From the Alton Telegraph

(Editorial):Ethics reform welcome, still short
September 24, 2008 - 8:57PM
All of a sudden, ethics reform has become the hot topic in the state legislature. While we welcome the changes, which long ago became obvious, they only treat the symptoms, not the disease.
Last week, the House and the Senate overwhelmingly overrode Gov. Blagojevich's senseless veto of a measure that would prevent constitutional officers from taking campaign contributions from those who have state contracts worth $50,000 or more.
The measure was successfully pushed by Comptroller Dan Hynes, and he and the other officials had long ago banned such contributions for their own offices - all except the governor.
Gov. Blagojevich vetoed the measure by adding a bunch of other restrictions to the bill that critics say are either muddled, unworkable or would meet with resistance in the Statehouse.
Whether these were poison pills, as some alleged, including us, is a moot point now. The governor's measures have been put forward in a separate bill, a course of action that we and others suggested in advance of his veto.
While the ban on accepting money from state contractors is a no-brainer, and the new measures that passed the state Senate Wednesday are more or less fine, in the sudden rush to come clean, the legislature needs to pause.
Let's remember that campaign contributions are, in essence, political speech, which should remain unimpeded. Measures such as McCain-Feingold at the federal level have the (perhaps) unintended consequence of being incumbent protection acts.
As we've noted in the past, such laws are merely a sideshow to the core problem: Public money - our tax dollars - are used more and more to support private interests, from recreation to corporate welfare.
As long as government seeks to solve private problems with public money, all sorts of private organizations will seek to funnel our money their way. No matter how many laws are passed to protect politicians from themselves, the creatively corrupt will find ways to circumvent them all.
Until government returns to its core duty of protecting our freedoms, ethics laws only make corruption pause.