Transparency

Updates below (latest on August 11, 2009)
There's an interesting situation in Colorado Springs. According to an article in yesterday's Colorado Springs Gazette, an ethics complaint filed against the city's weak mayor alleged that the mayor was an investment adviser to a developer...

Here's a short opinion piece by Walter Dellinger, head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Pres. Clinton. It's part of a series of such pieces that will appear in tomorrow's Washington Post. The opinions concern what Pres. Obama should be looking for in his first Supreme Court nominee. After Dellinger's opinion piece, I tie his ideas into...

The word is out:  if local government officials don't want to file financial disclosure statements, all they have to do is resign en masse and whoever wrote the ethics code will not only rewrite it, but will say all sorts of warm, wonderful things about them.

According to an article in today's New York Times, the reason that charges were dropped against Sen. Ted Stevens is that federal prosecutors repeatedly failed to disclose information that may have helped the defense. Most of the...

According to an article yesterday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, there's a battle going on in New Orleans, but this time it involves a flood of public documents, as well as a trickle of financial disclosure forms. The battle is between the mayor and the city council, on one side, and a civil rights organization called the...

Update below
Recently, I wrote a bit about the odd Venice, FL ethics program, which puts the city manager completely in charge. Now Venice is making news with respect to open government issues, and this has led to a very interesting conflict of interest issue.

According to an article in Friday's Sarasota...