Month: November 2013

Toronto’s Pathetic Mayor: What’s The Question?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
If Chris Farley had been elected mayor....

If Chris Farley had been elected mayor….

I’ve received a wave of emails from helpful readers, with links to news reports about Canada’s shame,  drunk, crack-smoking, lying Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. “Write about this!” they suggest.

Write what?

The mayor of a major Canadian city is a law-breaker, a substance abuser, an addict, and ill. When your defense to a video showing you smoking crack is “I was so drunk, I don’t remember it,” that should say it all. He initially lied about the allegations of his crack use. He calls up radio stations in a drunken state. He is caught on tape drunkenly screaming that he want to murder someone. His various public stances to keep his job have ranged from shameless appeals to pity— “I hope none of you ever find yourself” in such a state, a reverse Golden Rule tactic that amounts to arguing “Do unto others as you would want others to do unto you if you were the irresponsible, addict mayor who will do and say anything to stay in office”—to that old stand-by, Bill Clinton’s “I’m just going to concentrate on doing my job and accomplishing what the voters elected me to do,” as if they elected Ford to embarrass the city. Continue reading →

Wait…Did Debbie Wasserman Schultz Expose A Media Ethics Scandle? Is MSNBC Staging Interviews? Does Anybody Care?

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments
"And now let's ask our guest a tough question: what do you think about what I just showed our audience, Congresswoman? I hate to put you on the spot!"

“And now let’s ask our guest a tough question: what do you think about what I just showed our audience, Congresswoman? I hate to put you on the spot!”

In an appearance on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co., Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz answered queries from Chris Jansing about President Obama’s multi-year lie—desperately being recast as a “promise” by the reporters who have the honesty to report it at all (it’s hard to admit that the leader you’ve been promoting for five years is just just another manipulative fraud )—that “you” can keep your doctor and your health plan if you like them, “period.” I was struck by the unethical means (an ad hominem attack)  Wasserman Schultz employed to rebut a clip of Marco Rubio criticizing the President,  and her pure obfuscation that followed. I also mentioned that she appeared to not know how to pronounce the common word “misled,” saying it instead as “myzeld,” which is usually proof that a speaker is 8 years old.

Sharper eyes than mine among the commenters noticed what I completely missed: the Congresswoman looks like she’s reading from a teleprompter. That would explain “myzeld” more plausibly than my explanation (that everyone in the woman’s life from grade school to now has allowed her to sound like an idiot by not correcting a childish word gaffe). It would also indicate something far more significant than the well-established fact, barely post-worthy, really, that Wasserman Schultz employs unethical debate tactics and is dishonest in statements to the media and the public. If true, it would indicate that MSNBC is staging what it represents as spontaneous, candid interviews, and allows Democrats to know the questions they are going to asked in advance, prepare responses, and have them running on teleprompters at the MSNBC studio. Continue reading →

Preliminary Ethics Observations On The NFL Bullying Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
The bully and the bullied.

The bully and the bullied.

If you are unfamiliar with this story, the details are here. There is much that remains in question, but the basic outline of the incident is this:

  • The Miami Dolphins, like most professional football teams and also most college teams, have a tradition of “hazing” rookies, humiliating and harassing them in various way, “all in good fun, of course.”
  • The ironically named Richie Incognito, a starting guard for the Dolphins, was known as an especially relentless and enthusiastic hazer.
  • Last weak, the team’s second-year tackle Jonathan Martin walked out on the squad and checked into to a hospital, saying he could  he could no longer deal with the continued harassment from his teammates.
  • Incognito was shown to have referred to Martin using abusive language and racial epithets in voice messages.
  • Based on the evidence of the voice mails, the Dolphins suspended Incognito, who is being defended by his team mates. Sources are saying that his career with the Dolphins, and perhaps the NFL, may be over.
  • It is likely that the Dolphin coaches were aware of Martin’s hazing.

This is the perfect ethics problem to approach with what I regard as the most important clarifying question in beginning any ethical analysis:  What’s going on here? Continue reading →

Unethical Magazine Cover Of The Year: Time (As Henry Luce Spins In His Grave)

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Time Christie

It really is past time for Time to go away.

Once the epitome of sharp, incisive, erudite weekly news reporting and commentary, it long ago morphed into just another left-biased shill for liberal politicians and positions, but with a desperate, tabloid-style habit of using intentionally gross, disturbing or controversial cover graphics to sell more copies than its equally biased and shameless rival, Newsweek. Now Newsweek is mercifully gone, but Time’s rude cover habit remains, culminating in the above disgrace to Time’s traditions and responsible journalism.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is fat, get it? He’s the “elephant in the room.” Continue reading →

Case Study: Governments That Waste Money And The Consulting Firms That Help Them Do It, As D.C. Hands Out $90,000 For….WHAT????

