The House Ethics Committee has cleared Maxine Waters of wrongdoing in a celebrated but thin case over whether she improperly set up a meeting between the Treasury Department and a troubled bank in which her husband had a stake. Her chief of staff (and grandson), Mikael Moore, still faces scrutiny. But Waters “went above and beyond what was required of her,” according to one Republican on the committee.

After Wi. Supreme Court Justice tried to strangle another Justice, the state judicial commission filed an ethics complaint against him to be decided by his fellow justices. But Prosser came up with an idea to getall four of the conservative justices on the Court to simply recuse themselves from deciding on the complaint, because they witnessed the event personally.

A loophole in the STOCK Act would render it fairly meaningless. If you remember, the STOCK Act was the bill that rocketed to passage after allegations of insider trading among members of Congress, using at times non-public information to profit off of companies over which they held oversight responsibilities. The bill, which languished for years, was quickly taken up and passed with overwhelming majorities.

But it turns out that there’s a potentially gaping hole in the legislation.

Poor Mitt Romney. After having had to deal with the evangelical search for the best anyone-but-Mitt to back against him, after making his pilgrimage to Liberty University, and after offering up his gay foreign policy spokesman to appease their anger, Mitt looked like he was starting to get a little traction with the evangelical community. When Richard Land called on Rick Santorum to get out of the race, it had to be received as a good sign by Romney that he had at least one major evangelical leader who was willing to get behind him as the presumptive nominee.

But now Land is in some hot water of his own, and was rebuked by the board of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission — a commission he leads. Land lost his radio show but not his job with ERLC. Still, Poor Mitt has to be crying about this. “I finally get a big evangelical supporter, and this happens to him? Why me?”

The group that led the fight for paid sick days in Milwaukee has filed an ethics charge against a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, after learning that he had accepted free legal services worth tens of thousands of dollars from the same law firm that appeared before him to argue against paid sick days in Milwaukee.

When Darrell Issa took over the House Oversight Committee, Democrats were nervous that he would use it as a launching pad to pummel the White House with frivolous investigations. It hasn’t really worked out that way. And now, he’s covering investigations up.

Long, long ago and far, far away there were Ethics Committees in both houses of our legislative branch, empowered to keep members from violating basic canons of decency and disgracing the body called Congress.

In case that sentence sounds altogether outdated and quaint, it does seem that when the Ethics Committee in the House of Representatives was dismembered (pun intended), it turned loose standards by which the so-called representatives of the country were able to dishonor their offices and the country. The Ethics Committee did its work, and caused the end of the career of Tom DeLay after his misadventures with Jack Abramoff’s lobbying payoffs. That was its own end, as well.

Local law enforcement, including those who have come in from out of town to work at the Capitol, have been unfailingly nice, and supportive of the peaceful protests. Setting up the possibility of a situation with outside entities coming in to foment unrest has really rankled them.

Seems like at least one of Boehner’s Majority Makers has achieved that rare display of bipartisanship the President gets so excited about: both GOPs and Dems think David Rivera needs to scram.

Joe Miller reversed himself and discussed his background yesterday, acknowledging that he committed ethics violations while working at the Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2008. He used company time and resources to help depose the head of the Alaska GOP.