At a rally in support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Stockbridge, Georgia on October 7, 2018, former U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder said,

“It is time for us as Democrats to be as tough as they [Republicans] are, to be as dedicated as they are; to be as committed as they are.

Michelle says when they go low, we go high. No, when they go low, we kick them.”

Kudos to Holder for urging Democrats to work harder. Words of caution and concern to Holder for asking us to take the low road.

It may be true that in recent years the Democrats have been out-hustled by the Republicans. In the 2016 presidential race, apathy contributed to the Democrats’ defeat as much as anything. But when Eric Holder takes away the high ground from the Democrats and says that “we kick them,” he gives Republicans a line that they can run with, similar to Hillary’s “basket of deplorables.” Furthermore, he distracts Democrats from the direction in which they must move by only focusing on the intensity of the movement.

It’s somewhat similar to praising the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini for making the trains run on time, without any regard as to where they were going (often to war). If Democrats use dirty tactics, it is of little consequence what values they purport to hold.

It’s not just a question of “just makes right” for the Democrats. While most of us who are active progressives are more likely to get a good night’s sleep after working in an above-board fashion, there is even more than that to consider.

Democrats need to find new ways to distance themselves from Republicans. What they must do to distance themselves from Republicans needs to be:

1. Satisfactory to the Democratic base.
2. Meaningful to independents and others who infrequently vote for Democrats and whose votes are essential for Democratic wins.
3. Most importantly, what Democrats do differently has to be visible to independents and other infrequent Democratic voters.

For today, here’s one strategy that Democrats can take. Focus on voters and not dollars.

There are two obnoxious ways in which Democrats seek money for their campaigns. First is groveling for big money, often from sources that are “dark.” Second is by being like the out-of-town uncle at the Thanksgiving table who is constantly begging everyone else to give him money.

Yes, money is needed for campaigns, if even just to spread the message that Democrats are not acting like Republicans when it comes to money. Ideally, this seed money would be available through public financing, but we’re not there yet.

Democrats need to make the point that their policies are designed to protect consumers, workers and businesses that operate in an ethical fashion. They also advocate strengthening the safety net so those who are experiencing mis-fortune or are simply not skilled enough to function in today’s economy have the means to have a livable income.

Democrats need to advocate for those who live as close to honest and hard-working lives as possible and who value the common good as well as individual liberties.

Jettison the money crap; it’s not the way that the grass-roots base of the Democratic Party lives its lives. We have no control over whether the Republicans go low or high, although I wouldn’t go to Vegas to put money on Republican ethics. But Democrats need to go high. Money may or may not be the root of all evil, but it makes sense that the first place for Democrats to “go high” is to totally reform their relationship to money. To paraphrase the “Raging Cajun,” James Carville, “It’s the voters, stupid!”

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Sirens. Flashing lights. Alarm bells. The warning signals about the ethically compromised presidency of Donald Trump are growing louder and flashier as each day goes by. Are we going to heed the alarm? Or are we going to let Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns and fully divest from his domestic and foreign business interests—as well as address unanswered questions about his and his administration’s ties to Russian interests—get lost in the rapid-fire background noise of the chaos and incompetence of this first month of the new administration?

The fact is that there are too many glaring signs of potentially dangerous ethical violations involving Trump, his cabinet, his aides, and his family that cannot be ignored nor excused with spin, lies, or Kellyanne Conway’s ridiculous claims of alternative facts.

Let’s be clear. When the voters who put Trump in the White House wake up one day to understand the havoc wreaked on our democracy, our economy, and our international standing by the Trump administration and appeasing Republicans in Congress, don’t let any of them get away with claiming that the warning signs weren’t there from day one.

What’s fascinating and, frankly, comforting right now is that these unmistakable alarms are being sounded by individuals from both sides of our deeply divided political spectrum. Just think about what it means that George Will—conservative aristocrat and spokesperson for the good-old Republican Party—was handed a pink slip from Fox News for his refusal to tow the Trump line.

What surprising bedfellows are finding common cause in their resistance to Trump. As neo-conservative commentator David Frum warns at the beginning of a chilling video called “Can It Happen Here?: “This moment of danger can be your finest hour as a citizen and an American”—but only if we heed his urgent call and stand up to the challenge and resist.

