My Head Just Exploded Over This News of the Corruption Of Our Legal System That I Didn’t Know About Because The Media Decided a “Today” Host’s FAMILY CRISIS IS MORE IMPORTANT…!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In case you can’t tell, I’m madly disgusted about this, “this” meaning both the episode I’m going to write about, and the fact that I didn’t hear or read about it immediately because of our incompetent, irresponsible news media deciding that their dumb audience would rather share feelings with Savannah Guthrie.

From the New York Times: [Gift link!]

“A former obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was convicted in 2022 of sexually abusing patients must be given a new trial, a state appeals court said on Monday, overturning the former doctor’s conviction. The former doctor, James M. Heaps, 69, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in April 2023 after jurors in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County found him guilty of three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person. U.C.L.A. has already paid about $700 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Heaps, who was affiliated with the university in various roles from 1983 to 2018.

“A three-judge panel on the California Court of Appeal ruled on Monday that Mr. Heaps had been denied a fair trial because the trial judge never told Mr. Heaps’s lawyer or the prosecutors on the case about a note that the jury had sent while it was deliberating in October 2022.

The “Note to Judge” said that a recently seated alternate juror had “expressed to us that his limited English interfered with his understanding of the testimony, resulting in every case being the same, and his mind is already made up.”

Under the California Code of Civil Procedure, people who lack “sufficient knowledge of the English language” cannot serve on trial juries. The appeals court ruled that Mr. Heaps’s conviction must be overturned.”

“We recognize the burden on the trial court and regrettably, on the witnesses, in requiring retrial of a case involving multiple victims and delving into the conduct of intimate medical examinations,” the appeals court wrote. “The importance of the constitutional right to counsel at critical junctures in a criminal trial gives us no other choice.”

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement that it planned to retry Mr. Heaps ‘as soon as possible.’ Mr. Heaps will be sent back to county jail, the office said, and a court could release him on bail.”

I will now pause a bit while you mop your skull and brain bits off your computer screen. I’ve found that Windex does a good job, though you have to pick up the bigger pieces with your fingers.

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Friday Open Forum: Hey, Help Me Out Here, Will You? Please?

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

One of the few reasons I was worried about Donald Trump getting a second term rather than the United States ending up with that incompetent babbling, DEI Doom Machine Kamala Harris in the White House was that I knew with absolute certainty that his second four years in the White House would be exhausting on the ethics front, making it both impossible and absurdly time-consuming to cover the ethics landscape adequately. That has come to pass even more horribly than I dreaded. Trump does stuff (as Presidents are supposed to do) but often does it sloppily or defiantly; he trolls, he jokes, he behaves like a the kid in “The Twilight Zone Movie” who acquires the power of a god; the Axis of Unethical Conduct goes nuts, the Democrats lie, the polls are faked, the news media spits Trump-Hate propaganda, unethical judges throw monkey wrenches into the works, businesses pander, ethics train wrecks pop up everywhere, socialists, communists and idiots demonstrate…

I feel like Newman feels about the U.S. Mail in the “Seinfeld” clip above.

If EA were going to have the impact and thoroughness it needs to have (five commenters are not enough), it would have to be a multi-contributor site like Instapundit, Powerline, Victory Girls or Legal Insurrection, or I would have to be retired like Althouse or work only a few hours a day like Prof. Turley. But the latter options are impossible (forever, for reasons largely, but not entirely, beyond my control) and I have tried to build the former without success.

The brilliant Mrs. Q opted out quickly because of other priorities. Curmie, who brought a different perspective to his carefully curated posts, went Trump Deranged and quit without so much as a “thanks,” a “Bye!” or a “Good luck!” I have a standing offer to one of EA’s dependable contrarians, who has chosen to ignore it. (This is one reason I bristle when someone calls the blog an “echo chamber.”)

Talk about the mail “coming and coming”! I already have several topics on the runway, and this morning I saw about a dozen others that need ethical analysis that know I will not have time to provide, as well as some issues I’ve already discussed continuing to throb. For example, all of the morning shows and the news were concentrating most of their time on the disappearance of the “Today Show’s” hosts’s mother, which is, literally, trivia compared to other developments, like, say, emerging evidence indicating that a member of Congress—a Democrat, of course—may have ties to terrorist organizations. But.. but…a talking head celebrity’s mother is missing!

Also on the Ethics Alarms radar…

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I assume the President will get severely criticized for this, and he will deserve it. “Make America Weenies Again.” Is that the strategy?

President Trump said yesterday that he has personally ordered the withdrawal of 700 I.C.E. officers from Minnesota and that his administration could use a “softer touch.” Earlier in the day, Tom Homan, the White House mush-mouthed “border czar,” said about 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state because an “unprecedented number of counties” were finally cooperating with federal officials and allowing ICE to take custody of unauthorized immigrants before they were released from jails. “This is smart law enforcement, not less law enforcement,” he said.

