To quote Mammy (Hattie McDaniel ) in “Gone With the Wind”, “I done told you an’ told you!” In two scenes, she used that introduction to remindScarlett that “you can always tell a lady by the way she eats in front of people” and Rhett that “it just ain’t fittin’ for a girl child to ride astraddle with her dress flyin’ up!” Well, I’ve done told lawyers, business executive and anyone else with a job that requires public trust and that affects a larger organization to eschew making political statements on social media, even in jest. Nobody listens.
Jane Smith, the chief executive of a Family First Credit Union in Michigan was fired after posting a photo of her family in sweatshirts that read “Lake America.” She allowed the picture to go viral as her family left on September 11 for a 10-day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Subsequently Family First Credit Union announced that Smith was no longer with the company.
“We weren’t trying to make a political statement,” Smith told Michigan outlet WJRT as she pleaded her case. “However, we were kind of poking fun at the fact that one of the Great Lakes’ names were getting changed.”
Her actions put me in mind of the New Mexico judge who recently excoriated a lawyer who had cluelessly submitted an AI-composed court document without checking its accuracy. “Do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world?” she asked, incredulous that any lawyer would be so unaware of all the recent AI debacles in court. The same questions apply to lack of awareness regarding Trump Derangement. What a normal person might consider a joke about our President’s re-naming obsessions, a Trump Derangement sufferer, and there are millions of them, might well let the Cognitive Dissonance Scale take over and refuse to do business with a bank whose CEO goes on social media to extol the “Lake America” episode.
“We sincerely apologize for the concern, disappointment and pain this situation has caused our members and community,” the bank wrote on Facebook.
Of course it did. I don’t feel sorry for her, and neither should you. If Jane Smith couldn’t see this the danger of this familiar sequence playing out sufficiently to stop her from posting the “Lake America” photo, she’s not smart enough to be a CEO anyway.
🚨 THE VIEW HOST QUESTIONS PATRICK CLANCY FOR DIVORCING LINDSAY CLANCY ‼️ Sara Haines questioned how Patrick’s marital love ended so quickly after Lindsay killed their 3 children. Patrick has since remarried. Do you agree with Haines? #LindsayClancy#PatrickClancy
[Sorry for stooping to using TikTok, but it had the only suitable clip that WordPress would let me embed…]
“The View” is trying to get its own private dining car on the Lindsay Clancy Trial Ethics Train Wreck. First Sunny Hostin uses the issue to declare that she was the “lone juror” who got a man declared not guilty after he killed a woman and made her into a delicious soup…and it turns out that she was lying about the whole thing and wasn’t the “lone juror” after all. Now Sara Haines—how can anyone determine which of these opinionated, wokeness-infected, ignorant women is the dumbest?—expressed her shock that Lindsay Clancy’s husband (now remarried) would divorce the woman who murdered his children. After all, Haines says, don’t the marriage vows state “in sickness or in health”?
Well yes, Sarah, but at least the vows I took didn’t have a “whether one of us murders our kids or not” clause in there.
Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?” Gee, that’s a real brain-teaser. Domestic abuse activists argue that “marital love” has been abandoned once a husband punches his wife in the face, but that’s obviously bad and inexcusable. Murdering the children is more nuanced. Good question, Sara. I’ll have to think about that….
How is someone as dumb and confused as Haines on television anyway? The inconvenient truth about all journalism is that the vast majority of reporters just aren’t very bright, and certainly not as smart as they think they are. Nonetheless, we allow them to have public platforms and exposure that consistently accomplish the opposite of what our Founders believed made “the press” essential to a functioning democracy. Heck, we allow them to manipulate elections. Haines and her colleagues—not just the confederacy of dunces on “The View” but reporters and pundits generally—make the public less informed, less astute, less ethical and less responsible. Somehow this stupid woman—yes, I hold that asking why a man would divorce his wife after she murdered three children, especially their three children, is signature significance: no intelligent person even thinks that’s a puzzle, never mind announcing it on national TV—managed to be a correspondent on NBC and ABC. What does that tell us about the competence, judgment and trustworthiness of broadcast news?
