Is it too much to ask that an ethics commission member lead the way, set an example, with respect to the single most important aspect of a government ethics program:  ethics advice? According to an article last week in the Winston-Salem Journal, a member of the North Carolina ethics commission ente…

"It was like dandelions. You just accept them. They were there, something you've seen all your life." Dandelions are a perfect metaphor for institutional corruption. In this case, the dandelions were extra payments (beyond those due to retirees) made by Detroit's two pension funds, to active employ…

I wrote about it in a June 2011 blog post, and then again in a June 2012 post, but it hasn't gone away. In fact, it became a big issue again this week when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution provided new evidence that things might have been far worse than was suspected. The new evidence suggests that…