ProPublica Really Thinks Revealing That Florida Actually Executes Convicted Murderers Will Turn Americans Against DeSantis, Trump and Republicans

(That’s a famous photo of the execution of the John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators)

Ah, the ethical delusions of the woke and biased!

ProPublica is another one of those supposedly “non-partisan” watchdogs that somehow only finds the conduct of Republicans and conservatives worth criticizing, with enough rare exceptions to let them say, “But what about…?” to rebut that verdict sufficiently for those who aren’t paying attention.

Being reflexively progressive, ProPublica has long been an opponent of capital punishment, though the position is misplaced absolutism. Now it announces, “Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at a faster rate than ever before. What followed was the most intense period of executions the state has carried out in more than eight decades.”

This supposedly horrific “period of executions” meant that a grand total of 19 murderers who had forfeited their rights to live in a civilized society were dispatched instead of being kept alive at taxpayer expense. Let’s look at the killer ProPublica picked to have us weep for in the first half of the long article: Frank Walls, whom Florida executed last year.

Walls committed his first murder on March 26, 1985, at the age of 17. He noticed 19-year-old junior college student Tommie Lou Whiddon sunbathing at the beach, went over to her and slashed her throat. Walls then stole her car. Whiddon’s body was discoveredthe next day lying in a pool of blood on the beach. On September 16, 1986, he killed 24-year-old Cynthia Sue Condra by stabbing her 21 times. He left her body on the side of a road.[4] On May 20, 1987, Walls broke into the mobile home of 47-year-old Audrey Gygi. Walls raped her, left, but later decided to come back and murder her.He stabbed her to death, stole a fan and a radio, and left her nude body to be found after she failed to show up for work. On July 22 that same year, Walls committed a double murder. He broke into another mobile home inhabited by 22-year-old airman Edward Alger and his girlfriend, 20-year-old Anne Louise Peterson. Walls forced Peterson to tie up her boyfriend, then tied her up as well. Alger managed to get partially free and attacked Walls. In the fight, Walls cut his throat with a knife, but Alger bit Walls on the hand, causing him to drop the knife. Walls then shot Alger three times in the head. After sexually assaulting Peterson, he shot her in the head too, and when the first shot didn’t kill her, Walls put a pillow over her face and shot her again, killing her. The couple’s bodies were found the next day.

The story, as is de rigueur in such sobfests, is told from the perspective of death penalty activist Father Dustin Feddon, who has nothing better to do than “administer” to condemned prisoners like Walls. ProPublica never informs its readers of the details of why Walls was on Death Row. It just arrays the usual anti-death penalty rationalizations:

July 2: Let’s Thank Minnesota For Saving The USA

If you know anyone from Minnesota or is unfortunate enough to have to live in that ethically-addled state today, pause in your appropriate contempt for the blight on the Republic the Land of Lakes has become in recent years. Express your gratitude for their state, whose brave soldiers in this day in 1863 may have quite literally saved the United States of America and made this 250th celebration possible.

I know, I know. Minnesota has gone completely nuts. It has an incompetent, silly, uber-woke governor; its Attorney General is an anti-white racist and probably a criminal, the Mayor of Minneapolis is an Ethics Villain, it has an anti-Semitic Congresswoman who has openly admitted that her first loyalty is to Somalia, its opposition to ICE operations represents more of a genuine insurrection than anything that occurred during the 2021 Capitol riot, and the state is in a tight race with California, Washington, Oregon, New York and Maryland for the booby-prize of “Most Embarrassing State .” But ’twas not always thus.

July 2 was the second day of the decisive Civil War battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the most complicated and wide-ranging day in the conflict. So much of desperate significance was going on at Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, on Little Round Top, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den and a half dozen other key features on the battle field that whether an instance of heroism was recorded or forgotten is as much a matter of chance as anything else. Even determining what was the turning point in the day’s conflict, which ultimately was won by the forces of the North, is an exercise in searching for order in chaos.

