy people on the planet.

For another thing, as I’ve already covered previously, Oy herself, a decade ago, complained that a Usenet newsgroup for Pacific Northwest singles ads of which she was a member was becoming too difficult to read because of posts that weren’t ads — in other words, she felt certain posts were off-topic and in the way.

Now, she’s perfectly happy to inflict the same noise into other people’s signal, if it serves her purposes, and to use her daughter to do it.

Forgive me if I’m not going to go easy on them.

Her daughter also spammed the Yahoo! group for an American Sign Language club, apparently at Portland State University, with the same request for free legal assistance they’ve been spamming elsewhere.

What I didn’t see where illegal aliens out volunteering on a Saturday doing the work that, according to Bush and the Chamber of Commerce, only they will do.

Of course, in the illegal aliens defense, Saturday is probably a busy day for drug sales and child-raping.

- Daniel

I try not to delve into childish name-calling and instead rely on logic, facts and relevant examples but I also throw in sarcastic humor to make a point.

- Daniel

According to Theo, she is “one of Portland’s favorite radio and television personalities.” Am I the only one who instead considers her to be one of Portland’s most annoying and grating celebrities?

Well, that’s how the sub-head of this AP article via CNN reads: “Flag burning, gay marriage, abortion top Republicans’ Senate plan.”

As near as I can tell from the relevant webcam, there doesn’t yet appear to be any sign of Lars Larson erecting a nativity scene in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Over at Metroblogging Portland, Aaron offers a new allegation against the Emilie Oy campaign, involving a railroading mailing list to which he belongs.

This afternoon, a message was sent to the list by Ms. Boyles’ daughter, who is on her campaign payroll, requesting that some lawyer donate legal services for her poor helpless mother. Obviously off-topic and obviously spam.

I’m waiting to find out if there’s a public archive of this list so we can all see four ourselves. But I will say in the meantime that when Oy mentioned the “hundreds, if not thousands” of ways her daughter had devised for people to connect with Oy’s campaign online, the first thought which popped into my mind was spam.

Also in the meanwhile, check out this 1996 thread in the pdx.general Usenet group. It includes a post by Oy, and one by Erik Sten’s father.

Update: Also this or.politics thread from 2004, in which Oy endorses Bruce Broussard in a Senate race. Broussard, of course, at one point also was running for Sten’s seat in the coming Portland election.

Update: Then there’s this person, who cross-posted Oy-related material to four different Usenet groups on April 8 — one for Portland singles, one for Portland-area online issues, one for general Portland talk, and one for Portland arts.

Update: This one from the deep irony department. Something around a decade ago, Oy appears to have been involved in a discussion on whether or not to turn a Usenet group for singles in the Pacific Northwest into a moderated group. It appears that Oy supported such a move because she was tired of having the signal of the personal ads buried in the noise of people commenting on the ads.

So, if the latest allegation that Oy’s campaign is spamming unrelated mailing lists with requests for legal assistance turns out to be true, it would appear Oy might have switched sides on that particular signal-to-noise issue.

Update: The message in question has been located, thanks to a commenter over at Metroblogging Portland. It seems it also was posted to a Yahoo! group about Portland. You’ll note that the person who posted it and who identifies themselves as Oy’s daughter uses the same name — forthegoodofportland — as the person who cross-posted Oy campaign messages on Usenet.

“Working for my mother isn’t even my first job in marketing,” Oy’s daughter says in the email. “Many of you would not even know who she is if I hadn’t been working online to get her name out.”

Well, except for most of us who know who she is because her campaign paperwork is all messed up and some of her campaign expenses appear to violate City law.

Update: Still more spammage, in which, back on April 5, Oy’s daughter (writing as Oy herself, I guess) announces her candidacy to an unrelated Yahoo! group about Celtic music.

(She attempted to find relevancy by informing the list that she is an “ordained minister” in this, one of those mail-order ordination operations.)

Which prompted the reply: “What does this have to do with Celtic music and dance? This is a first on any list I’ve been on ‘spammed’ by a politician.”

Update: Yet another place Oy’s daughter posted their latest spam, requesting legal assistance would be the United Republicans of America list.

Update: Found another one.

Update: By the way, I forgot to mention how much I adore the little copyright notice at the end of this request for legal assistance.

To obtain permission to purchase or reprint this email, please email Kimberly Boyles. … Implied consent to forward this email is given in instances where the email is forwarded to an attorney at law who is licensed in the State of Oregon in consideration of representing Emilie and Kimberly Boyles and is done with the understanding that the consideration of representation is being requested and the content herein is considered confidential as a potential client.