There’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, liberal Democrat of Rhode Island, in a video interview with Salon, pulling back the curtain on the silence of Republicans who have conveniently forgotten what truth and patriotism mean. (Who can ever forget the moment in the halls of Congress when Republican Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted out during Obama’s speech, “You lie!” Where’s good old  Joe now when we need him?) Whitehouse tells us that Republicans have “a lot of anxiety” and “fewer than half [of Republicans] think this guy makes it through his presidency.”

Here’s Whitehouse again on the troubling issue of Trump’s conflicts of interest and the questions about whether Trump, when making tough policy decisions, will be serving the American people or the interests of his business empire:

If his business empire depends on funding from various organizations outside the country then those are all manipulatable [sic]. And if you’re talking about a man’s reputation or you’re talking about the collapse of his business empire, you’re pulling some pretty tough strings. So the potential problems are real and significant.

Those of us gathering at the rallies, attending town halls, and calling our members of Congress have been heeding the warnings from people like Frum and Whitehouse and others since day one of Trump’s presidency.

For the sake of our democracy, the questions now are whether Republicans will continue to keep their heads down, hoping against hope that the ugly stain of Trump and Bannon won’t stick to them. And will those same compliant Republicans wait until 2018 to push the panic button? I hope the answer is a loud and definitive “no” because we’ve still got to survive 617 days until the 2018 midterm elections. By then, who knows what irreparable damage Trump and his gang may have inflicted on America and the rest of the world.

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Experts in the field of government ethics apparently had to restrain themselves from laughing out loud at Donald Trump’s conflict of interest plan, as he assumes the office of President of the United States. Trump’s lawyer, Sherri Dillon, outlined the plan at Trump’s Jan. 11 press conference.

When it came time for this important announcement, rather than try to explain it himself, Trump turned the podium over to Dillon. He stated that Dillon has designed a structure “that will completely isolate him” from the management of his company.

Dillon proceeded to defend the plan she was about to announce by arguing that: It would be too hard to sell Trump’s assets; that a sale of assets wouldn’t be fair to Trump because he wouldn’t get a fair price; that there’s no one outside of Trump’s family who knows enough or could be trusted enough to run a blind trust; that a sale would entail taking on third-party debt—possibly from foreign countries; and that the whole thing wouldn’t work, anyway.

Based on all of these excuses, Dillon outlined the plan that Trump intends to implement. According to Dillon:

Trump is conveying leadership and management of the company to his adult sons and longtime Trump executive Allen Weisselberg. Dillon said the three will “make decisions for the duration of the presidency without any involvement whatsoever” by Trump.

Dillon also said the trust agreement “imposes severe restrictions on new deals. No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration” of Trump’s presidency. New domestic deals will be allowed, but they will go through “a vigorous vetting process.”

Trump will not be informed of such deals and will only learn of them if he “reads it in the paper or sees it on TV.”

And, she said, Trump will donate to the U.S Treasury all profits made from foreign governments who stay at his hotel.

Almost immediately, government ethics lawyers reacted negatively. Basically, they said, the plan fails the giggle test.

On the PBS News Hour, Norman Eisen, former special counsel to President Obama gave this analysis to host Steve Inskeep:

INSKEEP: The president-elect suggests he is going above and beyond. Is he?

EISEN [appearing to be holding back laughter]: No. He’s going beneath and below the minimum floor that’s required by law, that’s required by our most fundamental law, the Constitution, that is established by what every president for four decades has done, that ethics require and that common sense requires, Steve.

This was a sad day. I wasn’t happy to see what happened here.

More specifically, Inskeep asked Eisen about Trump’s refusal to create a blind trust for his assets:

STEVE INSKEEP:  Is she [Trump’s lawyer, Sherri Dillon] right that a blind trust isn’t going to work?

NORMAN EISEN: No, she’s wrong…

On the first point, if it’s a problem that he would still know things in a blind trust, how much more of a problem is it now, where he has this completely unprecedented continuing ownership interest, and very weak protections that were outlined today for communications between and among his sons? Does anybody really believe that they’re not going to be talking about the business?

Then, number two, it actually would be simple to do this. All Trump needs to do — this is not complicated — find an independent professional trustee. There are plenty out there who have dealt with far more complications. This is — the Trump Organization is just a big international family business.

