The AP has apologized for running this misleading, undignified, offensive photograph of Mitt Romney, suggesting that he was happily mooning a shocked girl. In fact, he was in the act of sitting down for a photo, and the girl was showing surprise that the presidential candidate would be sitting next to her.
Apology not accepted. Continue reading
Poor choice of role model, Mr. President.
Consider these post-debate quotes from various key figures in the Obama campaign:
” The President did a good job explaining his positions, but give credit where credit is due. Governor Romney had a great night. He was focused and clear, and obviously connected with the audience. He’s a capable adversary, as we always knew. President Obama can and will equal and surpass his performance in the coming debates.”—David Axelrod
” Governor Romney proved himself to be a formidable debater, and the President will have to be more aggressive in countering his arguments, which he certainly has the ability and the ammunition to do.”—Stephanie Cutter
“I didn’t feel I had a poor debate, but I obviously need to have better ones. Sometimes the other guy just beats you, and you have to accept that, tip your hat, and win the next time.”—President Obama
If you haven’t seen these respectful, gracious quotes, all typical of the comments of past candidates and their staff after debate performances that were seen as falling short of their opponents’, there’s a reason. Nobody on the Democratic side, including Obama himself, nor most of the media pundits except those who would be fairly classified as conservative, have been willing to give Mitt Romney any recognition for a well planned, well-executed, professional and compelling debate. “What happened?” Diane Sawyer asked the President. “I had a bad night,” he replied. Romney, you see, had nothing to do with it. Continue reading
–—Peter Eyre, advisor to the Presidential Debate Commission, in a statement to USA TODAY. He was referring to the revealed conflict of interest that calls into question the appropriateness of ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz being chosen as moderator for tonight’s Vice-Presidential Candidates Debate despite the President having attended her wedding and the fact that her former husband was an OBAMA donor and is a high-ranking member of the administration himself.
Let me make this as unequivocal as possible: Eyre’s statement is ignorant, arrogant, incompetent, and disgusting. And, of course, unethical.
Eric Lomax was a hero of forgiveness.
Eric Lomax, his book, the Bridge on the River Kwai,, and his friend, the man who tortured him.
In 1942, Eric Lomax, was a 19 year old member of the British Royal Corps of Signals stationed in Singapore when he joined thousands of British soldiers in surrendering to the Japanese. It was 1942. He was one of those shipped to Thailand and became one of the slaves laboring to build the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway. The building of the railroad and the brutal treatment of the English prisoners by their Japanese captors formed the plot of the classic 1957 David Lean film, “The Bridge on the River Kwai,”
After Lomax was discovered to have built a radio receiver from spare parts, he was mercilessly tortured and interrogated by his captors. After his release, fantasies about murdering his main torturer, a man named Nagase Takashi, obsessed him. Lomax spent the early years of his retirement in the 1980s looking for Takashi, and eventually learned that he had become an interpreter for the Allies after the war. In 1992, he stumbled across an article profiling Nagase and noting that he was haunted by guilt over his mistreatment of one British soldier. That soldier, Lomax realized, had been him. He arranged to meet the man who tortured him, and whom he had spent the rest of his life dreaming of murdering.
Torturer and victim met in 1993, on the infamous bridge Lomax had been forced to help construct (and which was not blown up, the film ending notwithstanding). Continue reading
All is lost now…
The Obama campaign’s new creation is a 30-second spot that opens with shots of Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and other business villains. “Criminals. Gluttons of greed,” intones the ad’s solemn narrator. “And the evil genius who towered over them? One man has the guts to speak his name.” Then the ad cuts to Mitt Romney, pulling two words out of his debate comments (the words that came before them were, “I love..”), saying “Big Bird….Big Bird…Big Bird”
B.B. then appears in a montage of Sesame Street clips, as the narrator says, “Yellow. A menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about. It’s Sesame Street. Mitt Romney, taking on our enemies no matter where they nest.”
It’s an epically stupid ad, if for no other reason that it recruits a non-profit organization’s symbol into a partisan political attack ad, without that organization’s permission. The Children’s Television Workshop has officially “requested” that the Obama campaign remove it. The ad is far worse than that, however: Continue reading
ABC just made my head explode. How’s yours?
Is this basic and obvious ethics principle really so elusive that ABC never considered it?
We learned today that ABC’s Martha Raddatz, a senior foreign correspondent and the assigned moderator for this week’s Vice Presidential debate, was once married to a high-ranking member of the Obama administration, FCC head Julius Genachowski, and President Obama was a guest at their wedding.
DING!
Foul!
Gone!
Uh-uh!
Disqualified!
