Now, About Another “Old Friend,” However…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Ironically, while I was feting an old friend over the Independence Day weekend, another old friend, this time a college classmate who roomed with one of my very close friends so I spent quite a bit of time with him, used Linked-In to promote a “Medium” essay he seemed to think was worth reading. Foolishly, I read it earlier this week.

Let’s call this old friend “Bobo.” Bobo has had some tough breaks, but he’s smart and resilient and landed on his feet. He did end up on my blacklist for what I consider to be a major breach of ethics and friendship. About 30 years ago Bobo reached out to me when he was visiting D.C. and said he wanted to get together to catch up. When we did meet, he pitched me on a ski resort he worked for as the head of marketing, complete with a promotional package. The meeting had nothing to do with “catching up”: Bobo was using our past relationship to get a contract from the organization I was working for at the time.

The next time he was in town and called me, I ignored him.

The Medium essay was as good an example of Trump Derangement and progressive indoctrination as one is likely to find. Bobo is based in Colorado, and is apparently a Boulder ventriloquist dummy with the Axis of Unethical Conduct drinking glasses of water while he mouths their message. This thing carried the obnoxious headline, “Is 850,000 Fireworks enough?“, so I knew what I was probably in for. Still, the essay was even worse than I expected. As I said, Bobo is smart, or used to be. But here is what he wrote, absent gratuitous quotes from John Adams, FDR, Dr. Mortimer Adler (?), and Thomas Paine, a pompous introduction, and shoehorned in at the end, another promotion of a project he’s involved in, and probably paid to push

Good ol’ Bobo! Here’s the guts of his essay:

“Nearly every day, our social fabric is being torn apart by executive orders, endless lawsuits, and odious Supreme Court rulings cheered on by the current administration. Let’s also put a bookmark in place to visit the fragmented, siloed media landscape that has amplified unimaginable lies, perpetrated false claims, and exaggerated ludicrous conspiracy theories while doing the bidding of dark money moguls and narrow corporate interests. These bad actors are ripe for prosecution. Criminal disinformation is rampant as they continue to mislead far too many Americans. Do I need to remind my readers that FOX News was guilty of knowingly lying to their listeners and paying nearly a $Billion$ fine? The more we learn about the fragmentation of our sources of information and loss of integrity in journalism, the uglier it gets. There is so much more to say about news deserts, food deserts, lack of trust, wealth disparity, homelessness etc. The meta crises are vast and complex… All this chaos is by design and funded by what many call the Big Ugly Bill — supporting the 800-plus pages of Project 2025. The primary architect and author of that project, Russell Vought, is currently the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

“In 2017, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Steve Bannon declared that Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees were selected for the purpose of the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. And, that was his first administration. My last article in Medium addressed the issue of accountability — it fell on the deaf ears of Republican Senators….In Trump 2.0, think of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. This all boils down to fewer public servants looking out for what people care about, like clean water, clean air, food safety, and better schools for our children. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“…Wondering whether there was anything to be said that hadn’t already been said, concerned that more words would simply be adding trauma to an already deeply traumatized citizenry, I hesitated…. In 1993, we were celebrating our nation’s 217th anniversary of the courageous Declaration of Independence. I had recently returned from the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio, where I had been embarrassed by the proclamation of then President George H.W. Bush, whose first words to the assembly and the world were: “The American Lifestyle is non-negotiable”…

“…Celebrating our independence from tyranny and oppression is baked into our cultural heritage. Yet, in the midst of an historic heat wave, ironically fueled by more than a century of polluting our atmosphere, we have a President determined to “set a world record, like you’ve never seen before” by adding 850,000 bombs bursting in air this evening. Let’s find another way to celebrate that doesn’t add one more molecule of pollution to our precious atmosphere… before this administration literally burns down everything they detest.

“Most observers agree we have precious little time left to change; others are certain collapse is unavoidable. The optimists see this as a golden opportunity to redesign everything that is dysfunctional and destructive. A friend recently reminded me that HOPE is a VERB with its sleeves rolled up! With empathy and compassion, courage and heartbreaking bravery we can move beyond this moment of cruel havoc and selfishness…”

As you know, I have been regularly wrestling my fingers to the floor to avoid responding to such junk on Facebook and elsewhere, but this was too much, especially coming from a fellow Harvard grad. I wrote as a reply to his Linked In post that included the Medium link:

Since you asked for feedback, [Bobo], it’s bad form to complain about false media reporting and then to post “that FOX News was guilty of knowingly lying to their listeners and paying nearly a $Billion$ fine.” That’s not true in several ways. 1. Fox wasn’t found guilty of anything: there was no trial. 2. The issue was alleged defamation, not “lying to their listeners.” The First Amendment protects networks from being punished for lying; otherwise, MSNBC and CNN would be indicted every day. 3. There was no “fine.” A settlement is not a fine or even damages.