Okaaaaay. Maybe that’s true. It doesn’t matter. How the action will be received by the open borders mob, not just in Minnesota but in Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Virginia and the rest, is that interference with law enforcement works, riots work, elected officials demonizing law enforcement works, and open defiance of the federal government and U.S. laws work. Trump’s move, especially in a week when The Nation, the Far, Far Left magazine, nominated Minnesota for a Nobel Peace Prize for encouraging attacks on I.C.E officers, is a retreat that can only encourage more George Wallace -style nullification.

I know he is stuck with a party of weenies who will always surrender first principles when the whining from voters gains volume (“Why does law enforcement have to be so mean?”) Nevertheless, The President should have driven a hard bargain here, beginning with a demand that Tim Walz and his lackeys shut the hell up and stop talking about fighting law enforcement, arresting officers, the Civil War and the Holocaust. Trump should have threatened to use the Insurrection Act and added a “Dirty Harry”-esque “Go ahead. make my day.”

I get it: Trump doesn’t want to invoke the Insurrection Act. But his decision to try to avoid conflict only increases the likelihood that he will have to.

Ethics Dunces: All The News Organizations and Everyone Else Who Isn’t A Member of Savannah Guthrie’s Family

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just took a brief break from work to have a quick lunch. As I often do, I tried to catch up on the news. I was foiled in this endeavor because CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all spent at least ten minutes each with extensive reporting on the mysterious disappearance of “Today” host Savannah Guthrie’s mother.

This is an unethical waste of journalism resources and breach of the duty for the news organizations not to at least try to report events that citizens need to know to be informed, safe, competent citizens.

600,000 Americans go missing every year, and about 90,000 of them, on average, are never found. If I were a member of the family of one of those Americans, I would be angry and disgusted at the disproportionate attention and resources being devoted to this one woman, Nancy Guthrie, whom I had never heard of before this week. And why should I have? She is not a crucial figure to the nation or society. Her greatest accomplishment is that she is the mother of a celebrity, and one who makes $8,000,000 a year.

The “Today” star has the resources to pay for a private investigation. We can empathize with her, but no more so than with anyone beset with a family crisis.

Absurdly, President Trump posted on Truth Social that he was ordering federal law enforcement to”deploy all resources” to find Nancy Guthrie. Good Lord, why? She is not essential to national security. The nation will not suffer one bit if she has vanished like Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, Ambrose Bierce or Amelia Earhart.

Sure, it would be tragic for the Guthrie family. I could list the important stories that the news media is burying, hiding or ignoring now but it would take up too much of my time or yours. It is true that other disappearances from high profile families became media feeding frenzies: the kidnappings of the Lindbergh baby and J.Paul Getty’s grandson were hysterically over-covered too. But at least they were both children.

The entire spectacle just rubs ordinary Americans’ faces in the ugly truth that they just don’t matter as much as the welfare of the rich, famous and beautiful.

Comment of the Day: “I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone…”

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This rueful Comment of the Day arrived like manna from Heaven. I was cogitating about how we hadn’t had an “echo chamber” complaint on Ethics Alarms in a while, especially if we don’t count “Marisa’s” immortal “five commenters” snark. My mind went to that issue in part because I was marveling on how conservative Jonathan Turley’s commentariate had become, though he has always been described as a liberal, Democrat law professor, as almost all of the are. Most of the progressive and Trump-Deranged comments on his posts are anonymous (which I don’t allow) and also usually don’t deal with the post, but just regurgitate anti-Trump taking points. Jonathan need start moderating his comments.

Ann Althouse’s blog has evolved similarly. The few resolute progressive regulars are well-known by name, like the infamous “Inga,” but the vast majority of the former U. of Wisconsin law prof are conservative, though Ann insists that she is “fiercely” non-ideological.

I attribute the lament of EA’s house contrarian below to three factors.

1 Since 2016, Democrats, progressives, “the Resistance” and the their captive institutions have gone bonkers, abandoned ethics, and as a result, the bulk of criticism here has been aimed at their words and conduct, and appropriately so. I am as sick of this as anyone else, but it’s sure not my fault, and as an objective analyst I can’t pretend it is other than it is in the pursuit of “balance.”

