A Second Hand Conjecture

Newmark’s Door
We can’t enact or enforce enough laws to manage ethical behavior.

“Goo-goos”–good government advocates–have been fighting corruption in government through endlessly tweaking campaign financing reform laws and ethics laws for at least 40 years.

Senator Stevens is the latest case and even though he may have been up to no good, Newmark thinks it will be difficult to convict him.

What I do assert is, that in the absence of a tape or a document in which Stevens admits knowing that he didn’t pay for the full value of the work, it should be real darn hard to convict him.

The only way to stop this is the classical libertarian approach of smaller government.

I’m not the first person to argue this: either restrict government power or live with a lot of corruption. The goo-goos are largely tilting at windmills.

There may be some related good news . Apparently Trent Lott has had an epiphany on the issues of pork and earmarks.

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When you’re Speaker of the House, I guess that, in addition to all your other powers, you can make language mean whatever you wish it to mean.

PELOSI: I’m never certain of anything. Today, I would be certain. I just think that it is the opportunity for our country to move away from Washington.  You know, I’m the Speaker of the House. I’m an outsider in Washington, D.C. .  Business as usual in Washington is not in the people’s interests. It there’s for the special interests.

KING: You would be the ultimate insider, wouldn’t you?

PELOSI: Well, I — you would think. But I…

KING: The speaker of the House isn’t an insider?

PELOSI: Well, they didn’t want me to be Speaker of the House.

KING: But you are.

PELOSI: I had to fight these special interests. And now to make the change, we have to have a Democratic president. And Barack Obama has done more than anyone in terms of passing the toughest ethical bill — ethics bill in Congress, to shed the bright light on transparency on the link between special interests and legislation in Washington.

Even Larry King is incredulous at the notion that a chosen Speaker of the House would not be the ultimate insider!

The amazing thing is that these politicians can get on national TV and make ludicrous statements with a straight face.

Ah, well.  They have got lots of practice at it.

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Money in a freezer.  Sex scandals on either side of the aisle.  Cozy relations with developers, lobbyists and businessmen.  Someone call the Ethics Committee!

Done.

Here’s why.

No wonder it’s difficult to find almost any profession with ratings lower than those of Congress.

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This is fascinating, though the idea of destroying a female embryo to show that females could reproduce is sort of grotesque.

The researcher is applying for permission to use stem cells from bone marrow instead of embryos because it would be more practical, which leads me to wonder why it was necessary to try with embryonic stem cells first, and if it was easier to get permission to do so. (Certainly, women who want to produce sperm to fertilize another woman’s egg aren’t going to be doing it from an embryonic state.)

Overall though, this is really cool.

The article explains that sperm was created from male cells previously. The problem with creating sperm from female cells is that the information to do so is in the Y chromosome.

h/t Ann Althouse

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Are you a liberal who foams at the mouth about the immorality of big business?  Are you a conservative who rails about giving ten cents to government employees who will waste it or steal it?

Turns out you are all right!

Let’s face it.  People are people.  Some of us rise to the occasion magnificently.  Some of us are utter low lives.  Most of us are in the middle; we basically live a decent life, but have our moments of acting poorly.

No matter where each of us falls, however, the bottom line is that government and the private sector has its share of bad apples.

The study, released yesterday by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center, found that nearly 60 percent of government employees at all levels — federal, state and local — had witnessed violations of ethical standards, policy or laws in their workplaces within the last year.

Observed misconduct was lowest at the federal level, with 52 percent of federal workers surveyed saying they had witnessed problems such as conflicts of interest, abusive behavior, alterations of documents and financial records and lying to employees, vendors or the public within the last year. . . .

The sooner we all recognize this simple fact, the more rapidly we can get to superior solutions to lowering the ill effects of such activity.

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Synova reflects on the ethical issues around human cloning. She has the unusual stance of favoring reproductive cloning, and being opposed to therapeutic cloning. Not my view (I have to say this, because some people consider linking proof of unquestioned agreement) but as always her observations are interesting and worth contemplating.

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