There is no question, however, that the First Minnesota Volunteer Regiment’s astonishing heroics stand out even among the many other examples of gallantry on that day. The battlefield monument to the First Minnesota is the largest erected to any Union regiment, and yet it has not guaranteed our cultural memory of the epic sacrifice those soldiers made. Other second day exploits, due to sometimes arbitrary choices made by historians and film makers, have taken up the limited space available in the public’s attention to the details of the Civil War.

This is a massive injustice. As the battle raged for Cemetery Ridge, crucial high ground occupied by Union forces but under siege by the Grays, General Winfield Hancock saw a serious breach in the Union line. He realize, in horror, that Wilcox’s Alabama Brigade was on the verge of breaking through, possible dooming Meade’s army to defeat. The attack had to be blunted and and its advance stalled until he could round up sufficient reinforcements to repel the rebels.

Hancock ordered the First Minnesota to charge the brigade and hold the position, even though its 262 men was outnumbered by a force of more than 1200. It wasn’t quite the hopeless odds face by the defenders of the Alamo, but the regiment’s prospects were grim enough.

Continue reading

July 4th Ethics: How Far Gone Do People Have To Be To Think This Is A Rational Way To Celebrate America’s Founding, And What Would Make Them Become That Way?

That is really and truly the official schedule for the Fourth of July celebration in San Diego County.

Nothing more needs to be said except perhaps,

Remember The Battle of Gettysburg

Today is July 1, which is always treated across the United States as the gateway to a long weekend and the Fourth of July, and little more. This year, it is the run up to the 250th Anniversary of out nation’s founding. July 1 is also, however, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most important and most deadly battle of the many important and deadly conflicts in the American Civil War. The two American armies that clashed in the Pennsylvania town sustained more than 50,000 casualties on the Gettysburg battlefield, which may be the saddest and noblest place in America. It is also reputed to be the most haunted, which considering the number of souls lost between July 1 and 3 in 1863, shouldn’t surprise anyone.

[Digression: The Gettysburg Hotel is allegedly haunted, and the proprietors designate specific rooms as haunted. The rent for those rooms is less than the other rooms because, I was told when I called to inquire regarding reservations, “guests tend not to stay the whole night in those rooms.]

Our 250th celebration is an appropriate time to remember Gettysburg, because it is one of those landmark events in American history that could have so easily turned out differently, and if it had, we would never have made to the Centennial, never mind the 250th. The fact that the North prevailed was due to a confluence of random events, the essence of moral luck.

If you have not made at least one pilgrimage to the battlefield, you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to the memory of the combatants, to go. You need not swelter in July. Gettysburg is just as inspiring in the Spring or Fall.

And Speaking of Fake News: NPR!

See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says! I’m smart, and I want respect!

Excuse me while I gleefully gloat over pointing out once again what a rotten, biased, disgrace of a news organization NPR is (and has been for a long while) right before it beclowned itself spectacularly yesterday by breaking the imaginary story that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the Supreme Court.

No, you can’t excuse this putrid example of the variety of fake news I call “Wishin’ and Hopin’ News” (in honor of the late, great Dusty Springfield) with the rationalization (#19 on the list) “Anyone can make a mistake!” For a professional news organization that has any scruples or legitimate editorial procedures literally never makes a mistake like this. NPR didn’t check its “facts” with the subject of the story. It didn’t get confirmation from the Supreme Court. It literally broke a story that didn’t exist because the Axis and the Axis propaganda network and the Trump Deranged and so, so many fans of NPR wanted this to be true so badly that NPR decided that Ethics Don’t Matter….though, to be fair, NPR decided this long, long ago, as when, oh, just to pick a random example out of the air, they blacklisted me as the network’s go-to ethics expert after a woke hostess deemed my 100% accurate explanation of how celebrities are vulnerable to late-hit sexual harassment accusations intolerable because, she told me, “I thought you were trying to defend Donald Trump.”

I may use the Alito episode from now on as my routine example of confirmation bias. The fiasco is so wonderful for Ethics Alarms in so many ways!

