Again: Progressive Hysterics Over A Responsible Trump Policy Change

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I thought the clip from “Poltergeist” fit here: Welcome back, Dana!

The New Republic, biased and dishonest as usual, bleats, “Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees: Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.” It terms this as “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”

Oooh, banning students! Sounds like a mad dictator to me!

The President isn’t “banning students” or degrees. This is a financially and educationally responsible move that should have been done decades ago. If a student wants to waste a college education on majoring in “Queer History,” or “Slavik Literature” (Plymouth State University allows students to major in “Adventure Education” by taking “Rock Climbing Fundamentals,” “Canoe Paddling Fundamentals,” “Wilderness Expedition,” and “Whitewater Kayaking”) that’s swell: they just can’t use taxpayer funds they will never be able to pay back to do it.

The Department of Education, or what is left of it, tweeted in response to that unethical New Republic analysis,

“This is fake news at its finest. First off, we’re not ‘banning’ any program. The federal government doesn’t set curriculum or programs. Here’s the truth: we are holding colleges accountable for leaving students worse off than if they never enrolled. Too many graduates report delaying major life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Why? Because low return-on-investment programs saddled them with unmanageable debt that was never going to translate into a real-world job. Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs. American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce – and transparency about programs that will never pay off.”

There is a strong case to be made that college itself is now a high-cost scam that doesn’t prepare students for the work force, just anti-Israel rallies and pro-illegal immigration riots, but okay, let’s go with the hoary myth that college is essential to life success. The student debt crisis in this country has reached levels that never should have been permitted, and higher education is as expensive as it is because the schools realized that could charge absurd tuitions and the US government would enable it by backing bigger and bigger loans. Taxpayers and the government subsidizing degrees only makes sense if it incentivizes the development of skills from which the the nation and society will derive tangible, quantifiable, practical benefits. Those are also skills that have a fighting chance of translating into jobs with sufficient compensation to allow reasonable loans to be paid back.

Declaring that the government will only back a student’s loan when 1) that loan is likely to be repaid and 2) when the loan is paying for a benefit to society rather than a self-indulgent frolic is responsible leadership. Unique among U.S. Presidents, Donald Trump sees his most responsible acts reflexively condemned through a combination of misrepresentation, bias and animus. I’m surprised there isn’t a college major in that.

On Perpetual Immaturity and Facing A Life-Defining Moment

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Two thoughts on the first day of the MLB play-offs:

1. I am officially 12-years-old. (Most of my friends and associates know that, but it continues to amaze me.) Today I have critical client work to do involving huge amounts of money (for them, not me). I have several medical issues I need to attend to ASAP. I’m late getting my invoices out and I’m in cash-flow hell. But all I can think about is the Red Sox-Yankee game tonight. (8 PM, EST. on NBC)

This is the juvenile state of mind that led me to risk my job in 1978, when I walked out of a critical, high-level capital fundraising meeting at Georgetown, with all the brass present, saying, “I’m sorry, but the Red Sox and Yankees are playing a game in Fenway Park in an hour to decide the American League East, and I have to see it. Let me know what you all decide.” (That was the Bucky %$#@ Dent Game.) My wife-to-be Grace was at the meeting and was the only one smiling; everyone else looked like the audience in “The Producers” after “Springtime for Hitler.”

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Let’s Play “Wait, Was That Racist or Not?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Hi there, everyone! It’s time to play the exciting ethics game that’s sweeping America: “Wait, Was That Ethical or Unethical?”! As you know, contestants are asked to decide whether an ambiguous statement or action was racist or not!

“Are you ready, contestants? Then let’s play, “Wait, Was That Racist or Wasn’t It?”! Introduce our subject for Round I, Johnny!”

“Sure thing, Jack! Meet Dixie Walker! Dixie was a star baseball player who died in 1982. He won a batting championship and a runs-batted-in title, and he played in two World Series and four All-Star Games. He is most remembered, however, not for his impressive exploits on the baseball field but as the player who led the campaign to keep Jackie Robinson from joining the Brooklyn Dodgers and integrating the game.

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

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.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Not An Ethics Quiz: The “Lake America” Sweatshirts”:

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.

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Ethics Villain: Arlington County (VA) Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

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.

***

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!

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Unethical (And Infuriating) Quote of the Month: Fake Conservative Pundit David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

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.

Pardon my Portuguese, but what an asshole.

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Fewer Voters Trust Voting By Mail. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

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.

Ethics Verdict: The Public Is Too Stupid and Ignorant For A Republic To Function

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Great. Now what?

And those responsible?

  • Parents
  • The education system
  • Teachers
  • The news media
  • 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.

The Rest of the Story: A Non-Apology Apology For An Unethical Quote of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

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.

Et Tu, “Shawshank Redemption”?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

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:

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