Spinning like that removes an essay from the realm of enlightening commentary to just partisan talking points. A collection of characterizations isn’t an argument. Which SCOTUS opinions to you consider “odious”? I read them all, and they were all legally sound, including the one that rejected the President’s EO ending birthright citizenship.

Meanwhile, how about that Graham Platner?

Linked In made me delete a several hundred words. What I originally had before the Platner sign-off was this:

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Ethics Train Wreck Update, In Which the Complicit and Corrupt NYT Journalists and Pundits Can’t Bring Themselves To Be Honest About Graham Platner

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Oh bloody hell,” as self-exiled EA columnist Curmie would say. The New York Times actually published this round-table circle-jerk by three of its writers on the opinion page: “‘There’s No Graham Platner Without Donald Trump’: 3 Writers on the Fiasco in Maine.” [Gift Link, with a head explosion risk warning] Sorry for the vulgarity, but seriously folks, how long can the New York Times go on like this? Yesterday the highest-ranking news editor at the King of the Axis Media, executive editor Joe Kahn, finally admitted that the outrageous May 11 opinion column by Nicholas Kristof accusing Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners didn’t meet Times news standards. Got that? So Times columnists can publicize fake news and unverified positions, and the paper lets them get away with that.

Now we have this garbage, with three progressives blaming the Platner debacle…on Donald Trump!

“In retrospect, it seems clear that Platner had something of Trump’s shamelessness. I saw him when the first scandals had just broken, and wondered both how many people would be in the crowd and how he’d explain himself. (No one knew at the time that much worse was to come, though of course some people suspected it.) He was unbowed in a way that read as strength…There’s no Graham Platner without Donald Trump. Trump’s ability to keep winning and hold G.O.P. support made Democrats feel like they had permission to accept Platner’s faults for as long as they did,,,”

What a crock. Platner is nothing like Trump, who was a CEO of a large and successful development company, had extensive business, negotiation and management experience, had authored books on management and was a national figure before he got into politics. Hhe doesn’t drink and has never used drugs. He also was and is about as far away from being a communist as it is possible to be. Platner was a substance-abusing part-time oyster fisherman who has accomplished exactly nothing: his “faults” are all there is.

Here’s the execrable Michelle Goldberg:

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Ethics Test For The Axis Media

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I know, I know. What’s the point of another test the Axis media is sure to flunk?

The Washington Free Beacon reported this week that an Inspector General audit of the Minority Business Development Agency’s flagship program found that 96 % of the reviewed transactions were improperly approved.

Wowsers.

The November 2025 audit reviewed $16 billion in transactions approved by the MBDA business center program, a network of federally funded consultancies, public and private, aimed at “supporting minority-owned businesses.” A business had to be at least 51% minority-owned to qualify for services: you can figure out how easy that requirement is to scam around. $15.4 billion of the $16 billion in transactions reviewed were “duplicate transactions, transactions with missing or inadequate documentation, and transactions that MBDA should not have approved based on the underlying activity.” One “minority-owned business” obtained a $33 million contract through the program without providing any paperwork to justify it.

President Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 killing the agency. Naturally a partisan federal judge blocked the EO, so the administration fired all its employees in October because another federal judge in March 2024 had ruled that basis of the agency’s mission was unconstitutional and that it was illegal to use race or ethnicity to determine what businesses deserved grants. The Biden administration ignored that ruling.

Did you know that President Trump, that fascist, has ignored court orders?

The audit began under the Biden administration, so it can’t be discredited as a partisan exercise. It did only look at ten of the 40 business centers funded by the agency before the Trump administration ended it last year, and it only chose only those centers with a documented history of bookkeeping irregularities.

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An Old Friend Comes To Call…

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I had a weird Independence Day weekend.

Six months ago an elementary and high school classmate whom I had not seen, spoken to or, frankly, thought about or missed in 50 years contacted me and said he and his family would be taking a cross-country road trip with his 86 foot long trailer in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our nation’s founding. For his D.C. stop, timed to take place on July Fourth, he was wondering if I could accommodate his monster vehicle. (He had checked my Alexandria home’s locale via Google satellite, and saw that there seemed to be a lot of space on my cul-de-sac.)

Let’s call him “Jeff.”

I said “Sure! It would be great to see you!” as a reflex, and promptly forgot about him as well as my commitment.

Well, Jeff arrived as planned after calling me for three days as he drove here. It was immediately clear that he expected me to be his family’s chauffeur, host and tour guide until they departed Monday afternoon. So I was. I took them to museums and D.C. area attractions. I accompanied them to restaurants. They left their trailer and knocked on my door early every morning—earlier than I would usually be up— assuming I was ready to start the day’s events.

