Just before signing The Stock Act which now makes it illegal for members of Congress and their staff to profit from inside financial information, President Obama declared, “The powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else.” In 2004, I once asked a well-connected financial guy why someone like businesswoman and billionaire Martha...

In Silver Spring, Maryland, Police stopped a black Lamborghini without “tags” (no visible license plates). The man who stepped outside the vehicle turned out to be The Dark Knight himself… Batman! The Batman? Well, no. His real name (at least on his license and registration) is Leonard B. Robinson, a 48-year-old self-made success who made a pile of money after selling his commercial...

Colman McCarthy is an anarchist! He believes that teaching peace to high-school and college students will lead to – can you believe this – PEACE! And people think I’m a radical when it comes to ethics!! McCarthy and I are too oranges on a tree called Hope. In fact, Winston Churchill wrote, “All the great things are simple, and many...

Last Friday’s question regarding the 26-state challenge to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act and the three-days of oral arguments in the Supreme Court drew a lot of response. Before I go any further, let me say that, “no” I have not read all 2,700 pages of the law. I have read through the key features of the law as well as a timeline of...

In an Op-ed for U.S. News and World Report, GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum wrote that “Polls show Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to ObamaCare, especially the individual mandate.” Is he right or wrong? While the Supreme Court deliberates the constitutionality of The Affordable Care Act, Pollster Mark Blumenthal at Huffington Post has done some fairly comprehensive work cataloging the public’s...

Here’s a re-cap of recent issues that have caught my attention. Representative Charles Rangel, (D) from New York, who was censured by the House in 2010 after the Ethics Committee found him guilty of 11 counts of ethics violations, (failure to pay taxes, improper solicitation of fundraising donations, failure to correctly report his personal income), has agreed to pay $23,...

Last Wednesday, (Mar. 21) comedian Bill Maher wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times; the gist of it being that he’s tired of all the apologies. From celebrities to politicians, anyone and everyone with a voice in the media for what Maher believes are incidental infractions of polite society. “I don’t want to live in a country,” Maher writes, “where...

In the run-up to Super Tuesday, outside political action committees “spent three times as much as the candidates themselves according to a Wall Street Journal analysis…” “Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich spent a combined $2.4 million on television ads during the last two weeks in Ohio, Oklahoma, Georgia and Tennessee, the contests with the most delegates Tuesday, according to a...

Here is an ethical quandary submitted by a friend. “You’re playing in the club championship finals and the match is halved at the end of 17 holes. You have the honor and hit your ball a modest two hundred fifty yards down the middle of the fairway, leaving a simple six iron to the pin. “Your opponent then hits his...

Wade Clark Roof is the J.F. Rowny Professor of Religion and Society and Director of The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Author or co-author of 14 books and over 100 articles, Clark’s mission through the Center is “to advance conversation on major public issues, ethics and...