Related questions:
Will anything cause ABC to recognize that calling “The View” a news program is a disgrace, and that the network metaphorically soils itself and the culture every time it gives this coven of morons gets another hour to lobotomize the public?
How do Democrats continue to get votes when siding with progressives means associating oneself with the likes of Sara, Sunny, Whoopi and Joy, never mind Bernie, Kamala, AOC, Fredo, Ayanna, Jasmine, Gavin, and Zohran?
When did American woman lose their ethical bearings?
You would have a hard time finding a clearer explanation of why “The King’s Pass” (#11 on the EA Rationalizations List) is toxic to organizations than what Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy told the news media yesterday.
On the night his team became the first MLB franchise to have a 100 win season in three years, Murphy pulled one of his best and most respected players, All-Star catcher William Contreras, for a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning of Milwaukee’s 5-1 win over the Phillies as punishment for not hustling. Contreras had jogged to first base on his ground ball to Phillie shortstop Trea Turner in the fifth inning, presuming it would be an easy out. But Turner bobbled the baseball, and because Contreras wasn’t running hard, he had plenty of time to throw to first for an inning-ending out in a tie game.
“I don’t know if he could have been safe or not,” Murphy said. “Everybody knows how much William does for our team, how hard he plays and how much he competes. But he’s also a guy that people expect a lot out of. We don’t accept that. He knows that.”
Translation: “He’s a veteran and a role model for our young players. If he doesn’t play hard, they might think it’s okay not to play hard. Major League players, stars or not, have to play hard all the time. I won’t accept anything less, even from William.”
“There’s never going to be a time when you’re not responsible for playing winning baseball,” Murphy added. “It’s a guy that has done so much for the Brewers, he still has to abide by all the same [rules]. He doesn’t have to go 100 percent every time down the baseline, but when a guy muffs it, you have to be going hard enough that you’re safe if he does muff it.
Contreras has played at least 141 games and started at least 108 games behind the plate in each of his four seasons with the Brewers, making him the first catcher in Brewers history to catch at least 1,000 innings in three straight seasons. His 1,067 2/3 innings in the grueling position behind the plate are most in baseball this season. This morning a commentator on the MLB DirecTV channel argued that the Contreras was so dedicated and hard-working that the manager should have given him a break. I think that’s how most people react, which is why “The King’s Pass” persists such an unethical blight in companies, universities, the military, government and society in general.
At least Murphy’s players seem to have received the message.
“I think it’s great. I’m sure you guys have heard him say it because he says it to us all the time: ‘You can’t coast uphill,’” said first baseman Jake Bauers when asked about Murphy’s symbolic move. “He wants [us] to keep [our] foot on the gas. We want to keep the foot on the gas. And we don’t want to go into the postseason feeling like we already did something. It’s really just, keep our heads down, keep working, keep preparing and go out and execute at a high clip.”
Paving Paradise, a research analysis study of the loss of California’s agricultural and natural land due to rapid population growth found that 91% of land development since 1970 is a consequence of uncontrolled “immigration,” aka.illegal immigration.
California, a so-called sanctuary state, has the highest concentration of illegal immigrants in the United States, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Over 400,000 entered the state between 2021 and 2023 during the Biden administration. Because population of California has doubled over the past five decades, 3,740 miles of California’s farmland, forests, wetlands and open spaces have had to be paved over to accommodate the all the lonely people, and we know where they all come from. 2.4 million acres of land, an area three times larger than Yosemite National Park, have been consumed. The overpopulation contributes to water shortages, loss of wildlife, more wildfires, traffic congestion, rising housing costs in the state, researchers found.
To be fair, at least there are more murders, rapes, and other felonies. And twenty-four million former California residents have legally migrated to other states to flee the effects of the open borders, so it all evens out in the end.