Ethics Quiz: The Weenie King

I read about King Charles renouncing his traditional title and, I must confess, shrugged. Then a couple of well-regarded commenters suggested an EA post on the matter, so I rethought the issue.

In an annual review published for 2025-2026 reported by the U.K.’s Telegraph last week, the King who was previously been both “Head of Nation” and “Head of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith” was revealed to now be “Head of Nation” and “Supreme Governor of the Church of England who protects the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation.”

“What is the king trying to say with this shift?” asks the conservative Western Journal. Its answer: “That the United Kingdom is not Christian, and that her monarch represents a non-Christian people — Muslims.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it ethical for the King to do this, cowardly, just pragmatic or does it really matter at all?

In considering this, and I am strongly pulled to the last alternative, one must remember that Charles has always been drawn to progressive positions, and that, unfortunately, he is not very bright. The King is also hanging on with his metaphorical fingernails to a position that his own people increasingly see as anachronistic and superfluous, undercut by a royal family that has enmeshed itself with increasing acceleration in one scandal and embarrassment after another, some of which he participated in.

SCOTUS Reaches The Only Fair, Factual, Logical, Ethical, and Legal Decision Regarding Biological Males in Women’s Sports

Late yesterday, while everyone was concentrating on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the President’s Executive Order on birthright citizenship, the Court upheld two state laws barring the participation of biological males “identifying” as female (a.k.a. “transgender females”) in girls’ and women’s sports teams. Although the 6-to-3 ruling involved upholding laws in West Virginia and Idaho, 25 states also restrict biological males from cheating in women’s sports, and the decision represents a decisive splash of ice water in the faces of those who support one of the silliest and most unpopular of the Woke Left’s delusions.

Of course it is unfair, dangerous and absurd to allow individuals who have gone through puberty as males to compete with girls and women in sports involving strength and speed, and where size and weight are an advantage. That the radical Left insists otherwise (because life ought to be different than it really is, a prime driver of so much progressive cant) should be one of the most damning tells on the whole ideology as well as strong evidence that the Democratic Party has jumped Fonzi’s metaphorical shark. The Democrat-stuffed U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 9th and 4th Circuits struck down sensible “no biological males in female sports” laws, but it was inconceivable that their biased and partisan reasoning would prevail at the U.S. Supreme Court. Sure enough, it didn’t.

West Virginia v. B.P.J. should have been a unanimous, 9-0 decision, but the Left’s fealty to the LGBTQLMNOP++ wing of the Democratic party is so strong that the three knee-jerk progressives on the Court just couldn’t manage it. Before noting Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion which didn’t need a judge, a legal scholar or a lawyer to write, just, you know, someone reasonablyintelligent with functioning eyes and brain cells, I have to begin with the Authentic Frontier Gibberish of Justice Jackson. Again. She wrote a remarkable dissent which, perhaps in a SCOTUS first, makes a persuasive argument for the opinion she’s railing against in its incoherence and “Don’t confuse me with facts my mind’s made up!” obtuseness. Seriously: what the hell is she babbling about?

“But there is reason to doubt the soundness of the concession that Title IX’s reference to “sex” means only sex assigned at birth….A transgender woman penalized for being perceived as aggressive has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’ just as much as a cis-gender woman has, no matter that the transgender woman’s behavior matches expectations of her sex assigned at birth. Either way, the institution has imposed its gender-based expectations upon her. And either way, the institution may have violated Title IX. In short, the majority is wrong to suggest that the term ‘sex’ in Title IX ‘ cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.’ Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose; it cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity…”

No wonder Jackson infamously said in her confirmation hearing that she could not define what a woman is. After reading that mess, neither can I. I’m not sure I can understand English any more, either.

Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note, NPR Division

This is hack, bottom-of-the-barrel journalism at its worst.

The statistics show that the “The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher. “And the available evidence suggests that we’re going to go even lower this year,” he predicts based on the numbers and trend so far.

Here is how NPR starts its story:

“As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, it’s doing pretty well by at least one measure: the national murder rate.”