During the same News Hour segment, Inskeep consulted with Richard W. Painter, who was the chief White House lawyer from 2005 to 2007.

INSKEEP: What is wrong with turning over management of the company to his sons, who it is said will act independently of him?

PAINTER: Well, he will still own the company.

And the problem is the company, the Trump Organization, has business deals all over the world. And some may be getting turned down, although some might get accepted. There are already deals in place. There are deals with powerful politicians in Indonesia, with oligarchs in the Philippines, deals in Turkey.

I mean, these are parts of the world where there’s very important issues to be dealt with on behalf of the United States and strategic concerns. We can’t have the president have substantial economic exposure himself in these countries and business partners who may be in league with foreign governments.

This is an enormous conflict of interests. We also have  the president’s name being on buildings around the world in places where it’s questionable whether these other countries can protect those buildings.

…That’s going to be jeopardizing the lives of the people who live in those buildings and could drag the United States into a conflict. That’s only the beginnings of the problems.

We have potential mixing Trump business with United States government business. And that would trigger a bribery investigation. And then we, of course, have those payments coming in from foreign governments and companies controlled by foreign governments that violate the Constitution, unless they sweep all of those out of the Trump Organization as of January 20…

Even before the official announcement, Painter and Eisen issued a five-point checklist against which to measure Trump’s plan. Their checklist asks the following questions. [Read full explanation of the conflict-of-interest test here.]

1. Does Trump make a clean break from ownership of his businesses, not just from operations
2. Does Trump divest into a true blind trust?
3. Does Trump use a truly independent trustee, not a family member?
4. Are all Emoluments Clause issues resolved?
5. Is a strong ethics wall put in place for both the administration and the business?

The answers, according to Painter and Eisen are no, no, no, no and no. Trump’s plan fails on all counts.

In addition, Walter Shaub Jr., the current director of the Office of Government Ethics, has severely criticized Trump’s plan. According to a transcript of Shaub’s prepared remarks posted on the Brookings Institution website, he called Trump’s plan to “limit direct communication” about the business “wholly inadequate.”

The plan the [President-elect] has announced doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the last four decades have met,” Shaub said. “We can’t risk the perception that government leaders would use their official positions for professional profit.

Talking Points Memo adds:

Responding to Trump’s repeated comment during the press conference, and previously since his election, that presidents cannot have conflicts of interest, Shaub called the assertion “quite obviously not true.”

“I think the most charitable way to understand such statements is that they are referring to a particular conflict-of-interest law that does not apply to the president,” he said, adding “common sense dictates that the president can of course have very real conflicts of interests.”

Not surprisingly, our thin-skinned and prone-to-retaliation president-elect reacted strongly to these criticisms. Even prior to his lawyer’s announcement and his own self-serving pronouncements, Trump’s minions in Congress passed a bill that would have gutted the very Office of Government Ethics that was to criticize Trump’s plan. That shameless act of obsequiousness toward Trump met with such a huge public outcry that Congress reversed itself on the ruling.

But that didn’t completely stop them. Shortly after Shaub went public with his critique of Trump’s sham of a plan, Republican Jason Chaffetz [R-UT] sent Shaub a letter demanding that he testify before Chaffetz’s Committee on Government Oversight. The letter went so far as to threaten that, if the ethics office didn’t comply—and stop criticizing Trump—its budget could be slashed and its operations thereby undermined.

All of this adds up to dangerous times for American democracy. There’s a frightening confluence of behaviors at work here: On the one hand, there are Trump’s obvious conflicts of interest, and his unwillingness to honor 40 years of precedent in divesting from conflicts of interest—or just to do the right thing. That behavior is merging with Congress’s willingness to look the other way on conflicts of interest and self-enrichment in exchange for a rubber-stamp President, plus Congressional bullying of responsible people who are critical of Trump’s plan to violate long-established ethical standards.

The result is a frightening erosion of democracy—from the inside out. And that’s not funny.

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More than forty years ago, Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein taught us to “follow the money.” Those words of wisdom certainly apply to the current troubles that NBC News anchor Brian Williams is having. It is clear that Williams broke journalistic ethics, and some sort of punishment, including financial sacrifice on his part, is appropriate.