This was a weird family. Jeff’s wife (his fourth, I learned) was an Armenian woman 25 years his junior who barely spoke English, and Jeff never indicated that he spoke her language. They had a delightful, happy four-year old boy (whom she dressed like a girl) whom the couple had adopted after his mother, Jeff’s wife’s niece, had been murdered by a serial killer.

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Classic: CNN Accuses Trump of Red-Baiting!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“Why does Trump keep talking about ‘communism’?” CNN asks in a funny headline that answers its own question. Because, you hacks, today’s Democratic Party is crawling with communists.

“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” Trump said during his July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore. “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” At a Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall, the President pledged that “America will never be a communist country.” CNN is perplexed! What is this mysterious “communism” of which the President speaks?

Gee, what could it be? Graham Platner said he was a communist, and was endorsed by Bernie Sanders (who went to Stalin’s Soviet Union on his honeymoon), Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ed Markey, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rep. Ro Khanna, and Sen Ruben Gallego. Is the argument that Platner’s Nazi tattoo appealed to them? His non-existent leadership experience? Was it his record of domestic abuse?

The Mayor of New York both spouts Marxist slogans routinely and is being hailed as a Democratic Party “rising star.” Hilariously, both Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York and Melat Kiros in Denver, who won primaries over establishment Democrats, are defended against allegations that they are communists because “they identify as democratic socialists.”

Riiiight. And Lia Thomas identifies as a female. “You solve homelessness by giving people housing, you solve hunger by giving people food,” Kiros has said. You know. “To each according to his needs.” Chevalier, in addition to wanting to abolish police, prisons and borders, has said that she wants to “seize the means of production.”

“Communism? What communism?”

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Graham Platner Ethics Train Wreck Update [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I wish I didn’t have to write about this nauseating mess at all. It is, however, the most throbbing of the current ethics matters in the news, and, as Hymen Roth says, “This is the life we have chosen!”

1. This is getting to be a habit with Democrats, isn’t it? Use democratic, sort of, means to pick a candidate whom they then drive out of the campaign so they can duck any democratic process whatsoever and pick the next candidate as the Politburo chose Soviet Premiers. Nice! Platner won the primary, and anyone who voted for him is a certifiable irresponsible fool. They have no standing to claim they were duped or deceived. The party and its sheep should have to live with their incompetence. George Will called it “condign justice.”

2. Platner has to step aside voluntarily by 5 p.m. July 13 for his party to replace him. As of now, Platner has only committed to pausing his campaign, whatever that means. If he does withdraw, the law gives Democrats until July 27 to choose a replacement.

3. Here’s how serious Democrats are about governance: one of the potential Senators being floated to replace Platner is actor Patrick Dempsey. Dempsey became a TV star after being a B+ list movie player in “Grey’s Anatomy,” a prime time medical soap opera. He is more qualified than Platner for a Senate seat, but then who isn’t? Dempsey’s a high school grad, an expert juggler, a professional caliber auto racer, and has great hair. Sure, why not? If it works, the Democrats can finally nominate Oprah for President.

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My Legal Ethics Association Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
Great. Unethical legal ethicists....

I have gradually discovered, over the past few months, that the association of legal ethics lawyers in which I am a card-carrying member is, in fact, biased, partisan, and not particularly ethical at all.

Membership in the group is considered a credential and an important one, especially since few legal ethics experts have degrees in the field. (My mentor in the area, Michael Daigneault, is one of the few who do.) I don’t belong to the association because of the credential—membership in the ABA ethics section is regarded as a credential too, and that association is crippled by bias, so to hell with it—but because it once seemed like a useful network and because the listserv keeps me relatively informed of major developments in the field.

I knew the group was overwhelmingly left-biased because the whole legal profession is left-biased. Conservative members generally foxhole during discussions that turn political, and they often do. When I have decided to be Popeye (“It’s all I can stand, ‘cuz I can’t stand no more!”) and point out a particularly annoying outbreak, I receive sheepish emails off site from members who tell me that they agree with me. They just don’t have the guts to say so on the site.

Last month, as I have mentioned here, I raised for discussion the difficult problem of how to square the legal profession’s protection of its many (MANY) alcoholic and substance-addicted lawyers with the duties of candor and communication to clients, supposedly a core legal ethics requirement. The group’s reaction was to “circle the wagons,” deny the problem, and attack me. When I responded in words I believed were appropriate to the attacks, I was singled out and threatened by the group’s president, who said that he had received complaints about my “incivility.”

Translation: Non-conforming positions that made some members uncomfortable are not welcome. Shut up, Jack.