It’s there, I would assume, because the rest of the email is more of the “oh woe is us, we are just poor victims” trick the Oy campaign pulled with her “response” to the allegations against it, and they are trying to avoid people plastering it around the Web with disparaging remarks.

Fortunately, it’s everywhere now (being spam, and all), so linking accomplishes the same goal anyway.

So, while we’re all coming down hard on Emilie Oy, the question that really needs to be answered is the enigma of Vladimir Golovan, chief fundraier for both Oy and Lucinda Tate, who also tried to snag the same position with Bruce Broussard.

If the charges that the signature sheets Golovan collected for Oy contain forged signatures are true, what about the 1,000 contributions of $5 each? Either the people Golovan says he approached contributed money but refused to sign their names, or the money came from somewhere else, or there never were 1,000 contributions of $5 each.

If the third option, that most likely would bring Oy herself into the web of the alleged deception, unless she never bothered to examine her own campaign bank account, which itself would mean she isn’t qualified for public office. If there never were 1,000 contributions of $5 each, then Oy inherently would have known the signature sheets were bogus in some fashion.

If the first option, then Golovan would have knowingly forged the signatures of people who contributed but who refused to sign their names. This would still leave open the matter of whether or not Oy ever bothered herself to examine the signature sheets.

If the second option, things get pretty messy. If there are forged named on the signature sheets, but there in fact were 1,000 contributions of $5, who made those contributions?

One possibility, of course, is that Golovan got more than $5 from certain people, and then simply divided those contributions into $5 amounts and applied the right number of signatures, thereby violating the City’s campaign finance laws. The other possibility is that Golovan himself contributed some portion of the funds he raised, also thereby violating the City’s campaign finance laws.

Understanding that this is all speculatory musing in order to examine all the possibilities: If an individual engaged in that particular possibility, it would place them pretty firmly in the role of confidence man. Remember, the idea was to tell candidates that the signatures and the funds could be raised, and raised quickly, if the candidates paid something like $15,000 for the activity.

Even if you had to divide (to pick a random amount) $2,500 of your own money into individual $5 contributions, if you later received $15,000 from the candidate you’d have made a tidy profit.

State campaign finance law makes if a felony for a candidate to knowingly accept contributions made under a false name. But there’s a more general question that’s valid, too: If the allegations are true, is there a reasonable expectation that Oy should have known?

But even while Oy’s own actions must be investigated, the real mystery figure in all of this is Golovan himself. If the charges related to the signature sheets he collected for Oy prove true, you’d have to assume that he would have utilized the same tactic for Tate, and for Broussard as well had the latter hired him.

In such a case, there’d be a whole other story to find. Just how does someone decide to hatch that sort of scheme (if scheme it’s proved to be)? Why would they assume they wouldn’t get caught at it? Is the potential profit actually high enough to be worth the risk or facing potential felony charges?

Update: For whatever it’s worth, I notice that Golovan appeared before City Council on March 29 “to address Council regarding fund allocation for Vision Project.” That would have been a day or two before the story of his signature sheets for Oy first broke, and one week before the visionPDX community grants were announced.

Update: I’m told that in actuality Golovan never showed up for this appearance for City Council. I assume he must have known what was about to hit in Theo about the signature sheets he had gathered for Oy and wisely though being in such a public venue might not be the best idea.

For months now, I’ve been pimping what’s come to be termed Serenity Now/Equality Now — a set of nationwide, same-day charity screenings of Serenity on Joss Whedon’s birthday, all to benefit Equality Now, his favorite charity.

If you haven’t been following along, the effort now includes thirteen cities which have either scheduled screenings, are about to do so, or are in pre-planning. For more information on the overall effort as well as links to more information on plans in individual cities, follow the link above.

KATU finally gets around to covering the Emilie Oy campaign finance story, and while it hits the major points, it then does something a little sneaky.

Down at the bottom, KATU offers what it terms a “related link”, the text of which says, “Read the Oregonian’s article.”

That’s all well and good until you discover that the link isn’t to any of the Theo reporting on the matter. In fact, it’s technically not even to an article.

It’s to the paper’s editorial railing against both Erik Sten and the publicly-financed campaign system.

So, just who at KATU decided it was kosher to link to a scathing piece of opinion and bias and refer to it as an “article” as if it merely were a supporting news story related to KATU’s report?

Addendum: KATU also does not spell Golovan’s name the way Theo has been, and refers to him (as did the Merc) as her campaign manager, whereas Theo has always referred to him simply as her chief fundraiser, and refers to an altogether different “campaign manager” individual.