I burned this week’s open forum on Tuesday night as my remedy for enforced absence from EA (dead laptop, ethics road trip), so I’m waking up this morning with a different low energy feature. This was an awful week from a scheduling standpoint; on the other hand, at least my ethics wisdom was in demand. I had back-to-back seminars to teach for the first time since Ethics Villain Dr. Fauci and the totalitarian Left wrecked my training business (and the economy, children’s socialization, education, culture…) with their lockdown. Oh, and it killed my wife, too, I mustn’t let them off the hook for that. But I’m not bitter…
1. TCM has cancelled Porky Pig. It is hypocritical for a station that purports to preserve American film history and present the screen entertainment of the nation’s past for enlightenment and perspective to engage in any censorship at all reagrding the content its mission dictates, but I guess Porky doesn’t count. TCM often shows Warner Bros. cartoons between its main features, and as any culturally-literate person knows, these always ended with Porky Pig poking through the screen and stuttering, “That’s all folks!” the traditional Loony Tunes coda. It took me a long time to figure it out (“Huh! That’s funny…this one doesn’t have Porky…”) but Ted Turner’s legacy project has erased Porky from the endings of all its Warner Bos. animated features. What petty, silly, cowardly, pandering morons. Porky stutters, see, so he’s being mean to the disabled, or “differently-abled,” or funny speech-enabled, or whatever the hell we’ve been ordered to call it by our moral betters. If “Make America Great Again” meant nothing more than “End Crap Like Banning Porky Pig,” it would still be worth cheering for. I am officially ECLBPP.
2. Speaking of mind-rot in the U.S., one of my most esteemed and once-rational Trump Deranged Facebook Friends demonstrated how the cult corrupts. He posted with favor an essay by a progressive journalist that purported to give “both sides” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and recommended that everyone read it. The essay was weakly camouflaged anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda, and obviously so.
Once my friend would have seen that, but Trump Derangement has eaten a substantial part of what had been an impressive brain. The party he is now pimping for has become, incredibly, pro-Islam, pro-Iran, pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism, so the Cognitive Dissonance Scale is forcing him to excuse these indefensible positions by embracing spin, rationalizations, and lies. The author my friend was promoting referred to Israel as an “occupation” and cited the position of the World International Court as evidence of Israel’s wrongdoing. There is a reason why the U.S. doesn’t recognize the anti-American, anti-Isreal WIC.
Those are flaming tells, and that my friend, a retired lawyer, couldn’t or wouldn’t see that is itself a tell. Tragic. And yes, this time I did comment critically on his post. No response, because he’s still smart enough to know I was right.
3. Back to TCM: the station is saluting director Stanley Kubrick this month, which is appropriate since almost every one of his movies is brilliant and he excelled in every film genre he tried. I stumbled upon a disturbing note, however. Sue Lyon, who played Nabokov’s teenage sex nymph in “Lolita,” was evidently raped and sexually abused repeatedly by the film’s producer during the shoot, which the actress reasonably believed derailed her emotional stability, career and life. Where was Kubrick while this was going on? It was his film and his project, and I hold him responsible if his child star was being abused during the production. This month HarperCollins UK announced it would stop selling the children’s books authored by David Walliams following allegations that he harassed female and junior employees. The UK has lost all common sense in its woke-mania: if we start banning artists based on their personal conduct, we’ll have decimated our cultural resources. Kubrick’s film achievements aren’t degraded by his human failings, but it is interesting to me that Porky Pig was banned because he stuttered yet the TCM progressives don’t think Sue Lyon’s abuse under the director’s metaphorical nose is worth mentioning. TCM’s hosts habitually mention all sorts of production details in their introductions and final comments to the movies they show. (“Gone With The Wind” is racist, you know!) But they admire Kubrick too much to tell “the rest of the story.”
4. Here is something artificial intelligence is good for: baseball statistics and history. Last night the Boston Red Sox lost to the Cleveland Ind..sorry, Guardians 1-0 on a home run around Fenway Park’s famous “Pesky Pole,” which marks the shortest outfield fence point of any baseball park still in use. I wondered if the Red Sox had ever lost a 1-0 game on one of those cheap homers, so I asked Google’s bot. The answer came in seconds: No, last night was the first time that has happened in all the games the Sox have played at home since 1912. Then I decided to check the information, as one must with AI until its annoying habit of making stuff up abates. It took me almost an hour, but the bot was right.
