Ethics

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will reimburse the state nearly $7,000 for costs associated with nine trips taken by her children, her attorney said. The settlement agreement was filed by a special investigator hired by the Alaska Personnel Board to investigate an ethics complaint filed against Palin. Her attorney, Thomas Van Flein, estimated the amount would be $6,800. There is no state law prohibiting the governor's family from traveling with her, and the personnel board found no wrongdoing by the governor.

A former deputy director for the California Department of Managed Health Care has agreed to pay a $3,000 administrative fine after admitting a conflict of interest violation, the state's ethics watchdog agency said Monday. Kevin Donohue, who still works for the agency in another capacity, admitted he held stock in UnitedHealth Group Inc. when he helped review the 2005 merger of the firm with PacifiCare Health Systems Inc., according to a stipulated settlement with the state Fair Political Practices Commission.

"Resolve to be honest at all events," attorney Abraham Lincoln once declared in a lecture on the legal profession. "And, if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation." By keeping faith with this maxim, both as a lawyer and as president of the United States, Lincoln earned for himself the sobriquet of Honest Abe.

It is one of the oldest tricks in journalism. A reporter, eager to have his story published or broadcast as soon as he has finished it--and worried that a competitor might beat him--tells his boss that his story has to run right away because he has heard that the competition is using the same story in that night's news broadcast or in the next morning's paper.

The Boston Globe has demanded the resignation of controversial columnist Mike Barnicle after concluding he had stolen someone else's punch lines and misled the paper about it. The Globe initially suspended Barnicle, 54, for one month without pay after learning that he had used a series of one-liners in his Sunday column that had been lifted from comedian George Carlin's best-selling 1997 book, "Brain Droppings."

Virtually every reporter who has ever picked up a pencil or a microphone, typed on a keyboard or looked into a camera would echo what Wolf Blitzer, senior White House correspondent for CNN, said recently about trying to be first, trying to get every story before the competition does: "It's in my journalistic blood."

At this city's largest newspaper, a standoff continued on Thursday, as Boston Globe editors demanded the resignation of longtime columnist Mike Barnicle and Barnicle steadfastly refused to offer it. "I've done nothing wrong," declared Barnicle, a Boston institution whose three-day-a-week column has led the Globe's Metro section for more than 25 years.

Despite a new law imposing the state's strictest limit on political contributions, some members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board of directors continue to accept contributions from lobbyists and contractors who do business with Los Angeles County's transit agency.

Michael Josephson isn't necessarily into heroes, for they come and go, as fleetingly as fame. But role models are something else. As a nationally renowned ethicist based in Marina del Rey, Josephson is in the role model business, and Mark McGwire, who hit his 54th home run Wednesday against Florida, is good for business. And reports of McGwire using the muscle-enhancer androstenedione as a part of his workout regimen are bad for it. "I'm a fan in the sense that . . .

The latest Justice Department investigation of Vice President Al Gore's campaign fund-raising strikes at a sore spot: the vice president's candor. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said Thursday that the purpose of the newly launched 90-day preliminary investigation is "to consider statements Vice President Gore made in the course of another preliminary investigation last year concerning political fund-raising calls he placed from the White House."