Free Republic

James O’Keefe has filed an ethics complaint with various bar associations against Department of Justice Civil Rights Attorney Karla Dobinski and three others arising out of a prosecution of police officers in New Orleans. PJ Media has covered Karla Dobinski’s ethical misconducthere and here. Dobinski was in charge of the taint team in the prosecution of New Orleans polices officers on civil rights charges in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The taint team was responsible for protecting the Constitutional rights of the accused police officers. It is responsible for ensuring that evidence obtained in the local internal affairs investigation did...

As a former academic, headlines describing what appear to be questionable policies or practices in institutions of higher learning usually get my attention. When the fine print implicates a philosophy department, a subject I used to teach, I take a close look. Now, suppose you are an undergraduate at a large, private Catholic university that is one of the 28 member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. You decide to enroll in a course given by the philosophy department that will explore the intersection between ethical theories and contemporary controversies -- a course of the sort I...

AUSTIN, Texas -- It has been an up-and-down week for Texas State Representative Ron Reynolds. On Tuesday, Reynolds, an attorney and Democrat representing Missouri Springs, coasted to an easy re-election, winning 66 percent of the vote against his Republican opponent. Wednesday, he was in a Montgomery County courtroom -- not to represent a client, but to face trial for 10 felony counts of "barratry," the illegal solicitation of clients by attorneys commonly referred to as "ambulance chasing." Finally, on Friday, he managed to avoid a felony conviction, but was found guilty of six misdemeanor counts for a lesser charge of...

The Democrat-controlled Senate Select Committee on Ethics said that it never received a complaint pertaining to Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and the Obama administration’s efforts to approve visas for certain investors, according to a government watchdog group, despite previously confirming that it received the complaint — and saying that it opened an investigation. **SNIP** And when The Washington Times wanted comment for a Jan. 21, 2014 report on the complaint, a “spokesman for the ethics committee and Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, said they couldn’t comment on the details of any investigation.”

'Masquerading refers to a person in a given context being unable to tell whether the machine is human', explain the researchers -- this is the very essence of the Turing Test. This type of deception increases "metaphysical entropy," meaning any corruption of entities and impoverishment of being; since this leads to a lack of good in the environment -- or infosphere -- it is regarded as the fundamental evil by Floridi. Following this premise, the team set out to ascertain where 'the locus of moral responsibility and moral accountability' lie in relationships with masquerading machines, and try to establish whether...

Madison -- First lady Michelle Obama will come to Milwaukee next week to campaign on behalf of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke. Burke's campaign released the news Monday and said it would provide more details in the coming days on the event scheduled for next Monday. A spokeswoman for Burke didn't immediately say whether Obama would raise campaign funds for Burke while in Wisconsin. Burke has taken criticism from conservatives and some liberals for not appearing with Barack Obama during his recent visits to Wisconsin.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) found that over $33,700 in campaign flights were inappropriately charged to her official account in an internal review of her finances released Friday. The report is sure to draw added scrutiny to her use of charter planes just as her main opponent, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), is set to introduce a resolution meant to highlight such spending, which he calls a "waste of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars." The review , which was released four days after her self-imposed deadline of Sept. 8, found that the senator took 43 trips, which amounted to 136 campaign functions, that...

The Los Angeles Ethics Commission voted unanimously last week to ask the City Council to consider "financial incentives, such as a lottery system," to draw voters to the polls. You just know that if the city embraces this new low, then it will spread like a cancer across the land. The City of Angels has a problem. As Ethics Commission President Nathan Hochman put it, campaign "spending is going up, and voter turnout is going down." Last year, 75 percent of registered voters skipped the mayoral race, and less than 10 percent voted in a more recent school board special...

There’s fallout from the July 27 Houston Chronicle exposé of a trip to Azerbaijan by 10 member of the House that violated House rules. The trip was ostensibly sponsored by nonprofit groups but was actually funded by oil companies BP, Conoco Phillips and SOCAR, the national oil company of Azerbaijan. According to the New York Post today: Rep. Gregory Meeks pushed to let an Iran-backed natural-gas project dodge US sanctions — after attending an illicit junket paid for by energy companies. Also from the Post: “Congressman Meeks went on a 2013 Congressional trip to Baku, Azerbaijan, subsidized in part...

