Do you remember Manuel Miranda? He was the aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist who illegally gathered Democratic Judiciary Committee documents from Senate computers. A federal criminal investigation is still going on. Where is Miranda today? Heading up an ethics project for a conservative group.

Road to Surfdom explains:

One of the leading conservative advocacy groups in the battle over judges, the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary, has formed a new group called the Ethics in Nominations Project. ... They have just appointed....Manuel Miranda as the head of the new Ethics project. ... The Ethics in Nominations Project plans to assemble a group of ethicists to outline rules for how senators should deal with judicial nominees. The project will seek to highlight what its organizers see as corruption in the confirmation process.

How do these fine conservatives know the confirmation process is "corrupt"? Because of the internal Democratic Judiciary Committee memos that the head of their new ethics project stole last year.

Stealing memos is not unethical. Using stolen memos to attacks others is not unethical. Makes sense, right? Sadly, this is all rather consistent with things reported recently in USA Today:

[C]ritics point to a lengthy list of grievances against the GOP [House] majority. The most serious:

The House ethics committee is investigating whether Republicans offered campaign contributions amounting to bribes on the floor of the House during an unprecedented, three-hour roll-call vote on Medicare legislation last fall. Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., who is retiring, first made the charge, then backpedaled in later accounts. He didn't say who made the offer. But House Speaker Dennis Hastert spent much of the time with his arm around Smith's shoulder. Ultimately, the measure passed without Smith's support.

Tom Scully, then the administrator of the Medicare system, negotiated for a job as a drug-industry lobbyist while helping write the law, which added a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare. He has denied wrongdoing and says he obtained a waiver from legal prohibitions to do so. Meanwhile, Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, said he was ordered by Scully to withhold his higher estimates of the bill's cost from Congress while the legislation was being considered.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas has pressed industry interest groups and associations to hire Republicans as lobbyists. A Texas grand jury is looking into the use of corporate contributions to local Republican candidates by a political action committee he created. And DeLay engineered an unusual redrawing of House districts in Texas after Republicans took control of the state Legislature in 2002; as a result, Republicans hope to win about six House seats held by Democrats.

Any semblance of cooperation between the parties has vanished. Tempers flared last fall when House Democrats, angry at being denied a vote on their Medicare legislation, demanded that a clerk read the text of a lengthy bill to prolong a meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee. When Democrats left the room to talk strategy, committee chairman Bill Thomas called the Capitol Police to break up their session. The police refused, but Democrats haven't forgotten the attempt.

The committee system has virtually collapsed under Republican rule. Bills are routinely dictated by House leaders, rather than written in committees. That leads to the concentration of power in the hands of a few leaders, led by Hastert — a man virtually unknown to the American people. When House and Senate bills need to be reconciled, Democrats are often excluded from the negotiations. Only two Democrats, who already were sympathetic with GOP goals, were allowed in the room when the final Medicare compromise was written.

The predawn Medicare vote last November lasted three hours, rather than the customary 15 minutes. Stopping the clock until a bill is passed has become the norm under Republicans, but the Medicare vote set a record. "We've been working three Congresses for that," Hastert says. "We can wait three hours to vote."

Conservatives, of course, are representative of true American values. Running roughshod over Democrats is OK because liberals are all traitors and liberalism is a discredited, invalid political philosophy of absolutely no value whatsoever. “Modern liberalism seeks government control not autonomy in everyday affairs, is undemocratic as far as it seeks to legislate through the courts what it cannot get done through democratic means, and is quite arbitrary in that the rule of law is no longer applied.“ Isn’t it nice, then, that we have a conservative majority in the House, the Senate, and a conservative President who all do the exact opposite of these things?

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics