The Unethical, Inexcusable, Embarrassing Ambassador Guilfoyle [Updated and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Update: Guilfoyle has resigned. See below]

President Trump has “asked” the ludicrous Ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, to resign, says Katie Zacharia, the new White House Paid Liar.

Good, sort of. This political grifter should never have been appointed in the first place, and never should have been confirmed when she was. She was a solid bet to become a walking, talking black eye to the Trump Administration and the U.S. and sure enough, that’s what happened. Never mind! Appointing assorted incompetents, narcissists, liars, crooks and scumbags isn’t this President’s worst flaw, but it is a bad one. It is also one that he’s never going to shake.

It is true that sending incompetent, corrupt and persons of otherwise dubious character as ambassadors to nations that are allies and relatively stable is a tradition as old as Betsy Ross, but “Everybody Does It” is no excuse, especially when the practice ends up letting someone like Kimberly Guilfoyle represent the U.S. in anything more weighty than a pig-calling competition.

Her qualification for the job was that she is the former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. She is also the former wife of Gavin Newsom, and I will eschew the temptation to expound on the significance of that. She’s a professional trophy wife.

Guilfoyle recently made headlines by asking Trump donor Eric Deters to wire $100,000 to her American Express account. “She was so desperate for that $100,000. It was a quid pro quo,” Deters said in an interview with NBC News. “She said I could ask her for anything and everything in Trump world. There was no request too big.”

Anything?? When an infamous bimbo like Guilfoyle says that…well, the imagination runs wild. My imagination, anyway. Too bad about the cosmetic surgery, Kim.

“We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” Zacharia said during her first briefing yesterday. “She has been a wonderful asset to the team, and we wish her well.” What a debut! Three lies in 21 words:

  • Being asked to resign by POTUS is being fired.
  • She has been a festering sore on “the team” and everyone knows it.
  • They wish she would sink into the earth and stay there.

So should we all.

***

This Kimberley’s resignation statement, posted on Twitter/X:

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As If We Need Any More, Here’s Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I wish our brave, adamant, progressive but mostly reasonable George Mason prof “jdkazoo” had not fled the commentariate. He maintained, against all evidence, that the mainstream media/corporate media/ Axis media was not biased, and, I think, believed this sincerely…because his skull had been hollowed out by living in the leftist echo chamber that is today’s academia. I would have loved to read his explanation for this. My guess is that he would have to default to what I always hear from Axis apologists: “Hey, it was just a mistake!”

The New York Times had seemingly decided to practice journalism by reviewing the text messages examined by Cornell in its Title XI investigation of “Jane Doe’s” (aka Lucy Craig) and reporting on them. It reported the key text, from Lucy/”Jane” to one of the rape-accuser’s original, consensual sex-partners, as concluding, “At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.”

But that is not how that text ended. The whole message reviewed by Cornell, CBS NY and the Times was this:

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Alert! Commenting Problems…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Apparently today WordPress stealth-altered the commenting software, or something. As Michael R. determined, you now have to select ‘Add Your Name’, then fill in your name and e-mail to a popup box in order to post. That used to be under the text box. (Thanks, Michael.)

I grovel at the feet of those of you who lost comments due to this change. I can’t comment on my own posts at all due to a long-standing glitch, so I have no way of knowing about these things. I think this change was an emergency response to a recent glut of spam attacks, which I have been aware of over the last week.

And THIS Is How Growing Progressives Learn That Cheating Is Just Fine…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Arielle Curry, the principal of Washington Elementary School in Santa Barbara (she’s the one on the left) rigged the vote count in the student election results to elect two losers, including giving her own daughter the post of sixth-grade president. The principal was foiled by a whistleblower, put on administrative leave, and then, incredibly, allowed to resume her job.

Take that last part in slowly. This is the culture in schools. This is the culture in California.

In a letter to parents, Curry wrote that she ” led deliberations after the student votes were tallied that resulted in overriding the outcome of two positions.” She apologized “for allowing this practice to persist” while acknowledging that “our school’s process for selecting student officers lacks transparency and fairness.” She added, “I am committed to making this right moving forward.”

By resigning? Nothing else will do.That letter is all by itself justification for dismissal. What disgusting weasel rhetoric! Altering vote totals to benefit a family member is “deliberations”? She allowed a practice to persist by engaging in the practice…it wouldn’t have persisted if she didn’t engage in it. The school’s process for selecting student officers lacks transparency and fairness? No, she lacks transparency and fairness, also honesty, respect for students, shame, trustworthiness,accountability, and ethics generally.

There are tangible benefits in being elected a student officer at the gifted and talented education magnet school in Santa Barbara’s Mesa neighborhood. Student government members receive privileges like leaving class to attend meetings, while the president gets the opportunity to deliver the graduation speech at the end of the school year. The student body also helps select school activities, including themed events such as “Crazy Hat Day.” (Do they have a “Sociopath Principal Day”?

Cuury tried to steal these perks from deserving students and bestow them on her choices regardless of the election results. How can the school, the district, and the parents allow Curry to keep her job? What possible justification could they cite? (Don’t say it!)

“District officials confirmed the expected policy was for the actual vote totals to determine the winners” one news source says. Ya think? “The district expects that for student/ASB elections, the candidate with the most votes wins,” assistant superintendent for human resources John Becchio said. Really? Then why do you continue to employ a principal who doesn’t get the “most votes win” thingy?

Curry has worked in the Santa Barbara Unified School District for several years, previously serving as principal of Santa Barbara Junior High and as an assistant principal at Washington and Franklin elementary schools. This is how your young are being aculturated, America. These are the people shaping their conduct and values. Do you care? What are you going to do about it?

Me? I’m heading to the woodchipper…

Help! My Ethics Conflict…

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

I would write “The Ethicist,” but I’m a better ethicist than he is, so I’m asking you.

I have a friend, a neighbor, who has been very kind and caring since my wife died in 2024. She’s about 20 years younger than I am, divorced, and desperately lonely. She’s also brilliant, politically obsessed, and furious at the world. Spuds likes her two dogs, and we all go to the nearby dog park together whenever our schedules mesh. She checks on me when she hasn’t heard from me for a while (which is annoying but still considerate). She sends me food; she invited me to have Christmas dinner with her and her then-boyfriend last year.

She is also as Trump Deranged as anyone I know, which is saying a lot. Her progressive mania is extreme: on Facebook and other social media she goes from one stream of furious posts on the latest leftist cause to another. Currently she is determined to have the seven men accused of sexual assault in the Cornell mess tried, convicted, and if possible, castrated.

My friend, like so many people I know infected with woke hysteria and Trump Hate, confidently rants to me about her obsessions because she assumes that nobody she likes and views as intelligent could possibly have any opinions different from hers. I’ve written about this phenomenon before. I just let her do it, because she needs to talk, and eventually I get her to move on to another subject, make her laugh, or try to get a word in edgewise that has nothing to do with politics.

For me, this is a pure Julie Principle situation: she’s a good and generous person, she’s intelligent, she needs a friend, she’s a great Scrabble player, and as long as she doesn’t try to run my life (which she is always on the verge of attempting), I’ll accept her quirks and obsessions and concentrate on what’s admirable about her, which is a lot.

However, she excises anyone from her life who doesn’t conform to her political beliefs. She is estranged from her family and both of her children. She recently told me that she made a list and that I am one of just 17 people she feels comfortable talking to. Somehow, she has concluded that I have the same political beliefs she does, which means, among other things, that she has never googled me or done any research online. I have a rather large cyber-footprint, including Ethics Alarms, of course. I know, with near certainty, that she would be crushed if she learned about my positions on many of the issues she feels passionate about, including the Cornell 7. When a dinner date recently told her he had voted for Donald Trump, she got up and walked out of the restaurant.

I feel like I am deceiving my freind, and yet I also don’t believe political views are relevant to personal relationships unless they are the basis of those relationships. I have many more than 17 friends, and the idea of ending a relationship because someone doesn’t agree with me about, well, anything is alien to my being.

Heck, I even have friends who are Yankee fans.

Is the most ethical course to continue to allow her to think I meet her self-harming extreme standards she demands of friends, or to be transparent, let her know more about me and guarantee that she will be angry, disillusioned, and cancel me as she has so many others?

This is a true ethics conflict, with valid ethical justifications on both sides of the question. Kindness or honesty? Inflicting pain in the cause of transparency for its own sake? My friend is incapable of embracing the Julie Principle.

Now what?

Speaking of Cheating Democrats…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a group called Frontier Media has paid TikTok “influencers” to post pro-James Talarico content on social media. Talarico is the Democratic challenger for an open Texas U.S. Senate seat deemed crucial to his party’s chanced of taking the Senate in November. But Talarico’s campaign told the Times regarding the discovery,

.

…so I guess they are as innocent as little lambs. You will recall paying for celebrity endorsements was part of Kamala’s “we go high” campaign strategy. Just for the record since I’m sure you don’t need to be told, this is lying. Such conduct falsely represents to the public that a trusted individual has independently concluded that a candidate deserves to be elected, while the payers do not reveal their influence and the payees don’t reveal their incentives.

This latest cheating to elect Talarico has surfaced nearly a month after an employee for a pro-Talarico PAC was caught on video explaining that the group was “paying people for their votes” through a “paid relational program.” The undercover video resulted in the employee’s firing (for getting caught).

Two related notes:

  • Lest you be overly impressed that the Times reported this story (“SEE?” I can imagine banned commenter and loyal Times bias-denier “A Friend” bellowing in his bunker), the paper buried the lead as best it could. The headline was “On Texas TikTok, it’s all about Talarico,” and there was no mention of the pay-offs until 18 screens into the article.
  • The Times piece also revealed that despite TikTok’s emergence as a social media power (and that young voters increasingly use it as a primary source of news), Republicans lag absurdly behind Democrats in using the videos as a marketing tool. Morons. Being slow to embrace technological and web innovations is how the party managed to lose the 2012 Presidential election. For these mid-terms Democrats have handed them so much ammunition that the GOP should be lapping them in the polls. “The Stupid Party” sobriquet remains as accurate as ever.

Seriously, What’s Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

And why should I have to ask?

The handling of Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico’s oddly-timed absence from the campaign trail in a close race is inherently suspicious. If an extreme left-biased Democrat propaganda machine like “The Daily Beast” is concerned, there is certainly enough “smoke” to make anyone with a memory ponder. The excuse for the candidate being AWOL without clear evidence of where has been that he has the flu and doesn’t want anyone to catch it. That’s thoughtful. It does seem a strange decision if Democrats really believe that flipping the Senate is crucial to “saving democracy,” which in Democrat-speak means knee-capping the Trump Presidency with more fake impeachments, packing the Supreme Court with Ketanji Brown Jackson clones, opening the borders, defunding police, letting trans-women crush the natural kind in sports, spreading anti-Semitism, further embedding “good discrimination” in the workplace and letting Iran continue with plans to nuke Israel as soon as possible.

Past extended unexplained absences do not make me sanguine that this one is as benign as the Axis narrative would have us believe:

  • Mitch McConnell vanished after a fall until we finally learned that he is too feeble to participate meaningfully in the Senate.
  • GOP Congressman Tom Kean’s hospitalization for depression this year was kept secret for 117 days. He finally disclosed the truth upon his return to the House floor.
  • Biden’s DEI Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for three days without even telling the White House. He should have been fired, but, you know, Biden was President. Austin said he was sorry.
  • The all-time champ, not counting Woodrow Wilson, was South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford going AWOL for six days, failing to answer calls from his staff, family, or the state’s security detail while his office lied that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail to “decompress.” He had actually secretly flown to Argentina to visit his soul mate mistress.

Of course, Biden’s brain was mostly absent for months (years?) while his staff and the Axis said he was “sharp as a tack.”

Here’s the New York Times story updating the mystery. Conservative outlets claim there is evidence that Talarico was undergoing treatment for some kind of mental or emotional issue. Best line: “The Eagleton has landed!” My Democrat friends, flush with similar confirmation bias, are certain there is “nothing to see here.”

Maybe they are right, but it sure seems like something is off. Where’s the transparency? And remember: Democrats cheat.

Ethics Quiz: The Kitty Boo-Boo

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Cynthia ​Morgan, a school bus driver for Harford County Public Schools in Maryland for more than a decade, was alerted by an alarmed 10-year-old boy on board that there was an injured kitten by the side of the road. Yielding to the young student’s entreaties, Morgan stopped the bus on lightly-trafficked Heaps School Road in Pylesville and allowed the student to retrieve the kitten. The boy held the kitty in his lap until he was dropped off at school, whereupon the bus driver volunteered her lap for kitten-sitting for the rest of the route.

The incident got her fired. Morgan confirmed her dismissal to CBS News Baltimore and said she was devastated by the decision. The mother of the kitten rescuer says that her son would have been “devastated” if the cat has been left to fend for itself. “The fact that she was let go because of an act of kindness does really weigh on him,” she added. “That is unforgivable and cruel.”

Is it? Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was it ethical—responsible, fair, competent and reasonable—to fire the bus driver for permitting the emergency woulded kitten intervention?

The community, not to mention the influential feline population, is rallying behind Morgan. A petition on Change.org calls for the bus driver to be reinstated. “Over the years, Cynthia has become more than just a bus driver to our children; she is someone they look forward to seeing every morning and afternoon,” one parent wrote. “Her kind and warm nature makes the pupils feel safe and comfortable.This is not just my personal sentiment – countless parents and students share the same view.”

