I’ve been remiss in posting deserving “Comments of the Day,” and I apologize. It’s not that there haven’t been worthy submissions, its just been a fact that getting content up on EA at all has been especially challenging of late. The last Comment of the Day was almost a month ago. Yikes.
Below, after a brief observation on the specific incident inspiring the post, Charles Abbott segues from the CEO fired for trolling the Trump Deranged in social media with a photo saluting “Lake America” to the ideological grandstanding that has taken over Facebook, at least based on what I am reading there.
It seems the safest thing to do is simply to shut up. That will be a post for another day.
I want to redirect this comment to the topic of your experiences on Facebook. I’m not an expert on the the topic but I’ve had a Facebook account for approximately 20 years now. Like many of us.
You often post that you are surprised by the sorts of posts and comments and behaviors you see on Facebook from people you know personally and/or professionally.
Here’s the way it looks to me. If Facebook has ever been a place where people went to debate things in good faith, or to seek the truth, or to strive after correcting error, that time is long gone.
With this post, I am belatedly adding “Ethics Villain” to the Ethics Alarms categories. I should have done it before: frankly, properly adding categories and tags to each post after I have finished it is a chore, and I often wonder whether it is worth my time. I’ve posted around 20,000 essays, and the tagging and categorizing process takes about 3 minutes, which means I have spent 5 days worth of waking hours doing it already with no end in sight. I could really use those 60 hours right now.
Anyway, back to Ethics Villain: I have used the term to indicate sort of a super-Ethics Dunce, but that that’s not quite right. Ethics Villains are more like ficks, the EA designation for the people who know what they are doing is wrong and shamelessly do it anyway. In March, I posted an incomplete inventory of Ethics Villains, leaving off Dr. Fauci, who was properly branded with the designation later. Upon reflection, the list was very incomplete, omitting, for example, both Clintons and Barack Obama.
It did include “Virginia Democrats,” however, and that’s from whence today’s Ethics Villain oozed.
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Local news reports here in Virginia and newly released transcripts from a House July deposition reveal that Arlington’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Taftiac admitted that her office follows a policy in which a DUI charge may be reduced to a different Class 1 misdemeanor when the drunk driver holds DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status. After all, these drunks are special: they are “good illegal immigrants” who face severe immigration penalties for serious law-breaking in addition to the penalties for drunk driving. An office memo urges prosecutors to consider lesser charges when a DACA recipient is arrested for endangering legal, law-abiding citizen drivers and their families as well as pedestrians who looked both ways and waited for “WALK” before crossing a street in what they assumed would be a safe crosswalk. Hey, all they want is a better life!
And I get — we get to go, or at least to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with the Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians.
But if I could vent one pet peeve about us, starting in 2015, we in the mainstream media learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.
Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places and in many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We have got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.
—-David Brooks, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome fake conservative pundit, on PBS, further amassing Ethics Villain points with wild equivocation as he whitewashes the news media’s leftward and pro-Democratic Party bias by purporting to criticize it.
Both Democrats and Republicans are paying attention. Probably not enough of them, but still…
In 2020, about 46 % of voters, those terrified by months of deliberate Wuhan virus fearmongering by the CDC, Democrats and their news media, cast ballots by mail. This included 58% of Democrats and 33% of Republicans. A new NBC News poll finds that 69% of registered voter plan to vote in person and only 21% plan to vote by mail. Seventy-two percent of Democrats plan to vote in person and only 23% plan to vote by mail, down from 34% two years ago and far below 2020 levels. Among Independents, 20% plan to vote by mail, down from 28 % in 2024. Over half of GOP voters say they will vote in person on Election Day, and 16% plan to vote by mail.
I am reading that this change is based on diminishing fear of dread diseases. No, I believe that the message is getting through to the public despite relentless Axis lies and propaganda. Mail-in ballots are not secure, regardless of what party you belong to. The fact that cheating Democrats want it that way doesn’t mean that thinking Democrats shouldn’t want their own votes to be counted.
Political parties, politicians and candidates, and
The lazy, incurious, complacent public itself.
More than a third of U.S. adults (35%) can’t name all three branches of the government. The 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults from August 6 to 9. Only 65% can name the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The results of that poll were 70% in 2025 and 65% in 2024.
Parents have an obligation to teach such basic civics, if they know it themselves. That any high school lets a student graduate without being able to name the three branches of government is disgusting and constitutes the negligent killing of democracy. I wonder how many teachers are in the 35%? I probably will be happier if I don’t find out.
Other news in the Annenberg poll are ominous but have fewer real consequences. When asked in to name the specific rights protected by the First Amendment, 73% cited Freedom of Speech, less than the 79% who got it right in 2025. Under one-half (43%) could name Freedom of Religion (because, I surmise, less than half care much about religion in today’s America), fewer than one-third (31%) named Freedom of Assembly and, surprisingly at least to me, only 29% named Freedom of the Press (29%). Almost nobody, just 12%, remembered the right to petition the government. In all, only 9% of respondents could correctly name all five rights in the First Amendment, while 24% could name none of them. A similar number, 25% thought the Right to Bear Arms, the Second Amendment, was part of the First.
