Misuse of Office/Special

Massachusetts has an interesting, but I think limited ethics provision that applies to local government board members and jobs under their board's supervision:

Here's an ethics story from Orlando with a good ending. It emphasizes what I wrote recently, that government ethics involves dealing responsibly with conflict situations.

When I saw the headline from the Anchorage Daily News, "Palin Calls Blogger's Ethics Complaint Bogus," and saw that it had to do with clothing the governor wore, I thought I might write a piece about using ethics complaints for the purpose of political harassment. But when I read the article, I realized that the complaint was not frivolous, and that the governor's criticism of it was worthy of taking note...

An article deep in the first section of this Sunday's New York Times presents an interesting ethical dilemma. In New York State, it used to be common for state troopers and local police officers to negotiate, effectively plea bargain, at the courthouse with people they'd given tickets to. And then, in 2006, the State Police set a policy banning this practice. The grounds for the practice are...

Here’s a new, foolproof way for an elected official to make some money on the side: loan money to your campaign, charge it a lot of interest, and then pay the loan principal off slowly, over a number of years.

According to an article in yesterday’s Bloomberg.com, this is what Rep. Grace Napolitano of southern California did back in 1998. And it...

Perks that public officials give themselves should be monitored as carefully as gifts, campaign contributions, and relationships with contractors. But they are not. And they’re usually easy to hide.

Rarely have perks been hidden as well as those of New York’s Republican state senators, who until this year controlled the senate for over four decades, according to...