Everyone is writing me about the latest Sunny Hostin episode, and frankly, I don’t understand it at all so far. “The View” co-host, who is arguably the most annoying Dunning-Kruger sufferer on that joke of an ABC “news” program, was in a discussion about Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense and Clancy’s lawyer’s attack on the holdout juror. Hostin, a lawyer who constantly reveals that she is a dim bulb with a law license, claimed that she was the lone holdout juror in the 1991 trial of the notorious Daniel Rakowitz,, known as the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.” Asserting that she was the sole juror who felt he was not guilty by reason of insanity, Hostin claimed she eventually convinced the jurors to vote her way. Rakowitz apparently killed his girl friend in an argument by accident, and subsequently ate some of her to conceal the evidence. Good plan!
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense,” Hostin said. noting that he fed her body parts to the “unhoused.” I admit to being biased against anyone so reflexively woke that they immediately adopt the latest politically correct lingo, especially one as stupid as “unhoused.” The New York jury, which was sequestered, became so angry with Hostin’s stubbornness, she claimed, that one of them threw a chair at her. ” One-by-one, I picked them off and said, ‘What about this? What about that?'” Hostin recalled. The jury eventually found Rakowitz not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.
The argument that Rakowitz was insane isn’t exactly a tough one to make: he cut up the body of a woman he had lived with, boiled her remains and made her into a soup, then chowed down on some of it and handed it out to homeless people. Yeah, he was as sane as the day is long…
Yet for once Hostin had the right analysis of something: she told the View Crew that the defense lawyer’s attacks on the lone juror in the Clancy case undermines the jury system. Correct! See, a blind squirrel can find a nut now and then.
The crazy part is this: several social media users tracked down a contemporary Daily News article that says that Asunción “Sunny” Cummings Hostin was upset with the holdout juror, who was a man, saying she believed the cannibal defendant was aware of his actions and that the Not Guilty verdict wasn’t justified. So she wasn’t the hold-out juror? She made up the tale she told The View?
I defend professional athletes against the hoary accusation that they are paid “too much.” I remember all the arguments my father would have with my Aunt Beatrice, an unshakeable liberal, who would insist that baseball stars getting higher salaries than teachers was “ridiculous.” Dad would patiently try to explain to her the economic principle of supply and demand but to no avail. It would be even more difficult keeping the late Aunt Bea’s passions in check now, when one baseball player has a ten year contract worth 700 million dollars, and the minimum MLB salary is $780,000. The amounts don’t matter, however. Those salaries reflect the actual value of those players, who have rare talents essential to a multi-billion dollar industry that supports many other industries with millions of employees.
However, alleged superstar Vladimir Guerrero Jr. of the Toronto Blue Jays recently made an exquisitely absurd argument to justify the obvious disparity between the 14-year, $500 million contract extension he signed in 2025 and his current disastrous season in which he has performed only slightly better than one of those minimum salary players. Guerrero’s mysterious season-long slump pretty much destroyed 2026 for the Jays, last year’s American League World Series representatives that were the overwhelming favorites to repeat.
In an interview, the 30-year-old Guerrero was asked about his struggles and explained that fans just don’t understand that he is being paid for what he has done in the past, not what he is expected to do in the future.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked…“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”
The early Open Forum today was because I had to complete my annual ordeal driving to Richmond last night to make an early morning three-hour CLE ethics seminar for my oldest client organization (but not my longest continuous client because they’ve fired me twice, always to come crawling back…). The thing was a challenge when my late wife was helping me get organized, packed, get other work in order and so on: now it’s almost impossible, especially last night when late breaking issues from client lawyers, a printer break-down, a need pit bull and a torn suit delayed my preparation for hours.
I began the drive to Richmond at 11:45 pm, and most of it was in heavy rain surrounded by trucks, with me expecting to die at any moment. I arrived at my hotel at 1:30 am, got to bed about an hour later, and woke up at six for final prep only to discover that I had managed to do something to my back over-night and could barely straighten up. Once I did, it became clear that sitting aggravated the injury, triggering back spasms, so I needed to stay standing during my three hour presentation, the break, and the usual discussions with attendees afterwards.
One attendee said he had been retired from law for a decade, but after listening to me, he had decided to renew his license to start practicing again. He said I convinced him that lawyers really could be a positive influence on society, and that it was time for him to use his experience and skills to do that.
Yeah, this is what I love.
It’s worth the hassle, and money has nothing to do with it.
