Free Republic

Donald Trump took his outrage over what he deems a "rigged system" a step further and called for a series of ethics reforms aimed at tackling corruption in Washington, including tighter restrictions on members of Congress and White House officials taking on jobs as lobbyists. The proposals came after Trump began his speech here by accusing officials at the FBI and State Department of engaging in a "criminal conspiracy," seizing on FBI documents released Monday that revealed that at least two officials at those departments allegedly bargained over reconsidering the classification of an email on Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's private...

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has been suspended from the bench for telling probate judges to defy federal orders regarding gay marriage. The Alabama Court of the Judiciary (COJ) issued the order Friday suspending Moore from the bench for the remainder of his term. "For these violations, Chief Justice Moore is hereby suspended from office without pay for the remainder of his term. This suspension is effective immediately," the order stated. The court found him guilty of all six charges of violation of canon of judicial ethics. Moore's term is to end in 2019. Gov. Robert Bentley will...

A series of tweets by well-known Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe caused a bit of firestorm online amongst legal ethics experts. It started on Tuesday when Prof. Tribe sent out this Tweet: (TWEET-AT-LINK) What followed was a rather lengthy back and forth on Twitter, with some encouraging Tribe to reveal the notes and others accusing him of breaking various legal ethical rules governing the attorney client relationship. Attorney Michael Krauss penned a strong rebuke of Tribe’s conduct in article in Forbes, calling it “extremely disappointing.” Krauss concluded that not only would the notes be confidential, but the mere fact that...

“Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain, “and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Hillary Clinton finds herself in the opposite situation: She has a reputation for venality — the merits of which we can set aside momentarily — that forces her to a higher ethical standard. Her inadequate response to the conflicts of interest inherent in the Clinton Foundation show that she is not meeting that standard, and has not fully grasped the severity of her reputational problem. The purpose of the Clinton Foundation is to leverage Clinton fame into charitable donations. That purpose has...

A State Department spokesperson clarified Thursday that Hillary Clinton’s 2009 ethics pledge—to avoid conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation—did not extend to Clinton’s top aides at the Department. Spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau was asked about recently revealed emails that showed top members of Hillary Clinton’s staff doing favors for Clinton Foundation associates. “I’m not going to speak to specific emails, but I think you guys know State Department officials are regularly in touch with a wide variety of outside individuals and organizations including businesses, nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks,” Trudeau replied. “You don’t feel like there was impropriety in the relationship

Vermont doctors and health care professionals are pushing back against an interpretation of state law that they say requires them to help kill patients who wish to die. Members of two medical groups, the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare and Christian Medical & Dental Associations, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against officials in two state medical agencies responsible for the interpretation. The lawsuit says these agencies have interpreted a 2013 physician-assisted suicide law, Act 39, in a way that would require health care professionals to counsel terminally ill patients about the option to commit suicide. Additionally, under such an interpretation...

I live in a small city (12,000 or so population) The Mayor has asked me to consider an appointment to the city Ethics Commission. He says they need people of good character and apparently he thinks I fit the bill. I've never done or considered anything like that. Outside of "Run, Run fast and far" does anyone have any advice or experience on such a commission?

A constitutional rights foundation has field an ethics complaint against members of the Democratic Party who staged a sit-in on the floor of the U.S. House recently in protest or the Republican-led House’s unwillingness to consider gun-control legislation. The ethics complaint came from the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust shortly after a couple dozen Democrat members of Congress took over the House floor and literally sat down for a day. It complains the Democrats were using the opportunity to send fundraising emails from the floor, and they were using official House images. The Hill reported House ethics rules bar...

Attorney General Loretta Lynch described her Monday meeting with Bill Clinton aboard a private plane as “primarily social,” but even Democrats are struggling to stomach the optics of the attorney general’s meeting with the former president while his wife is under federal investigation. Lynch said she and Clinton talked only of grandchildren, golf, and their respective travels, but the fact that the two spoke privately at all was enough to rekindle concerns about a possible conflict of interest. Republicans have long called into question the ability of a Democratic-led Department of Justice to conduct an independent investigation into Hillary Clinton’s...

Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel has found himself in a bit of a pickle. After years of allegedly thumbing his nose at pesky things like rules, his supposed misdeeds may be coming back to bite him on the proverbial hind quarter. A House ethics committee subpanel today found Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel guilty of 11 of the 13 charges of ethics violations against him. The panel, composed of four Democrats and four Republicans, emerged after private deliberation to announce their findings.