You know. Morons.
The poll helps explain the infuriating campaign ads I have been seeing during the telecasts of Red Sox games this month. Democratic House member Chris Pappas (Mass.) is the most flagrant villain, telling two-digit IQ voters that he will “fight I.C.E” (Congress can’t fight I.C.E., which is an Executive Branch agency) and “block abortion bans.” If there are abortion bans they are at the state level, so Congress has no say. Nobody has seriously proposed an abortion ban at the national level, which would probably require a constitutional amendment, and that’s not happening.
“Ignorance is costly,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have.”
Bingo. And that’s exactly why aspiring totalitarians like the state of U.S. civic competence just the way it is.
Toronto Blue Jays star Vladimir Guerrero Jr. kind-of, sort-of, not really “apologized” yesterday for the ethically brain-dead comments he made during a Spanish language interview about his $500 million, 14-year contract. I wrote earlier in the week about his absurd protestation that his huge contact wasn’t meant to pay for what he would produce on the field over the next decade-plus, but just a reward for what Vlad had already done. When the erstwhile slugger was criticized for the statement, he doubled down. Now, a scant two days later, he is suddenly contrite, or something.
“The main reason I’m here is because I regret my comments the other day,” Guerrero said through a translator. “I feel from my heart that my fans, my teammates, they needed an apology from me and that’s what I’m here for. Obviously, I’m also here because I’m just going to tell everyone that I’m going to continue to keep working hard to make my contract a great one.
“I just gave it some thought and I felt like the comments I made the other day is not what I really wanted to say, and I really feel that everyone, my fans, everyone deserves an apology from me and that’s the main reason I’m here today.”
Oh. What??? Wait, what exactly is Vlad apologizing for? He’s apologizing because others “needed” an apology because he didn’t say what he “really wanted to say?” We still don’t know what he wanted to say, or if he even understands what he’s apologizing for.
This isn’t even a level 10 apology on the Apology Scale ( “An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust…”). He might as well have said, “I apologize, whatever that means.” He regrets his comments because he’s getting criticism from fans, and someone, apparently his Hall of Fame father, Vlad Sr., told him that he had better say he didn’t mean what he said. Guerrero obviously did and does, because he said what he said twice, and that was essentially, “I don’t owe the team of fans anything going forward. So I stink this year; deal with it. I’ve got my money.” Guerrero’s contract includes a record $325 million signing bonus that protects his contract from the possible work stoppage everyone expects in 2027.
Now he says he “regrets” what he said twice, which is not the same as a sincere apology.
To be fair, I’ll concede that Vlad doesn’t speak English very well. I’ll also note that there’s no excuse for this, since he has split his residences between Florida and Toronto for at least seven years.
Wikipedia says that “that “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) is considered “one of the greatest films of all time.” OK. It’s a good movie. If “one of the greatest films of all time” means one of the best 250 movies, I can live with that. But let’s not get carried away. The Stephen King novella adaptation has been the #1 ranked movie on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) for over two decades, which tells me that the people who frequent that site do so because they don’t know much about American cinema—you know, like Ann Althouse. A substacker I never heard of writes, “I know I’m thirty years late, but I finally watched The Shawshank Redemption. I laughed, I cried, I threw a metaphorical tomato (many, in fact) at the warden and his prison guards, I walloped and fist-bumped in joy at the end. It lived up to every bit of hype and, in my opinion, justified its place as the #1 ranked movie…” That’s nice. You need to get out more, and I officially don’t care what you think about anything else.
But she’s not alone. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an 89% approval rating from 146 critics, It has a score of 82 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 22 critics indicating “universal acclaim”.The American Film Institute ranked the film number 72 on its 2007 AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) list, outranking “Pulp Fiction” released the same year. It was also number 23 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Cheers (2006) list of “most inspiring films.” I think I could list 23 equally or more inspiring films in the sports category alone of the top of my head. The Writers Guild of America listed Frank Darabont’s screenplay at #22 on its list of the 101 greatest screenplays. In 2014, “The Shawshank Redemption” was named Hollywood’s fourth-favorite film, based on a survey of 2,120 Hollywood-based entertainment industry members.
Yes, that’s because the California wokies want to abolish prisons. I’d vote the movie only the second-best film adaptation of a Stephen King novella.
I just watched most of the movie again for the first time in many years. Even if I had been a member of “The Shawshank Redemption” cult, however, I couldn’t forgive the film this gaffe that I missed first time around: in a long panning shot as “Red” (Morgan Freeman) goes on in his soporific narration about how the inmates must have hobbies, there is a brief shot of a chess board, set up and ready for a game.
The board is set up wrong, with a black square on the right-hand corner. I have written about that careless, insulting mistake twice, first in 2022’s Chess Board Ethics: A Popeye. Quote:
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.”
