County Related

Sometimes it's very difficult for a government official to deal with a conflict of interest involving a member of his or her immediate family. The common approach to ethics is to assume that an official will favor a family member, but sometimes an ethics law can take an official out of the uncomfortable position of having to reject a family member. And sometimes the situation with a family member can have elements of both.

In...

A troubling KMOV television news report from Missouri (yes, another story from Missouri) has caught fire on right-leaning blogs. A self-styled Obama Truth Squad has been formed in Missouri, consisting of city and county prosecutors and sheriffs, who intend to set the record straight in response to advertisements that falsely characterize Sen. Obama and his policies. Examples include his religion and his...

A year and a half ago, I started a series of blog entries on logical fallacies and their use in municipal politics. Logical fallacies are pseudo-arguments that consciously or unconsciously attempt to falsely persuade or manipulate people. They treat people as means rather than as ends, manipulating their thoughts, their feelings, their prejudices, their loyalties for the speaker's ends.

This blog entry will build on...

The most serious obstacle to the acceptance of conflict of interest programs in government is the clash between government ethics' use of a rules-based (deontological) ethical approach, and government officials' use of an ends-based (teleological) ethical approach.

It's not that these two approaches necessarily require different values or decisions, it's that they don't speak the same language, and they judge each other by different standards. In addition, the ends-based approach...

We have something more than a credit crisis. We have a governance crisis.

According to the new Gallup Governance poll, only 26% of Americans are satisfied with the way this nation is being governed.

Here is an editorial from today's Salt Lake City Tribune about the state of the state's ethics laws. I've read editorials like this before, but this one sounds unusually hopeless. After the editorial, I will throw out an idea about how to go about getting politicians to make the right sort of ethics pledges.