In the news

There is a situation involving a Cincinnati council member that touches on many important government ethics issues, which I will deal with it in multiple blog posts over the next couple of days. In this post, I will set out the basic facts and the issues.

The council member works for a development company owned by his father and his uncle, but has no ownership interest in the firm. The firm owns or has development rights to nine properties within three blocks of a proposed...

A capable individual decides to run for city council against an incumbent who has been on the council since long before the mayor got involved in politics (in other words, the incumbent owes nothing to the mayor and is in no way under the mayor's control). The mayor asks a former mayor to try to convince the candidate to drop out of the race, and allows the former mayor to offer the candidate an unpaid position on a city commission.

This is...

While I was away on vacation, the new, quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) was in the news a lot.

Going Outside of Congress
First, it did something that made it appear more than the paper tiger I called it a year ago. According to a New York Times editorial last week, when the OCE's investigation of contributions to...

According to an iLind.net blog post this week, the chair of the Honolulu Ethics Commission resigned on April 22. Although his letter of resignation provides no cause for the resignation, the chair apparently said that he had been asked to assist a mayoral...

According to an article in yesterday's Chicago Daily Observer, Cook County commissioner Tony Peraica has proposed a series of improvements to the ethics code. Here's a summary of the proposed amendments, taken from...

There was a fascinating editorial in the Waterbury (CT) Republican-American yesterday. The editorial turns anti-government anger against the idea of a local government ethics program, and yet it has some valuable things to say about government ethics. Here's an edited version of it: