Month: January 2010

Pennsylvania’s and Delaware’s Disgrace: Risking the Poor to Balance the Budgets

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Delaware and Pennsylvania, facing state budget deficits that would require political courage and citizen sacrifice to address, has taken the craven route of other states (with more sure to follow) by legalizing casino gambling.

In Pennsylvania, State Republicans, the majority party in the state senate, had opposed the expansion of gambling , but capitulated when faced with the reality of having to choose between cutting jobs and services or raising taxes. Instead, the Republicans joined with Democrats, those champions of the weak and powerless,  to victimize the poorest people in the state for profit. Continue reading →

Hell Freezes Over: Olbermann Relents

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

If any of the talk radio and cable news demagogues (Rush, Glenn, Laura, Ed, Michael, Marc, Bill, Monica, Rachel, Chris and the now-unemployed shouters over at Air America) have ever publicly admitted their rhetorical excesses, I’ve missed it. Thus I was stunned to witness just such an admission from arguably the worst offender of all, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month:charlesphillipsandyavaughniewilkins.com

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It seems to be down now, but the odor lingers on. And there is the matter of the billboards..

Let us stipulate, without really knowing, that YaVaughnie Wilkins has legitimate grievances with  her married former boyfriend, the distinguished Charles E. Phillips, who is president of tech conglomerate Oracle and a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Let us assume that she was legitimately heartbroken and angry when he returned to his wife recently after engaging in an eight year affair with Wilkens, and that YaVaughnie (YaVaughnie??)  was taken by surprise, since Phillips’ wife had filed for divorce two years ago.

Never mind. Creating and publicizing a website, http://www.charlesphillipsandyavaughniewilkins.com, designed to expose the intimate details of a dead affair is indefensible. Setting out to publically humiliate Phillips is revenge, pure and simple. Revenge is unethical. Always. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: New York Times Sportswriter Ken Belson

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I fear that I am becoming a broken record on this (Note to those under the age of 40: the phrase “becoming a broken record” refers to the archaic devices called “records” which once were used to convey music via another archaic device know as a “phonograph.” If a record was broken, as in cracked, the phonograph’s needle, which…oh, never mind. We really need a new phrase for “saying the same thing over and over again.”), but the popular position that only the pure and blameless have the right to condemn misconduct by others threatens our culture’s ability to discuss and distinguish right and wrong. It has to be refuted, discredited, and buried. For subliminal support for this  unethical stance to be injected into a supposedly straight news item—in the sports pages, of all places—is alarming, for it shows how our cultural attitudes can be warped without our even being aware of it. Continue reading →

Final Ethics Alarms on the Coakley-Brown Race: Fairness and Honesty Take a Holiday

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Some concluding Ethics Alarms from the Brown-Coakley Senate race, many with the same dispiriting lesson: hyper-partisan zealotry is causing many Americans to abandon their senses of fairness, proportion, and common sense : Continue reading →

Most Unethical Joke of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Rebecca Solomon,  a 22-year-old student at the University of Michigan,  was flying back to school after her holiday break. Shee arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, to make sure  security screening  wouldn’t make her miss her Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit. She knew about the attempted Christmas bombing attack on the same airline on the way to the same city, and was understandably nervous.

After sending her carry-on items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she saw a TSA worker beckoning her solemnly. As she walked over to him, he pulled a clear plastic bag from her bag. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.

“Where did you get it?,” he said, frowning. Continue reading →

Disbar John Edwards

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The last shoe dropped in the sordid John Edwards tale, with his admission that he was indeed the father of his mistress’s infant daughter, as many suspected. This comes months after he emphatically and repeatedly denied this fact to the media, in the course of admitting that he indeed did have an affair with the child’s mother, Rielle Hunter, after months of denying that. His efforts at covering up all of this ultimately incorporated his terminally ill wife, his friend and supporter Fred Baron, who paid his mistress to make herself scarce, and his aide Andrew Young, who was induced to publicly claim that he, not Edwards, was the father of baby Quinn. All of the deception initiated by Edwards took place while he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, on a platform of moral obligation and justice. Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” Jumps the Rails!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

An ethical dilemma is a situation that requires us to choose between an ethical course and one that fulfills a non-ethical want or need, like getting a promotion, winning the love of our soul-mate, or improving our financial status. Choosing the ethical option often has negative consequences, but it is still the ethical option. Thus it is more than a little disheartening to read the advice columnist who calls himself “The Ethicist” supporting the unethical option—the one that rejects an ethical value in favor of self-interest. Continue reading →

Erroll Southers: Right Result, Wrong Reason

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Erroll Southers, President Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration, withdrew his name today, citing political opposition. His nomination had been held up by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, who wanted Southers’ assurances that TSA workers wouldn’t be unionized. That’s a legitimate issue, but Southers should have lost his nomination when it became clear that he had lied to Congress about an incident in which he had breached his own agency’s security to do investigative work on his estranged wife’s activities. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Sen. Jim Webb

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Naming Virginia’s Senator Webb as an Ethics Hero really gilds the lily, for he has been a hero much of his life, most spectacularly in the Vietnam War, where he was its most decorated Marine. It isn’t surprising, then, that while his party was reeling from Martha Coakley’s loss of Ted Kennedy’s former seat in Massachusetts, and some of his colleagues were spinning plots to find some way to pass health care legislation before Sen. Brown got to Washington, Jim Webb, a Democrat, released this statement before the echoes had even faded away from Scott Brown’s victory speech: Continue reading →