Another told reporters, “Every year at the beginning of the school year she buys every child on the bus school supplies. She buys them gifts for Christmas, every holiday, birthdays; she gives them birthday cards, all out of her own pocket.”

In a meeting with district officials, Morgan defended her actions and insisted that she had not put the student or those remaining in her bus in any jeopardy. For its part, the school system is staying the course. “Certification and decertification are not always based on a single factor but often involve consideration of multiple circumstances and requirements,” the school district said in a statement. “Student safety remains our top priority, and all certification decisions are made with that responsibility in mind.”

That sounds like lawyer-dictated CYA to me. Of course the district would default to an “it was the final straw” stance. Still, maybe it was. A letter from district Transportation Director Danielle Bedsaul cited “multiple incidents” involving Morgan, some including “concerns regarding inappropriate interactions with students.” Was buying students gifts and supplies among those “inappropriate actions”?

And “The Great Stupid” Crawls On: White Female Executive Fired Because Her Hairstyle Was Too Black

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I can’t believe I even wrote that.

That’s Kelly Carnes above, the recently-hired executive director of the apparently insane Baltimore Rock Opera Society. After the blonde, white female returned from Burning Man with newly braided cornrows (above), her organization began receiving complaints from the staff regarding her choice of hair style. Cultural appropriation, you know. Can’t have that.

Carnes, who apparently has a habit of exploring daring hair displays…

…was fired, being told only that she and her new job were “not a good fit.” She had adopted the cornrows, she says, to deal with the desert where Burning Man is held annually. I wouldn’t regard a white woman’s cornrows as especially daring almost 50 years after “10” —Hello, Bo!

but The Great Stupid is full of nasty surprises.

The society’s board was especially stupid, publicly acknowledging “concerns” over their organization’s new executive director’s cornrows and that it was “taking the matter seriously.” It also said it planned to revise its anti-discrimination policy and require anti-racism leadership training, which apparently means that whites are racist when they adopt styles, behavior or dress that emulate our African American brothers and sisters. The board advised her not to attend a town hall that was called to discuss the controversy. That’s always a bad sign: they said that to Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers” when the town was meeting to fire him as the high school basketball coach for trying to teach the kids team play. Then the town’s star player got up and said he would only play if they let Gene keep coaching…wait, where was I?

Oh, right: the cornrows.

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The Legal Profession’s Self-Policing Myth

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

If you watch any legal-themed TV shows, sooner or later a lawyer will say, “I can’t do that. I would be disbarred.” That is a scriptwriters fantasy. Probably they think it’s true; almost everyone does. In the vast majority of cases, violating the Rules of Professional Conduct, the so-called “Law of Lawyering,” will not result in disbarment, or a long suspension, a short suspension, or any bar discipline at all. this is true even for serious and repeated violations.

I have been dealing with the issue for more than a year, and will soon go public, meaning public beyond Ethics Alarms, which is, as I am constantly told, an obscure, little-read, typo-prone dinosaur mostly frequented by irrelevant Boomers like myself. The lawyers are permitted by the courts to be self-regulating on the heart-warming theory that it is a profession, and thus worthy of public trust. Many years ago the legendary and wise Judge Richard Posner, the legal scholar who was until his retirement a star United States circuit judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, observed that bar associations were unacceptably conflicted as the supposed enforcers of legal ethics standards. Like all associations, he said, their main concern is the welfare of their members, not the public. I have discovered that he was more right than I, or anyone who would admit it, ever suspected.

Maybe Judge Posner didn’t know how much of a sham the legal discipline system is. Now I do.

Bar associations are grievously under-funded and understaffed to perform the job of policing the profession with even minimal proficiency. They also don’t try very hard. The bar association websites are usually badly designed, and the pages devoted to the disciplinary system are so confusing and verbose I suspect the intention is to make filing a complaint so burdensome for members of the public that they will just give up. Lawyers have contempt for client complaints, and so do bar association officials. The public doesn’t understand legal ethics, and confuses malpractice with ethics violations. Client complaints tend to be badly written, rambling and over-long, and arrive with the presumption of incompetence. Phone calls for guidance will never reach a live person, just infuriating phone trees now made more annoying with “AI agents.” You leave a number and are promised a call back, which may never come.

Lawyer complaints, which the rules (Rule 8.3) say bar members must file when they have substantial reason to believe that another lawyer has committed acts that “call into question the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness to practice in other respects,” are a tiny percentage of the number of complaints reality should demand. That rule is derisively called “the Snitch Rule,” and lawyers seldom report colleagues, firm members or friends. They do report adversaries, and thus the state bars take those complaints with many grains of metaphorical salt, just as they do complaints from clients

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