But what do we learn if we follow NBC’s money? Williams has been extremely profitable for the network. For the week ending on Friday, Feb. 6 (Williams’ last night), NBC had 10,177,000 viewers; ABC had 9,460,000, and CBS had 7,853,000.

But at the same time as Williams has been cashing in with his $10 million per annum salary, so has NBC. Often,the network uses the very techniques for which Williams is now being criticized. It embellishes its descriptions of all of its shows. Their entertainment division coined the phrase, “Can’t Miss TV.” Really, you can’t miss it, or what? They have not yet applied that tag line to their Nightly News, but there is a certain irony in NBC’s most recent tag line about Williams and Nightly News, “He’s been there. He’ll be there.” Here is one of the most recent promotion pieces for the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.

As the stories of Brian Williams’ exaggerations and falsehoods multiply, it is important to keep in mind that NBC has not been an innocent bystander. Like the other broadcast networks, it promotes its newscasts with the “cult of personality.” Each network says that whoever is sitting in the anchor seat is the paragon of virtue and a rock of stability. When Williams began crossing into the entertainment world with frequent appearances on David Letterman and Jon Stewart, the network did not say, “No, you can’t do that; it’s unbecoming for a trusted newscaster.” No, NBC laughed all the way to the bank, riding on the back of Williams. The more face time he had on TV, especially time when he was being funny and boosting his image, the more opportunity there was for NBC to cash in on the Williams brand.

If NBC was really so concerned about the integrity of what it puts on the air, why does it allow its affiliates to broadcast the shameful cacophony of distorting political ads that are run by candidates in each election cycle? Why does it promote its own programming in the body of its newscasts? Why does it constantly blur the line between news and entertainment on the Today Show?

Yes, the six month suspension without pay for Brian Williams may be appropriate. As more questionable journalism by Williams is revealed, perhaps his contract should be terminated. NBC is Williams’ employer and it has the right to fire him. But isn’t NBC also a co-conspirator in the mis-deeds? Isn’t NBC an un-indicted co-conspirator?

NBC has repeatedly said it is examining what Williams did. But the network has not said a word about examining its own behavior. This is not unusual behavior for an employer or anyone who is higher in the pecking order. It certainly would be refreshing if NBC engaged in a little introspection, considered an apology of its own, and moved to bring more integrity to its own standards and practices.

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When it comes to cheating in our schools, don’t just blame the teachers. While we’re at it, let’s give the students a break as well. As the great philosopher Michael Jackson said, “We need to look at the man in the mirror.”

What adult amongst us can say that he or she never put pressure on schools to perform better; never demanded more of a student when he or she had given just about everything he or she could? In many ways, our schools are very democratic; they carry out the will of the people. And you know what, that will of the people is in many ways a very ugly sight, pocked with pressure from all directions to do better and to do more. The moral compass is terribly skewed as millions of adults who have cheated in numerous ways on numerous occasions are deploring teachers and school administrators for in many ways acting both in ways that the public wants and the public behaves.

Education is a very curious issue for progressives because we love it, honor it, and support it in many ways. At the same time we seem to view it through the cloudy lens of amnesia. Most adults, including progressives, don’t remember well what it was like to be a student. We took the tests, wrote the long papers about books we didn’t read, and wished for our peers to perform poorly. Those cannot be pleasant memories, but rather than trying to put fewer excessive demands on today’s students we choose to buy into the misguided pedagogy of our parents’ generation and inflict more of the same on today’s students.

It’s time that we back off of that. Our concern should not be focused on cheating in Atlanta or dictatorial rule in Washington, DC under Michelle Rhee, but rather how we can humanize education and make it relevant and meaningful to students, teachers, and parents alike.

Below is a chart of our “race to nowhere,” as we go around generation after generation changing the cosmetics of our schools but keeping the same values in place, including cheating. Fortunately it’s not all a monolith as there are some schools that focus on learning without pressure. Some retain their spirit of compassion, innovation, and meaningful education. However the path ahead can be a treacherous one as parents, particularly those who are upwardly mobile, can easily fall prey to mistaking image for substance. The glamour of image is very tantalizing to students, and too often they move away from the principles of that school. Improving our school requires constant compassion, innovation, and vigilance for the early steps of moving away from being child-centered and instead become bragging rights for parents, teachers, and administrators.