Under no circumstances, in this hyper-partisan environment when “that handkerchief was a cheat sheet!” conspiracy theories follow a transparent debate thrashing, and a professional moderator who does his job, like Jim Lehrer, is used as a scapegoat to excuse a supposed master of communication who forgot to make eye contact while speaking, should a debate moderator be tolerated who has these kinds of connections to either Presidential ticket. Isn’t that obvious? If it wasn’t obvious to Raddatz and ABC, why not? What’s the matter with them? Continue reading
In Jessica Simpson’s Weight Watcher’s TV ad, the former “Daisy Duke” appears only as a giant head, as if the spot was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Jessica was a last minute stand-in for Marlon Brando.
“the horror…the horror…”
It is clear that Jess is not willing to show America her post-pregnancy body, even though she is telling the public to buy what she’s using to slim it. She is ashamed, in other words, and if a beautiful young woman like her believes that not being able to fit into Daisy’s cut-offs makes her hideous, just imagine how that makes the average woman feel.
Then there is Christina Aguilera. The former waifish “pop tart” who sang “Genie in a Bottle” is now an established pop music diva, and posed for photographers as she announced the American Music Awards Nominations in a throbbingly purple form-fitting dress that didn’t hide a single pound or curve, and showed that she has an abundance of both.
“We’re gonna need a bigger bottle…”
Christina’s not ashamed, nor should she be, and her willingness to look happy and confident regardless of her expanding figure is a boon to a culture that has been working overtime to make women of all ages feel unattractive unless they look like super-models. Continue reading
Frequent commenter Barry Deutsch provides some useful counterweight (as usual) to an Ethics Alarms post, this one regarding fake handicapped flyers in airports. Here is his Comment of the Day, on the recent post, “Miracle Flights”: More Air Travel Cheating”:
“Eh. I’m sure some people do cheat – but I’m also sure that some people who the article implies are cheaters, aren’t doing anything of the sort.
“I’m not usually bothered by the five-minute walk from when I get out of security to my gate in the Portland airport. But standing on the security line is much harder. First of all, it can easily take up to 20 minutes if the airport is crowded, so I’m standing for much longer. And even if it’s only five minutes, standing still (with occasional shuffling) is just much, much harder on me than walking is. My bad knee and heel, normally slight nuisances that I ignore while walking, sometimes scream with pain waiting on line. Continue reading
Paul! See that guy holding the sign that says, “Atheists Go Back to Your Apes”? YOU COULD BE THAT GUY, PAUL!
An ignoramus and proud of it, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA.) is apparently serving in Congress while waiting for a juicy role as one of the fanatically religious townspeople in “Inherit the Wind,” should a local production materialize. For it was good people like Broun, with his level of education, certitude and Godly conviction, who occupied the town of Dayton, Tennessee during the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” the famous legal battle over the teaching of evolution that inspired the fictional stage adaptation of the event authored by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, perhaps the best high school drama club play that ever graced Broadway.
Those science-hating, God-loving people of Dayton’s imaginary stand-in, “happy Hillsboro,” get to do a lot of revival meeting singing, and scream “Praise God” and “Read your Bible!,” and join in choral renditions of “We’ll hang Bert Cates from a Sour Apple Tree,” a reference to the play’s junior high science teacher, who, like the real John Scopes, dares to defy Tennessee law and teaches his students that the world isn’t only 9,000 years old, that Adam didn’t ride around on a triceratops and that mankind evolved from more primitive primates. Broun would be terrific at the singing and screaming, I’m sure. Continue reading
The Naked Teacher Principle: The Principle states that a secondary school teacher or administrator (or other role model for children) who allows pictures of himself or herself to be widely publicized, as on the web, showing the teacher naked or engaging in sexually provocative poses, cannot complain when he or she is dismissed by the school as a result.
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Ms. Webb, NYC school guidance counselor, circa 1995. Va-va-voom.
Tiffany Webb is, or was, a 37 year-old guidance counselor in the New York City public schools. She had excelled at her job for 12 years until photos she posed for as a 20-year-old lingerie model turned up on the internet. When a student showed photos of Webb that he had found online to her principal, it was recommended that she be fired. After an investigation, an Education Department committee voted 2-1 to do just that, concluding, ‘The inappropriate photos were accessible to impressionable adolescents. That behavior has a potentially adverse influence on her ability to counsel students and be regarded as a role model.”
Her firing came as she was scheduled to gain tenure. Naturally, she’s suing. I hope she wins, because while the committee’s rhetoric is in line with the sound reasoning behind the Naked Teacher Principle, the facts dictate that this is the point—and all rules have such a point point— where “ethics incompleteness” occurs and the rule, however valid it is the vast majority of the time, accomplishes unethical rather than ethical ends.
The Naked Teacher Principle doesn’t apply to Tiffany Webb because:
1. She is not naked, though the photos doesn’t leave much to the imagination, either. OK, forget #1. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 