In the news

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 difficult aspect of government ethics is the percentage of a company that must be owned by a government official in order for there to be a conflict of interest. The figure chosen for ethics codes is usually 5%.

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.

The current economic crisis provides an important opportunity for government ethics professionals. It takes our eyes out of the trees -- individual government officials' conflicts of interest -- and lets us see the forest.

Today's big story comes to us from Cook County, Illinois, and although it's about whether a government lawyer has a conflict of interest, the matter falls into the area of government ethics in which Chicago and Cook County have led the way for decades: patronage.

Here's the situation. An assistant Cook County state's attorney defends the county against charges of patronage. This suit, part of a series originally filed in 1969, recently was settled, with $3.2 million being paid to...