I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, <i>Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation</i> in the latest issue of the <i>New York Review of Books.</i> Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics.

This is an excellent article by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/th… Freidman</a> which really highlights something that I consider to be very important in the development of any sort of effective ethics program - namely <b>SIMPLICITY</b>. Often it is the really simple things combined with a bright idea that bring the greatest change for the better...

When an official makes <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/234">an Ad Hominem attack</a>, everyone realizes there is an attack. And when an official makes <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/244">an Ad Populum defense</a>, everyone realizes that there is a defense. But when an official sets up a Straw Man, the situation isn't so clear. It's not an attack or a defense, but a response to an argument.

There is so much valuable material in Terry L. Cooper's book <i>The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role</i> (1998) that it's difficult to sum up in a review. So instead I will look at some of its most important points in a few separate blog entries.

Responsibility is the key to municipal ethics as well as administration. It is central to democratic accountability, to recognizing and dealing with sometimes conflicting obligations, to being a public servant.

<h2>"Every lie is an exception we carve out for ourselves."</h2>

--Bill Curry, columnist for the Hartford <i>Courant</i>, former councillor to President Clinton and gubernatorial candidate in Connecticut. From his March 11 column on the Libby trial and lying among politicians.

According to <a href="http://tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070331/NEWS0201/7033… article in the <i>Tennessean</i></a>, the Tennessee House passed a bill that would allow lawmakers ten days to correct 'errors' in their campaign finance disclosure forms once the Registry of Election Finance warned them of problems.

In <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/254">an earlier blog entry, </a> I took the side of the Louisiana Board of Ethics in its dispute with the state legislature over whether it has jurisdiction over legislators who participate in debate when they have a conflict of interest. In another case, which the Board of Ethics lost on appeal, I feel the Board of Ethics was wrong, and I feel it is instructive to say why.

It is not enough to reform a city's ethics program. One must also let the world know about it. Most municipalities reform their ethics in a vacuum. They might look at a nearby town or city, or two, but the people in charge rarely know what is happening elsewhere, what are the norms and what are the latest reforms. This is one of the reasons we have put this website together.

With apologies to Louisiana, since this week I've already focused on its legislators' dispute with its Board of Ethics, I'm going to return to the state to discuss a situation where local government ethics can make a great difference.

Who should and who should not sit on elections commissions? Other than land-use commissions (and, sadly, ethics commissions), elections commissions are probably the most abused in terms of membership.