RACE TO NOWHERE

For more on working to minimize the standardized nature of our schools, you may find it of interest to read the author’s book, Standardized Education – Moving America to the Right.

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Political manipulation and cynicism hit a new low in December 2012, when, just 30 days after being re-elected, Jo Ann Emerson, the  ten-term Congressperson from Missouri’s 8^th district announced that she was resigning her seat in Congress to become president and chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. According to the New York Times, “the electric cooperative, which lobbies for electric utility companies, spent more than $1.7 million to support candidates, most of them Republicans, in the 2012 Congressional elections, according to federal elections data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

[The Times reports that the lobbying group she’s joining did not contribute to Emerson’s campaign. That’s at least some comfort to cynics like me, who assumed otherwise.] But she did manage to uphold the fine revolving-door tradition of lawmakers who cash in by going to work for a lobbying organization—with the added twist of not waiting until after one’s term in Congress is over.

One could write off Emerson’s move as a uniquely dickish tactic, motivated by greed and personal ambition– punctuated by disregard for ethics and a who-cares attitude about the costs it will engender for taxpayers–but, unfortunately, it’s not an anomaly. It’s just the most high-profile in a rash of similar, jerk-the-voters-around, post-election abdications. I’m not sure anyone has been keeping close historical tabs on this phenomenon, but it certainly seems like the post-November-2012-election period could be setting a record for the most resignations by newly elected legislators.

Similar shenanigans happened at the state level, as well. Democratic State Representative Bryan Quirk announced his resignation from the Iowa State Legislature on Nov. 28, 2012, less than a month after he was re-elected—by a landslide. Instead of serving in the legislature, Quirk, an electrician, will be general manager of the New Hampton, Iowa,  Municipal Light Plant. Apparently, his new employer asked him to quit the legislature. Quirk’s resignation will trigger a special election.

Nearby, in Illinois, 97th District State Representative Jim Watson (R-Jacksonville) resigned his seat just days after his re-election in November. Watson has been in the state legislature for more than 10 years. His new job title is executive director of the Illinois Petroleum Council. The group represents–a genteel term for “lobbies for”–oil refineries, marketers and others in the industry. GOP chairmen in his district will decide on his replacement.

But the grand prize goes to Georgia, where a slew of just-elected people jumped ship almost before the state’s election authority could hit “save” on the official election spreadsheet. Georgia’s predicament is reflected in a recent article entitled, “Doesn’t Anyone Want to Serve in the Office They Were Elected To?”  The author puts it this way:

In the weeks since the Nov. 6 general election determined the winners of 236 seats in the General Assembly, we have seen people resigning all over the state before they could even take the oath of office.

It’s not unusual to see someone resign from public office midway through a term; that happens quite often. In these instances, people are quitting before they have served one day in the office for which the voters picked them.

John Bulloch resigned after being reelected to his Senate seat in a southwest Georgia district, but he at least had a valid reason. He had some health issues related to his hospitalization for meningitis.

Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) stepped down from the Senate when he was offered a high-paying position with Georgia Public Broadcasting.

When Rogers resigned, a special election was called to fill his Senate seat. One of the candidates who qualified for that election was state Rep. Sean Jerguson (R-Holly Springs), who then had to resign from his House seat. That required another special election to replace Jerguson in the House.

The early resignations didn’t stop there. Robert Stokely, the Coweta County State Court solicitor, was elected to a House seat in the general election but resigned from that position six weeks later before he could be sworn into office.

In some of these instances, a state official will be appointing a replacement for the outgoing legislator. That strategy conveys an aura of incumbency on the successor making him or her harder to beat in the next election. An appointed successor also  conveniently avoids the need to run a campaign and subject himself to the scrutiny and approval [or disapproval] of actual voters.

In other cases, there will be a special election to fill out the unfinished term. That’s the scenario in Missouri, where replacing Emerson means holding an election with an estimated price tag of $1 million.

Part of what makes these post re-election resignations so galling is that they flout common-sense ethics. In addition, they’re obviously calculated to keep the seat safe for one’s own party, without all that messiness of making your successor actually run for the job. Equally stomach-turning is the resigning politicians’ total disregard for the economic consequences to taxpayers of their decisions.