I haven’t participated since. I had already been disillusioned twice in the previous weeks, once when the consensus was that ethics lawyer somehow get an exception from the legal ethics duty to report lawyers they know are unfit to practice ( it would take too much time, you see) and that the fact that bar associations, contrary to the public’s belief, not only do a terrible job policing the profession but intentionally make it difficult for the public to flag unethical lawyers. “How dare you!” would be my summary of the group’s reaction to my pointing out that fact.

Today I saw a post on the listserv by an esteemed member whose signature contained this as a feature:

“A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.” —-Declaration of Independence

So now I have to put up with partisan, No Kings, Trump Deranged virtue signaling. I am sorely tempted to drop a note with the coda, “These people are crazy.” —President Donald J. Trump, 2026 State of the Union Message.

I’m sure I would again be the target of censorship, and maybe, finally, banned. On one hand, I still find the listserv a valuable resource. On the other hand, as Captain Hook would say, they are hypocrites and unethical., and somebody ought to tell them.

Now what?

Ethical Quote of the Week: President Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Exactly.

The President acceded to a “cease fire” that only gave America’s sworn enemy time to regroup, and Iran an opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot be trusted to meet the terms of any treaty or agreement, as Barack Obama cynically and foolishly pretended when he sold out our country and Israel’s in the “palettes of cash for lies” deal.

Iran is in the grip of a sick culture that cannot accommodate the modern world. I’m sure Trump will be assailed by the usual suspects for calling the Iranian leadership “scum,” and probably the Pope as well, because, you know, humanity, redemption, yada yada.

Islam is a religion that celebrates lying to the enemy as a virtue. To trust the current Iran regime is a death wish.

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Jim Geraghty, As The Graham Platner Debacle Becomes An Official EA Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“If Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.”

—-Jim Geraghty in The National Review in a long, thorough and detailed review of just how obvious it should have been to Democrats and journalists (but I repeat myself) that Graham Platner is “an awful human being, and that fact was about as hidden as a supernova from the start.”

The specific political columnist Geraghty was admonishing is the New York Times’ hard left-biased, consistently unethical hack pundit Michelle Goldberg, one of my favorite examples of the kind of flagrant propagandist the New York Times gives its platform to. [Goldberg’s EA dossier is here.] I haven’t bothered to write about her for a while: The Julie Principle. In a classic “Oopsie!” column, she wrote,

“Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.”

Geraghty’s review of just how smoky the “Platner is a world-class creep” gun was is instructive. That anyone endorsed the guy or believed the lame narrative that he was a “changed man” should make the most knee-jerk Democrat think hard about how trustworthy, honest, and, let’s face it, smart this party and its leadership is. Geraghty makes showing their confirmation bias, corruption and contrived blindness look so easy because it is easy:

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Post 250th Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

That whiny, divisive, Trump Deranged video re-hashing familiar progressive, “No Kings” talking points while attacking the elected President of the United States is as good a symbol as any of the despicable efforts the Angry Left…now in the process of morphing into the Communist Left, made to undermine our 250th Anniversary celebration.

What a collection of Hollywood has-beens and hysterics! Then, for good measure, they had to include Margaret Atwood, because everyone knows President Trump wants to force American women to be baby machines. Then there was Chuck Todd, by far the worst, dimmest, most biased an partisan host “Meet the Press ” ever had, whining on his podcast,

Trump’s doing all of us a favor by selfishly trying to steal this anniversary from us. We now see who he really is. So no, it’s not the celebration we deserve. It’s not the one we could could have had. But we get a mirror, and the mirror is telling us something. The country is a lot bigger than Donald Trump. It is bigger than any president and it’s obviously bigger than any political party. And there’s no one definition of patriotism. But it still needs leaders who understand that. It still needs citizens who insist on it. And it still needs people willing to say that the national story belongs to all of us, not just whoever happens to hold power at any one moment. America at 250 may be a lost opportunity. Donald Trump has absolutely sullied the brand of America, doesn’t have to be at 275 Donald Trump has absolutely sullied the brand of America. But America 275 does not have to be…For some people the central text in their lives is religious and I respect that. For me the constitution has always carried that kind of weight. So that’s why I’m so angry and feel betrayed. I do. I feel betrayed as an American by him on this. The Constitution is not perfect, but it gives us a way to keep going. It gives us structure for disagreement. It gives us a method for repair. It gives us the possibility of becoming better without pretending we were always good.May it makes some of the same promises that some religious texts do for people.And this is why I’m so pissed off. Not because I love the country less, but because I love the idea of America enough to resent seeing it cheapened by this man.America deserved better at 250. Someday, I believe it will get better, but it’s in your hands.”

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