2. The courageous, idealistic but annoying stance of some here that all points of view deserve respect and debate is periodically bracing, but in the case of many issues the myth involves literal denial of reality for various and generally unethical reasons. Illegal immigration is not defensible, and laws should not be cancelled by disobedience rather than legislative action. Open borders are by definition suicidal. The mainstream news media is biased in favor of the Left, and clearly so. Banning guns is unwise as well as impossible. Hate speech is constitutionally protected (and so is same sex marriage). Israel has not only a right but an obligation to end Hamas. DEI is repackaged racial and gender discrimination. The Democrats’ pursuit of Donald Trump was politically motivated and has destroyed an important bulwark of our democracy. The Joe Biden senility cover-up was among the worst and most dangerous political scandals in U.S. history. I could go on; the point is that I didn’t arrive at these conclusions and others because of any party affiliation. I arrived at them through strict ethical analysis, legal principles, and historical perspective, adjusting for bias. This is a hard time to be a loyal Democrat or a committed progressive, because so many of your positions have been proven to be wrong, and so many of your leaders have been exposed as hypocrites and frauds. I’m just reacting to reality. I feel bad for you, just as I felt bad for my Republican friends when the Religious Right, Tom Delay and assorted crooks and knaves made the GOP impossible to defend in good conscience.

3. When I was a fellow at the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C, I argued vigorously that the organization, which calls itself “a source of information and guidance for ethics and compliance professionals everywhere,” needed to take stands on national issues with ethical implications, including corporate misconduct. Their response taught me a lot about the field. The organization wouldn’t take a black and white stand even when it was an easy call because it was afraid to alienate potential donors, board members and political allies. I vowed then and I retake that vow now that I will never accept that limitation, that indeed I view it unethical to do so. In both the Ethics Scoreboard (RIP) and Ethics Alarms, I have always tried to spawn discussion and enlightenment by taking strong positions, sometimes, I admit, more strongly than my true opinion justified, because I don’t think wishy-washy posts encourage dissent.

I have more to say on this topic, but the intro to Here’s Johnny‘s Comment of the Day on the post, I Am Increasingly Reaching The Conclusion That We Can’t Trust Anyone, “Experts,” Researchers and Scientists Included: My Dan Ariely Disillusionmentis too long already. So Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!

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That Tears It: I’m Heading To The Woodchipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On Facebook just now, two brilliant women I have long admired, loved and respected posted the following on Facebook:

…One quoted FDR about the President as a “moral leader.” This was intended by my friend as a knock on Trump. She obviously knows next to nothing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He cheated on his devoted wife for most of their marriage, ultimately dying with one of his mistresses. He locked up Japanese American citizens in arguably the worst civil rights breach of any American President. He helped the Holocaust to proceed by allowing anti-Semites in his Cabinet to foil the efforts of Jews to escape Nazi Germany. FDR condemned Eastern Europe to decades of brutal Communist rule in gratitude to Stalin. Roosevelt also allowed himself to be elected four times, the last time when he knew he was dying: an odd choice to use in contrast to a President being accused of being a “king.”

FDR was a great President in many ways, but few of our leaders were less interested in morality or ethics than Roosevelt.

.…The other poste that she read Kamala Harris’s book and found it inspiring. I don’t even want to talk about that one…

Ethics Quote of the Week, Self-Delusion Division: Jeff Stein, Washington Post’s Chief Economics Correspondent

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This is a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington and the country as a whole. I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession.They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”

—-Jeff Stein, The Post’s chief economics correspondent, bemoaning the lay-offs today of some 300 Washington Post journalists

Who does Stein think he’s kidding? Or is he completely oblivious to his own paper’s abandonment of fair, honest and objective journalism that is a major, if not the only reason for the Washington Post’s demise?

Stein was quoted in the New York Times’ gloating report of today’s metaphorical massacre. It wrote in part,

“The Washington Post carried out a widespread round of layoffs on Wednesday that decimated the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company laid off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first eight years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.”

The Washington Post figured out too late that the country only needed one all-Democrat-all-the-time biased paper, and that the New York Times was better at its biased reporting and pandering to its bubble than the Post anyway.

The Post could have survived, I believe, by becoming a national paper that strove for even-handedness and objectivity, leaving the Frustrated Right to the Wall Street Journal and the Angry Left to the Times. USA Today had failed miserably at filling that niche (Have you read that rag lately? Weekly Reader used to be more informative!). The opportunity was there once, but many years ago. Instead, the Post continued to inflict flagrant Axis hacks on its dwindling non-woke readers, propaganda agents like E.J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, Dana Milbank, Phillip Bump, Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Jonathan Capehart and more. Since the local readership was about 95% Democrat, hey, why bother being fair or non-partisan?

Well, people like me and my wife constituted one reason. The Post is my local paper, but we got so sick of its spin and bias, particularly its efforts to sanitize Bill Clinton’s corruption and lies during Monicagate, that we paid three times what the Post cost to have the New York Times delivered every morning. I confess that I was influenced in my decision by the suffering of my professional theater company, which deliberately eschewed the navel-gazing woke dramas that were slobbered over by the Post’s theater critics and was repeatedly slammed and snubbed by the paper’s critics for it.