That’s not news reporting. That’s partisan damnation with faint praise, while also engaging in deliberate misrepresentation. The story states that President Trump has achieved the best result in reducing the murder rate since at least 1960. That’s not, by any reasonable use of the English language, doing “pretty well.” It is an extraordinary success, and should be reported as such.

Then there is “at least one measure,” because, you see, everything else is terrible, but NPR’s Trump Deranged listeners assume that, so a major Trump accomplishment has to be minimized in the reporting. The technique is called “poisoning the well” and it isn’t journalism, it is pure bias. NPR, like the rest of the Axis, can’t tell a straight news story fairly, directly or honestly without applying a negative spin if President Trump is involved. You can almost hear the sneers: the outlet might as well had written,

“Well, how about that, the asshole did something right!”

“Look! Trump lucked out this time!”

“Hey, I guess everything the President does can’t blow up in his face!”

“Even a blind squirrel will find a nut now and then!”

As Clarence Darrow memorably said at the end of his closing argument in the Sweet case,

I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. I do not believe in the law of hate… I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred.”

So I am wrestling my brain to the ground to fight hating these awful, arrogant, unprofessional, smug and destructive people. They refuse to extend even moderate respect and decency to the President of the United States. They do everything in their power to distort facts, data, reality and analysis to confuse the public and turn it against their own leader. They will not give credit when it is due, and they will not assign responsibility where it belongs, if there is any way to twist the facts to impugn President Trump.

Supreme Court Ethics 2: It’s Not SCOTUS’s Job To Make The Laws Nicer

CNN’s summary of yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling that President Trump could fire heads of Executive Branch agencies went like this: “Supreme Court expands Presidential power.” That’s absolutely false. The ruling held that the law blocking Presidents from firing heads of agencies in the Executive Branch was unconstitutional, as many legal scholars have argued for decades, and that the 91-year-old decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had upheld the law at the center of the dispute, was wrongly decided and violated the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government. The Constitution has always held that the President, not Congress and not the Supreme Court, has the power to manage the Executive Branch. Fans of judicial activism and our “shadow government” by unelected agencies liked to call this the “unitary executive” theory, as if the idea that the President should have control over the his own branch of government is just a theory. It’s not a theory. It’s the law. SCOTUS was not “expanding” Presidential power by affirming it.

The Supreme Court expanded its own power when it green-lighted a Constitutional amendment in the form of an unconstitutional New Deal law.

The news media, your friends, and even some Supreme Court Justices seem to misunderstand the essence of the judicial review thingy, as well as the Constitutional role of the Supreme Court itself. It doesn’t help that some of the Justices on the Court have similar misconceptions. The two immigration decisions hostile to the Left’s open borders agenda handed down yesterday are causing SCOTUS to be condemned when all they have done is rule that the current administration of the law is legal. And the news media—fuggetaboudit.

Notable was the caterwauling over the Supreme Court ruling this week that the openly abused and distorted Temporary Protected Status really and truly is supposed to be “temporary.” Here is Jake Tapper of CNN “objectively” grilling DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin over deportations of Haitians with that “temporary protected status”:

Tapper: “Will you be deporting all of them?Will they be all deported back to their home countries, Haiti and Syria? And when will these deportations start? Will it be immediately?”

Mullin: “Well, Jake, first of all, Temporary Protected Status was never intended to be permanent. And there’s a lot of people that came over here 15, 20 years ago underneath TPS that’s already changed their status.The whole time these individuals have been here underneath the Temporary Protected Status, they could have applied for a visa. They could have applied for LPR. They could have applied for different directions. But the status itself can be ended in its name itself by saying temporary.”

Tapper: “The Trump administration’s argument is that this was only supposed to last 18 months. My understanding of how the process works is, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has the discretion to extend it if the U.S. State Department says that the countries that these people are from are still considered unsafe, which is why they were afforded TPS status to begin with. Is it the position of the Trump administration that Haiti is a safe country to send these people to?”