A joint investigation by the Washington Examiner and the nonprofit watchdog group Judicial Watch found that former President Clinton gave 215 speeches and earned $48 million while his wife presided over U.S. foreign policy, raising questions about whether the Clintons fulfilled ethics agreements related to the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state. According to documents obtained by Judicial Watch and released Wednesday in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act case, State Department officials charged with reviewing Bill Clinton's proposed speeches did not object to a single one. Some of the speeches were delivered in global hotspots...

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I...

Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is claiming that Cuban intelligence operatives may have planted reports that he patronized underage prostitutes. According to a Washington Post story on Monday by Carol Leonnig and Manuel Roig-Franzia: The alleged Cuba connection was laid out in an intelligence report provided last year to U.S. government officials and sent by secure cable to the FBI's counterintelligence division, according to the former official and a second person with close ties to Menendez who had been briefed on the matter. The Post apparently did not have a copy of the "report," nor could it verify its existence. To...

As we pause to celebrate the birth of this blessed nation, many among us are sad and even disgusted over what has happened to it. Millions of Americans who have known “the old America”—the one they were born in and grew up in—feel a deep disappointment that their grandchildren will not grow up to know the country that valued morality and biblical ethics. From the White House to the schoolhouse, we see forces that reject biblical values. From our government, we even see the outlawing of the name of Jesus from public prayers, especially from the military, which owes all...

Rep. Charles Rangel has barely wrapped his primary victory speech and already faces a new ethics charge — that he failed to properly disclose an all-expense-paid trip to China as part of his required financial filings. His camp is already rushing to amend the financial documents, the New York Daily News reported. But the oversight is especially notable for Mr. Rangel in that he has a history of ethical missteps that included a 2010 censure by the House for taking a trip to the Caribbean on corporate donor dime. This China trip came in August. Mr. Rangel was one of...

The environmental agency is having trouble locating emails belonging to a former agency employee and pulling information from his crashed hard drive, House members revealed Wednesday while questioning Administrator Gina McCarthy at a hearing on complaints of mismanagement. “What is it with bureaucrats and public employees … the hard drives crash?” asked Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.). He and others on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee questioned McCarthy about missing information related to the committee’s investigation into the potential environmental impact of a proposed gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska. “It sounds like we have...

Hillary Clinton's successful 1975 legal defense of an accused rapist has surfaced again with the victim, angered over a tape of Clinton chuckling over her courtroom tactics in the case, lashing out at the potential Democratic presidential candidate. "Hillary Clinton took me through hell," the victim told the Daily Beast in an emotional interview published today. The woman said that if she saw Clinton today she would say, "I realize the truth now, the heart of what you've done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me?...

The smoking gun in the IRS targeting scandal could be found in the Senate, one advocacy group says, pointing out a correspondence it believes pressured the tax agency to impose extra scrutiny on conservative groups as part of a Democratic election strategy in 2010 and 2012. The Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes campaign finance restrictions and other limits on political speech, filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics against nine Democratic senators, most notably Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois and Carl Levin of Michigan, for repeated lobbying of the IRS to probe conservative groups. It also...

Tea Party Patriots has filed a complaint against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) with the Senate Ethics Committee to protest his repeated attacks against Charles and David Koch. Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, filed the complaint, charging Reid with “unlawfully and unethically targeting private citizens.” The complaint further states that Reid “has misused Senate staff or resources to engage in partisan campaign activity in violation of federal laws and Senate rules.” Reid has repeatedly slammed the Koch brothers, two of the richest men in the world, for funding attack ads against Democratic candidates. Americans for...

Yesterday we were the first to report that none other than Vice President Joe Biden's son was joining the board of Ukraine's largest gas producer. It appears to have signaled peak crony capitalist as the new went viral with almost complete disdain. There was one defender though... as The Washington Examiner reports, The White House brushed off questions about any ethical issues as Jay Carney snapped "Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president." As The Washington...

**SNIP** “The current political climate has opened windows to reflect and drive cultural changes that would never have been possible a decade ago,” said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) in announcing the proposals. “This is an opportunity to reiterate why we choose to run for office, to serve the public, and to reaffirm our commitment to political reform.” A trio of Republican Senators called the proposals “window dressing” and said they would introduce legislation to double prison sentences, to up to eight years, for any elected official convicted of bribery or selling votes. "While we appreciate some of...