I remember one of the few times the Post’s chief critic deigned to attend an American Century Theater revival (they were virtually all revivals) of Gore Vidal’s satirical political thriller, “The Best Man.” She actually wrote that Vidal’s script was dated and unbelievable, because a Presidential candidate would never lose an election because of character issues, that only his policies mattered. This was, of course, while the Post was licking Bill Clinton’s metaphorical boots.

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Supreme Court Partisan Hacks Unmasked!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Supreme Court today refused to strike down California’s new gerrymandered congressional map designed to give Democrats five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and turned down a request from a group of California Republicans that would have required the state to continue to use the map in place while their judicial challenge to the map proceeded. If anyone dissented on the Court, he, she or they kept it to themselves.

This is called “following precedent.”

Two months ago the conservative bloc on the Court, over dissents from the Three Little Maids of Kneejerk Progressivism, granted a request from Texas to allow it to use its new map intended to allow Republicans to pick up five additional House seats in that state. In Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, a lower court had sided with Democratic challengers that the “legislature’s motive was predominantly racial,” making the redistricting unconstitutional. (Once again, crying racism was the Left’s default claim.)The majority reversed that ruling in its December 4 order. Justice Alito issued an opinion (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorusch) explaining that “it is indisputable … that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map…was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

The Republicans who challenged the California map were counting on a lack of integrity from the conservative majority although the issue was exactly the same as in the Texas case. But the six conservative, Republican-appointed Justices declined the bait. They ruled for the Democrats just as they had ruled for the Texas Republicans, which was the legal, ethical, fair and objective result. Even those conservative devils Thomas and Alito!

Another false partisan narrative bites the dust.

If the three Democratic women possessed similar integrity, they would have dissented in this case too, as they had in Abbott. But they didn’t, did they?With their votes, they showed that their principles only hold when their favorite party benefits from them.

They are the hacks.

Unmasked at last.

Fact: MS NOW, aka MSNBC, Is Entirely A Leftist, Woke, Untrustworthy Anti-Trump Propaganda Operation [Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

…and anyone who admits to using that network for news should be ashamed of themselves, as well as ignored when they opine on political issues.

Just when I think the news media cannot get more biased, unprofessional and dishonest, something like this happens…usually on CNN, MSNBC, or in the New York Times.

MS NOW used an AI-enhanced image of Alex Pretti, the anti-I.C.E. activist who was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent during an immigration enforcement operation. Naturally, the faked photo made him look better than he really did, a public opinion manipulation tactic as old as photography and unethical to its core. This is cheap Cognitive Dissonance Scale game-playing, because “lookism” is embedded in our DNA. A nicer-looking figure is more likely to land in positive territory on the scale than a fat troll: remember how much sympathy there was online and in the media for the handsome young terrorist who maimed all those innocent people in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? The alteration of Pretti’s image was subtle, but the point is why do it at all? Anything to make attacking Trump and supporting open borders more persuasive, I suppose.

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Today In The Wacky World of Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The above tweet (Do they still call them that even though it is no longer Twitter? We need a new word. “Xeet”? “Exit”?) is being circulated on social media followed by declarations that the only ethical course is to root for the Seattle Seahawks in this weekend’s Superbowl broadcast. My Facebook friend, an esteemed professor whom I have known in an arts context since 1969, making him also one of my oldest friends, posted it with commentary stating that the contents made it clear that every decent, thinking person should be rooting for Seattle.

My friend calls football “concussion-ball”) and reviles the sport for the same reason I do, though I have extra ethical ammunition against the National Football League, easily the most unethical among the spectacularly unethical professional sports organizations. If I were inclined to watch the Superbowl, the fact that the NFL was so irresponsible as to pick a cross-dressing, open-borders Trump-Deranged performer who will mostly perform in Spanish to lead its half-time show in what was once a non-partisan, All-American event that everyone could watch without feeling political anxiety would end that inclination instantly.

Who decides what sports teams to root for according to whom their owners are friends with, or where their political contributions go? My answer: crazy people. These factors have absolutely nothing to do with the sports, the teams, the players, or the entertainment value of the team’s games.

If one is looking for a professional sports team to favor and one is a wokeness-obsessed loony, it is probably impossible to cheer on any of them. They are all owned by billionaires or consortia including big, bad corporations. They are all privileged tycoon who reliable act as if they can make their own rules, because much of the time, they can. Jody Allen, for example, was sued along with her brother and Vulcan, the holding company she served as CEO in 2013 by five of her former security guards who alleged sexual harassment by Jodie, illegal activity, cover-ups and more, including bribing customs officials to smuggle animal bones out of Africa and Antarctica. The lawsuit was settled out of court, probably because that’s what rich people and corrupt corporations do when they are scared to death of what discovery will uncover. Not that any of that should matter to a Seattle Seahawks fan.

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