In the news

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has come up with a new defense of a potential conflict of interest: "I'm investing in something I believe in."

What she was investing in, as "part of an entrepreneurial package," as she said on yesterday's Meet the Press, according to a partial transcript, was T. Boone Pickens' Clean Energy Fuels Corp., which despite Pickens' emphasis on wind power, also...

Campaign contributions are not generally considered to be bribes, but the perception of large campaign contributions from local government contractors is often that they are payments for contracts past or future, what is known in the government ethics business as "pay-to-play."

For this reason, state and local governments have taken a variety of approaches toward dealing with this perception. The most common response is disclosure, for example, requiring local government...

Tomorrow, I am going to Guantanamo Bay. To get there, I have to drive through Guantanamo Bay.

How could that be? For the same reason that you might be sitting in Guantanamo Bay as you read this:  because innocent people are being held, and mistreated, in long-term detention all over the United States, including in local government facilities (see map).

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Ted Stevens has been indicted for falsely reporting over $250,000 in services he received from an oil company that renovated his home. He denies the charges.

Whether or not he's guilty of these charges, he is certainly guilty of a conflict of interest that plagues politicians at all levels of government:  identifying himself with his constituency, and abusing his power to benefit his constituents, to his own benefit, at the expense of others whose representatives lack that power...

In a recent blog entry, I looked at how a couple of Connecticut towns are using the Internet to get citizen feedback and provide transparency. But some cities have gone much further, according to a syndicated column by Neal Peirce.

Cities and their citizens are starting to make use of what is known as Web 2.0, the interactive, collaborative aspects of the...

The passing of new ethics code provisions in Anoka, MN (pop. 18,000) provides a fine case study of how to try to pass off useless ethics code reform as something valuable.

According to an article in the Anoka County Union, it appears the city council has a public confidence problem. The council's response was to quickly pass some rudimentary ethics code...