Starbucks is under fire from anti-gun advocates for its policy of allowing patrons in states that permit open carrying of firearms to sip their espresso with guns on their hips. This has, of course, provoked the usual high dudgeon from Second Amendment supporters, NRA members, conservative media, and—who knows?—maybe a few postal workers getting ready to blow. Continue reading
Month: March 2010
The Unethical Message of the Dems’ “Hypocrisy Defense”
The response of the Democratic Party to their recent flood of ethics embarrassments tells us all we need to know about why the ethics problems exist in this Congress and will doubtless continue. It has, predictably, resorted to the time-tested, playground strategy I like to call the “Hypocrisy Defense,” which aims at avoiding accountability by accusing the accusers. Other names for the Hypocrisy Defense: “Changing the Subject,” “The Incorrigible Scoundrel’s Last Hope,” “The Guilty Condemning the Convicted,” and “Making Yourself Look Less Dirty By Throwing Mud on the Other Guy.” If that’s the best you have, all it shows is that your accusers, hypocritical or not, are telling the truth. Because when you accuse the pot of calling the kettle black, its still means that you are a filthy kettle. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: Mark Levin
Despite his on-air persona as a real-life version of the old SNL John Belushi bit on “Weekend Update” in which his rant on some issue always ended with him convulsing and hurling himself to the floor, Mark Levin is an attorney of some note, a scholar, and theoretically a couple of evolutionary steps above the typical right-wing radio screamer. Yet tonight he began yelling about how hypocritical it was for the Obamas to be preaching healthy life-styles “when his own doctor told him to stop drinking so much!” Now, that is simply untrue, as Ethics Alarms and others have thoroughly documented. Obama’s medical report did not recommend that he “moderate his drinking” as the Drudge Report erroneously reported, but rather recommended “moderation in alcohol intake,” which is boilerplate language for “a drink now and then is OK.” Even though the Drudge smear, accidental of not, made the rounds of the virulent Right media, there had been plenty of time to get the facts right, especially for someone like Levin, who is always mercilessly slamming Democrats for sloppy research and dishonest facts. Continue reading
Ethics Quote of the Week
“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
—-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her speech before the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, dicussing the need to pass health care reform.
Many, including me, assumed that reports and YouTube clips of this comment were just typical examples of the increasingly common deceitful tactic of taking one sound bite out of context to make the speaker sound irresponsible or, in some cases, unhinged. But read the speech: Pelosi really is asking her audience to trust her, the House, Senate Democrats and President Obama to pass a sweeping, life-altering, expensive and vaguely defined law, that the legislators haven’t read and the public cannot begin to comprehend. Continue reading
Bizarro World Ethics: Saving the Prisoner to Kill Him
Lawrence Reynolds, an Ohio Death Row inmate, was supposed to to be executed by lethal injection this week. Instead, he is in a Youngstown hospital after an apparent suicide attempt late Sunday night. Having rescued him from death by his own hand, Ohio will now pay for Reynolds’ medical treatment until he is healthy enough to be sent to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville, where executions take place.
Then they’ll kill him. Continue reading
Fracking Ethics
The Eric Massa affair quickly revealed itself as the spectacle of a foolish, narcissistic, dishonest man trying to milk every drop of attention out of the well-deserved implosion of a political career that never should have begun in the first place. Fortunately, there was a side benefit: its reporting by the media exposed the dishonesty of the practice of fake civility. Genuine civility is one of the foundations of ethical conduct, though admittedly a shaky one right now. Fake civility, however, is cynical, dishonest, disrespectful and, on top of all that, silly and ineffective.
One of the inappropriate supervisory moments that punched Massa’s ticket out of Congress was that he told a male staffer, in the presence of others, that “I should be fucking you.” Someone at the Mainstream Media High command issued a memo that the gentile and classy way of reporting this statement was “I should be fracking you.” Not that there was any pretense about what the word signified. On the Headline News morning show with giggly news-bimbo Robin Meade (an in-your-face insult to every serious female broadcast journalist in America), Meade listened to the “fracking” account and said—every one of the times the story was repeated during the program— some version of “Gee, I never heard that word before (giggle)!” Whereupon the newsreader replied with some form of “I know (snicker) neither have I!” They were far from the only ones. Dana Milbank used the same code in his account of Massa’s messes in the Washington Post. “Fracking” is the euphemism of the week. Continue reading
Public Privacy and the Ubiquitous Camera
Everybody has a camera…well, almost everybody. Thanks to cell phones, we can be recorded in still or video formats almost every second of the day. We are our own Big Brother. So much so, in fact, that it is hard to muster too much fright and indignation over increasing use of public cameras by the government. Boston police, for example, now have immediate access to street video of shootings, robberies, and homicides on many city streets, and use real time images to send information about the suspects and crimes to responding officers. Continue reading
Black Barbie, Walmart, and Pricing Ethics
Social commentators, business analysts and ethicists are tying themselves into logical and philosophical knots trying to explain exactly what is so wrong in 2010 with Walmart cutting the price of its black Barbie doll, which has not been selling well at its current price, while leaving the price of its white Barbie, which has been selling, almost twice as high. Continue reading
Forgetting Farrah
The film montage of significant Hollywood figures who have died since the last Oscars broadcast is always an emotional and evocative feature of the Academy Awards, as well as a time to bid a final farewell to various faces that became affectionately remembered parts of our past. Except for fanatic film buffs, there is always the occasional “who the heck is that?” moment, as a the image of a”famous” make-up artist or key grip passes by. But they were all important, in their own ways, and deserve their final salute.
Farrah Fawcett, who died of cancer last year, deserved her final salute too. Yet she was missing. Continue reading
Ethics Train Wreck: Step-Dancing, Racism, and Coke
I missed this story last week. I am almost sorry it came to my attention.
February 20 witnessed the national finals of the Sprite Step Off competition in Atlanta, billed as “the largest Greek stepping competition ever.” I never heard of “step-dancing,” but that is apparently because I’m not black. It is a lively type of dancing favored by black fraternities and sororities. Although the performance by the all-white Zeta Tau Alpha team from the University of Arkansas—the only white team in the competition—received uproarious applause, mixed with amazement on the part of the almost all-black crowd that a white team could master the art, the cheers turned to jeers when they were announced as the winners. Although few disputed that the Zeta team had been one of the very best, angry e-mails and on-line protests from African Americans began building into a tidal wave. There were accusations of “cultural theft,” and the general message was that a white team should not have been declared the winner in a step-dancing competition. That was a black tradition, and only bias could explain the white team’s success. Most of the protests came from people who had not seen the performances. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 