According to a post in the Crain's Insider blog last week, the New York City council hired as deputy general counsel a lobbyist whose firm recently had been the council speaker's campaign consultant (the speaker is the leader of the NY city council, elected by its members). This raises an interesti…

Ethics reform can take the oddest forms, especially when those doing it put on blinders and consider nothing but the situation before them, thereby failing to consider best practices or, in fact, the practices of any other jurisdiction. This is the kind of ethics reform that recently happened in Pa…