Fox News Chris Wallace interviewed Hillary Clinton's baby campaign manager Robby Mook during his Sunday morning talk show. Wallace asked Mook about Clinton's low numbers in the trustworthy department and what did Mook do? Well, first of all, Trump’s speech earlier this week was just riddled with outright lies, inaccuracies,” Mook said. “It’s been fact-checked probably more than any other speech. Wallace quickly interrupted Mook to say he pointed that out to Trump supporter Newt Gingrich earlier on Fox News Sunday. I find it very ironic that Donald Trump bought his Turnberry golf course, you know, from an Arab country...

WHAT MAKES A POLITICIAN By DH, 2016 Has anyone really stopped and analyzed why it seems like the higher in office an elected official gets the more power-hungry and corrupt they become? There are several reasons for this personality disorder and it all starts with their first victory in any level of the election process. 1. They want to make changes to the current administration, laws, rules, or the dictates thereof. 2. They are egotistical zealots and simply crave public adoration. 3. They know that public office means a path to wealth, riches and special favors from those they give...

Strongly disputing a federal judge’s power to issue a sweeping order to punish the government over ethical issues in the hard-fought case over federal immigration policy, the Obama administration began moving swiftly on Tuesday to block that order. It asked the judge to put the issue on hold, and promised an immediate appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The department argued on Tuesday that the part of his order forcing the government to hand over personal information about youths who had benefited from one of the changes in policy would affect about 50,000 individuals, and...

Alice C. Linsley Gay activist Jonathan Charles Rauch describes himself as "an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual" which is to say that he has completely rejected the traditional wisdom of his ancestors. Jonathan Rauch is so lacking in critical thinking skills as to be dangerous. Rauch’s “Case for Gay Marriage” is full of fallacious arguments, as I have demonstrated to my Ethics students. J. Rauch’s First Premise: Marriage is necessary to providing reliable caregivers. This assumption is not true. It is, in fact, verifiable false since we are able to observe that reliable caregivers exist who are not married to the...

“This skit was outright sacrilege. They know if they did this to Muslims they’d have to be put into the witness protection program,” the singer-actor said. Pat Boone is calling out NBC and Saturday Night Live for allegedly being anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, cowardly, “diabolical” and even demonic for a skit over the weekend that parodied God’s Not Dead 2, the actor-singer’s latest movie. In God’s Not Dead 2, Melissa Joan Hart plays a public school teacher who is persecuted for answering a student’s question about Jesus. In the SNL skit, a trailer for a movie called God is a Boob Man...

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- In a recent interview for the BBC2 series Inside Obama's White House," President Obama sounded somewhat wistful as he spoke to an interviewer about how he has tried to use his voice "to move things toward a more ethical and moral outcome." The question of morals and ethics has been debated since the dawn of humanity. It won't be settled by the shifting winds of politics, because not everyone can agree on what is moral and what is not. Dictionary.com defines morality: "Conformity to the rules of right conduct." Ah, but here's the rub. That definition...

Judicial Watch Reveals More Benghazi, Clinton Foundation Corruption Cover-up on American POWs in Cuba?Clinton Email Scandal PanelJudicial Watch Reveals More Benghazi, Clinton Foundation Corruption This has been an important week in our continuing investigation of Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state. We are uncovering critical links between her official duties and the private interests of her family’s foundation. The 276 pages of internal State Department documents we released this week reveal that within two days of the deadly terrorist attack on Benghazi, Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, the president of Libya’s National Congress, asked to participate in a Clinton Global...

<p>The chief of the National Park Service knew his book project would be squelched by agency ethics officers, so he went ahead and wrote it anyway without bothering to ask for permission, investigators said Thursday in a report detailing a striking level of negligence.</p>

Like the Blind Leading the Blind: Donald Trump and Evangelicals This morning, like most mornings now, I found myself reading an article on Donald Trump’s candidacy. Everyday I ask myself the question, “How can so many American Evangelicals support such an openly narcissistic, power driven man?” Sarah Palin endorsed him, Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, endorsed him,[1] and not too long ago, a poll was released that showed that Evangelical Christians as a whole are gravitating to Trump.[2] But, this article I read today gave me a much needed answer as to why Americans and specifically republican...

The use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) is so common nowadays that it’s easy to forget how quickly social attitudes have changed. The Atlantic recently published a feature about the early days of artificial reproductive technology under the headline “The First Artificial Insemination Was an Ethical Nightmare: The 19th-century procedure involved lies, a secrecy pledge, and sperm from a surprise donor”.The implication is that that contemporary ART is far more ethical than it was in the bad old days.Let’s look first at the origins of ART. The first pregnancy after artificial insemination apparently took place in England in 1790. The...