Clearly, the old revolving-door gambit—in which legislators and agency officials become lobbyists, and lobbyists become legislators and regulators—lives on. Periodically, public opinion pushes federal and local governments to put in place rules that limit this behavior. One example was the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, which has been updated several times. But a recent study shows that about 57 percent of lobbyists who move through the revolving door from Capitol Hill into the private sector fail to adequately report their former government employment as mandated by the act.

And that’s just on the federal level. According to , the National Association of State Legislatures:

Thirty-five states have a ‘cooling-off period’ before a former legislator can come back to work at the legislature as a lobbyist. …Statutes range from Maryland, where the ban is until the conclusion of the next regular session, to seven states—Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York and Oklahoma—that ban former legislators for two years.

But fifteen states have no restrictions. In Minnesota, the ban only applies to House members, not those in the Senate. Ohio formerly had a one year ban, but the law was overturned by a federal district court in 2010.

Is the post-election free-for-all that we have just witnessed an indicator of a new trend of shamelessness and ethics-free behavior,? One can only hope that, in our lifetimes, our collective, moral pendulum will swing back toward higher expectations. I’m not holding my breath.

The post Get re-elected. Resign immediately. Go to work for a lobbying group. Repeat. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As the adage goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But small-time power—and the little, just-slightly-over-the-line acts that local politicians get away with—offers a convenient training field for the big leagues of corruption. I personally witnessed this phenomenon a few years ago.

As a volunteer in a political campaign a number of years ago, I helped out in an office on a busy city street, where metered parking was the only option. Parking meters limited our time to two hours, and police patrolled the street very strictly. Every day, volunteers and staff ran the risk of finding yet another yellow parking ticket on their windshields.  One day, staffing the front desk, I greeted a young woman who introduced herself as a local politician (who had recently been elected for the first time).  I cautioned her to pay attention to the parking meter to avoid a ticket. Her response was, “Oh. Are you having trouble with parking tickets? Here’s my card. I can take care of that for you.”

I did not take her card. But I did take a lesson from that incident. Her offer was the kind of small favor that can make local politicians’ careers, that is assumed to be part of the job, and that—in comparison to much greater transgressions—is almost never criticized as “unethical.” And I wonder how many of the top-level officeholders who’ve been caught cheating in epic ways got their start by offhandedly fixing constituents’ parking tickets.

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If you’re not sure how to be ethical in a Missouri election campaign, you can find out by watching a new, on-line tutorial posted by the Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC), says MissouriNet.

The Ethics Commission has taken several steps in the last year to improve their online presence and provide more resources that both candidates and the public can utilize. MEC director Julie Allen says the online tutorial makes the rules clear.

The newest section of the tutorial deals with “Campaign Materials Identification Requirements.” As with the previously posted tutorials on campaign-finance reporting and lobbying, the tutorial features a friendly, although perhaps a bit sing-songy, voice who talks you through all of the definitions, requirements and exemptions–of which there are many–while helpfully displaying the forms to complete and the web pages where rules are spelled out.

For someone who hasn’t run for office before, the process of staying ethical in a Missouri election campaign comes across as quite daunting, replete with multiple deadlines, complicated forms and a maze of twists and turns, depending on which office you’re running for. I suspect that this complicated process is not unique to Missouri, and I’m sure that the need for these rules arises from the sorry history of unethical campaign behavior that has plagued our democracy from its earliest days.  Following along with the tutorials, I can see why campaigns often must devote one or more staffers to the job of complying with the ethics rules.

MEC’s tutorial offers a good step-by-step walkthrough–but the campaign-ethics process itself remains complicated and burdened by terminology that only a lawyer or lawmaker could love. One form that’s available in special situations, for example, is called an “Exemption Statement of Limited Activity.” In a section on the complaint process, our friendly trainer notes that complaints must be filed by “a natural person.” (As opposed, I guess, to a zombie or a robot.)

Bottom line: MEC’s on-line tutorial represents a well-intentioned and valiant attempt to help candidates stay on the high road.  I’ve long believed that most candidates know, in their hearts, when they’re being ethical and when they’re being dirty,  that the labyrinth of ethics  rules serves mostly to restate the obvious, and that it’s very hard to legislate morality. But, as legislatures have felt the need to set the rules down on paper, it helps a lot to have guidance. Kudos to MEC for the effort.

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