We have a local blogger over at Bay Area Houston who has taken it into his head that he is the leading watchdog on government ethics in the state. After all, he regularly makes posts attacking pols who have been cited for various ethical lapses. Now I’d find this admirable except for one minor detail – he only reports on the REPUBLICANS – as a Democrat activist, he won’t touch the ethics problems of Democrats with a 10-foot poll.

That’s why he managed to miss this tidbit about a Texas legislator with a host of such problems – one who wants to be Speaker of the House.

Representative Sylvester Turner has been a busy little beaver. He has managed to amass enough campaign finance violations in the last two years to fill a 37 page ethics complaint, along with167 pages of campaign finance reports to back up the complaint. Since the complaint runs 37 pages I obviously cannot do all of his violations justice but I will hit some highlights for you.

• $220,905.33 (cumulative errors) is missing and unaccounted for out of his campaign funds, and also did not report any interest accrual on the account as well. This is fraud and perjury.
• Accepted $13,500 in direct contributions from corporate entities which is illegal.
• $500 of which was from Zachry Construction, the prime contractor for the Trans-Texas Corridor construction and a major contractor to TXDoT. Knowingly accepting Corporate donations is a third degree felony. He did this a total of 16 times in the last two years, listed the corporations on the forms, and then signed them, so he will have a hard time claiming he did not know. Maybe he didn't read them, but he SHOULD have read them. He signed the form which means he is accepting responsibility for what is in them.
• Made six payments to Ford Motor Credit in the amount of $736.46 for what appears to be his personal vehicle. Amounting to $4418.76. This is personal enrichment from campaign funds and he would be civilly liable for the amount, even if it's a lease with residual value to the lessor.
• Made a total of 141 payments to himself and others from the fund without disclosing the names of payees, dates, amounts, or purposes of the payments.

Now mind you, this covers just TWO YEARS worth of violations.

Personally, I don’t know if Turner is actually guilty of the offenses with which he is charged, and I am willing to wait to see what the outcome is. And I’d even cut John some slack here were it not for the fact that he has recently filed an ethics complaint against the current speaker, and has implied on his blog that the mere fact that the Texas Ethics Commission accepted his complaint as properly filed is indicative of Speaker Craddick’s guilt. That means, I suppose, that John is seeking to protect his party’s own corrupt pols, since he is only reporting on actions against his political opponents.

And interestingly enough, he himself would be one of the corrupt Democrats he has been protecting. After all, he’s the guy used by the Office of the Inspector General as a case study in what not to do with regards to the Hatch Act – which he was determined to have violated and for which he received a 180 day suspension from his job at NASA. Interestingly enough, John didn’t see fit to comment on that ethical lapse on his blog – and nor did he offer any criticism of the candidate for whom he illicitly raised funds on government time using government resources and facilities in violation of federal law. I guess that lapses of political ethics are in the eye of the beholder, right?

But then again, why should we be surprised? After all, he’s jut following the Pelosi Paradigm for improving political ethics – cleaning out the ethical swamp to make room for his own unethical alligators.

UPDATE: I'll be damned -- Coby actually reports today on the ethics issues of a Democrat. Of course, she is one of the "Craddick Democrats" who support the current speaker, so John is still only commenting on the ethical issues of those he identifies as political enemies.

UPDATE II: I love it when John brags about his threats of physical violence against me. Just more of barack Obama's "new tone" in American politics, I guess.