Mullin: “Well, we take a lot of things in consideration. Secretary Rubio, the President and I have had multiple conversations about this, obviously… The qualification isn’t quite just that simple. And keep in mind, a lot of these individuals haven’t been here 18 months. They have been here 18 years. Some of them have been here 20 years, 30 years. They have had plenty of time to reestablish their status inside the United States. They have just chosen not to. Then there’s some that has been here the underneath the Biden administration that took advantage of an open border. And those individuals didn’t really come over here because they needed protective status. They came over here because they were taking advantage of a weak leadership. So what we want, and the President has made this very clear, those that are coming to this country legally, they need to be able to contribute to the United States, not be a burden on the taxpayers. And so we are continuing looking at our Temporary Protected Status. Those individuals that do need assistance because of the country they’re in, we’re always looking at them. There isn’t a more generous country in the world than the United States, but we don’t want people to take advantage of it.”

Tapper: “But do you maintain that it is safe in Haiti to send these people back?…The reason I ask is because I heard Stephen Miller, who is driving a lot of this, say that Haiti is safe for Haitians. And I just looked at the State Department’s website, and they have a level four do not travel advisory for Haiti just from a few months ago, from April, and it says, ‘Violent crime is rampant. The expansion of gang organized crime and terrorist activity has led to widespread violence. Crimes involving firearms are common. Crimes include robbery, carjacking, sexual assault and kidnappings for ransom.’ That doesn’t sound safe to me.”

Mullin: “Well, that “do not travel” is not for Haitians.That’s do not travel for the United States, because they are kidnapping or trying to kidnap individuals from the United States because they feel like their family has the money to pay the ransom.”

Tapper: “I understand that. But based on everything I have read, including the U.N. and Human Rights Watch, it doesn’t sound safe for Haitians. More than 8,100 killings documented last year, those weren’t Americans. Haiti is among the top five countries with the highest rates of rape and sexual abuse, with more than 1,200 cases of sexual violence last year. That’s not Americans; 1.4 million people have been displaced. Those aren’t Americans.”

Fascinating! Because of woke logic like Tapper’s, the Supreme Court decision that it was long past the time when Haitians and Syrians permitted to enter the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status based on conditions of decades ago could be told to go home is being called racist and “cruel” by the Axis of Unethical Conduct. The sad (and apparently permanent) fact that Haiti cannot get itself civilized or secure does not make everyone on that perpetually dysfunctional island nation the responsibility of the United States forever. Nor is the reality that Haiti probably will never be safe for Haitians the concern of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The job of the Court is to determine what laws require and prohibit,, not whether one is a good law or a bad law, or whether it is being administered in the most kind and caring manner possible. What is Tapper advocating? He seems to think that SCOTUS should have ruled that all Haitians have a right to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, as long as the U.S. is safer than Haiti. If that’s true for Haiti, it’s true for Syria. If it’s true for Syria, it’s true for Gaza. Somalia. Ukraine. Heck, it’s true for the U.K. If that is the policy our nation wants to embrace, crazy and irresponsible as it is, fine—one of the Communist wackos who won her primary in New York this month advocates that policy—but it is not the Supreme Court’s role to render such an edict. The Court’s job is to declare whether it is illegal for the U.S. to end Temporary Protected Status decades after the events that caused Haitians and Syrians to be temporarily admitted into the U.S.

It isn’t.

Bye!

Supreme Court Ethics 1: Birthright Citizenship Is Here To Stay

I didn’t venture an opinion on whether President Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship would fly with the Supreme Court (I did post about Justice Jackson making a fool of herself during oral argument), but I would have been surprise if today’s decision had turned out differently than it did.

The Supreme Court ruled today that President Donald Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional. The ruling was announced just as I was preparing commentary on earlier decisions this week: that post will arrive later today.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling. “If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design,” Roberts wrote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the result but dissented on the reasoning. Such concurring opinions are for professors and geeks, to be cited in law review articles and wild-hair judicial opinion dicta.

Justice Samuel Alito made some interesting points in his dissent about how birthright citizenship has very different, and potentially perilous implications today that never occurred to the Founders, writing,