On the other hand – it would be better if Joe Biden’s kid had never gone near any Ukrainian natural gas company (or any other kind of company).

It would, in fact, be better if this whole business of leveraging a political career into big cash flows from private companies and corporations had never been embraced. It would be nice if US politicians had always seen that as a profoundly wrong and bad and indefensible move, and stayed away. Instead we have the opposite – everybody does it, it’s normal, shrug shrug. That’s all Trump and Giuliani need. The fact that Trump is doing the same thing but more so is neither here nor there.

The BBC traces the path… Read the rest

Here’s an issue to keep an eye on – Whitaker’s financial disclosure should have been made public long ago, and it hasn’t been.

https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1064202075544932352

New Letter: Where are acting Attorney General Whitaker's financial disclosures? The public has a right to know: https://t.co/TZJDpKxFjp pic.twitter.com/BxJXln7PxI

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) November 16, 2018

Megan Keller at The Hill has more:

Watchdog group American Oversight is calling for Acting Attorney General Whitaker’s financial disclosures to be made public.

“Transparency is a critical component of the government ethics program,” wrote the group’s executive director, Austin Evers, in a letter on Friday to Emory Rounds in the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE).

Evers pointed to the financial disclosure provisions of the Ethics in Government

For now, that is.

The news broke 15 minutes ago that

House Republican leaders have pulled a proposal that would gut its independent ethics panel, amid widespread criticism of the plan, multiple lawmakers tell CNN.

Even Trump objected – except what he objected to was the timing, the prioritization, not the substance.

Trump called out his fellow Republicans Tuesday for proposing to curb the powers of the independent ethics panel as their first move of the year, although the President-elect suggested the ethics panel was “unfair.”

“With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it … may be, their number one act and priority.

It’s a useful symbol, if nothing else – the surprise vote by House Republicans to kill the independent ethics office that oversees…Congress. No stinkin’ ethics for them! It’s helpful of them to make it so very clear.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

It also came on the eve of a historic shift in power in Washington,

Originally a comment by Samantha Vimes on 153 million.

I’m studying accounting ethics this semester.

Every time the possibility of conflict of interest comes up in the accounting code, it states that a person must avoid not only a conflict, but the appearance of conflict. For example, an accountant shouldn’t take a job auditing a company if they have a relative who works for the company, if they’ve gotten gifts from the company, if they have a significant investment in the company, or if they provide other services for the company– anything that might make them biased. Even if the accountant is as honest as can be: part of the responsibility of an accountant is to maintain the reputation … Read the rest

Naomi Klein also wrote about Clinton and corporate bribes, in the Nation the other day. I don’t read Naomi Klein much, because I think she tends to be simplistic, but she said some good things there.

The very suggestion that taking this money could impact Clinton’s actions is “baseless and should stop,” according to California Senator Barbara Boxer. It’s “flat-out false,” “inappropriate,” and doesn’t “hold water,” declared New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to issue “guidelines for good and bad behavior” for the Sanders camp. The first guideline? Cut out the “innuendo suggesting, without evidence, that Clinton is corrupt.”

That’s one of the many harmful side-effects of the way … Read the rest

I heard someone say on NPR the other day that the two Clintons have collected $150 million in speaking fees since he left office. My jaw dropped. I knew they’d both been pocketing huge fees, of course, but I didn’t know it added up to 150 MILLION.

CNN did the accounting a couple of months ago.

Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.

In total, the two gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May, receiving an average payday of $210,795 for each address. The two also reported at least $7.7 million for