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
Great. Thanks a lot, D.C. government.

Great. Thanks a lot, D.C. government.

There is so much to be outraged about regarding the Washington, D.C. “Parent and Family Engagement Summit”  hosted by the city’ s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (D.C. likes to think of itself as a state; it’s cute) in September, it’s hard to know where to start. I  also find it hard to type when I’m trying to stop my head from exploding.

1. Let’s begin with the fact that the city paid nearly $90,000 to a Chicago consulting firm to help it hold the conference, which was only one day, which is to say, about 6 hours, long. This is what having the federal government in your back yard will do to a municipal government’s sense of responsible stewardship. For perspective, think about this: the payment to Chicago-based SPC Consulting exceeds by $12,000 what the average D.C. Public Schools teacher earns in a year for actually doing something. I don’t know what a “parent and family engagement summit” is, but I have a pretty good idea what this one was: an Office of the State Superintendent of Education show-and-tell, so parents could learn what the city is allegedly doing about educating its kids. And I must say, the parents learned, if they were paying attention, what it’s doing, which is wasting their money. Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz

/ Jack Marshall / 61 Comments

Please watch the above, and listen carefully.

How does someone like this become the spokesperson of a major political party, much less get elected to Congress?

  • Her response to Marco Rubio’s undeniably accurate statement was a pure ad hominem attack.
  • Her explanation for why the President’s intentional misrepresentation isn’t the lie that it obviously is consists of nothing but assertively delivered double-talk and irrelevant talking points that do not address the issue.
  • She thinks “misled” is pronounced “myzeld.” Let me repeat that…

She thinks “misled” is pronounced “myzeld!!!!”

I am not surprised at the first; the second is standard operating practice for this Congresswoman (and she has lots of company these days, on this topic), but the last is the canary dying in the mine. Continue reading →

U.S. Journalism’s Integrity Meltdown, An American Tragedy, Starring CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It has come to this.*

Poor Ashleigh and Brianna are just SO confused about it all!

Poor Ashleigh and Brianna are just SO confused about it all!

What should have been, indeed what was obligated to be a professional, objective and clarifying report on the President’s revealed Obamacare lie of three year’s duration became an ugly exhibition of news media government collaboration and shameless incompetence, perhaps the most unprofessional I have ever seen.

From the transcript of  CNN Newsroom on November 5 at 9:33 a.m. EDT: Brianna Keilar, CNN White House correspondent, is reporting on the controversy over the reality that what President Obama assured Americans would be the case regarding their health care plans was not how his health care law actually worked.

KEILAR : Good morning. Basically in the face that that promise could not be kept ultimately [ COMMENT:  Ethics Breaches #1 and #2. This is  horrible, biased, misleading journalism. Obama didn’t make a promise, he made a guarantee: he said what would happen, based om what the law he period. A broken promise implies a present intent to keep a promise that is later broken. That is not what the President’s statements about the ACA were. They were authoritative assertions, intended to be taken as truth.  “Could not be kept” suggests that the failure of the ACA to meet the conditions the President attached to it was beyond his control. This is a lie, or incompetent reporting. It certainly could be kept: the Democratic Senate defeated proposed measures that would have ensured that it was kept. The law’s effect of forcing insurance companies to cancel insurance plans that the policy holders liked was intentional, and well within the President’s control. CNN is a news organization, and is not supposed to be dealing in spin and euphemisms. Yet that is what Keilar privided here.] , and that it just wasn’t as simple from that, we’ve heard from President Obama last night at an OFA event – that’s his former campaign apparatus which is now a non-profit advocacy group which is working on ObamaCare and promoting it – President Obama spoke at an OFA event and here was the change that he made: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month AND The Jumbo: President Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Now, if you had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”

—–President Barack Obama this week, telling supporters of Organizing for Action what he should have said for three and a half years,  but representing the statement as if he had been saying it all along. A video is here.

Jumbo film“Elephant? What elephant?”

There’s not much more to write about this, except to debate whether we should weep, laugh, or take to the streets with torches and pitchforks. The President’s solution to the discovery that his repeated assurances that nobody would lose their doctor or their health plan under the Affordable Care Act were an intentional deception of the American public was not, as his various lackeys and underlings and media lapdogs have claimed in various devious ways, to deny that his statement was a lie (for it obviously was). Neither was it to justify lying, as others among his shameless enablers have done. He didn’t try to minimize the lie and say it was trivial, since only a relative few million Americans will be affected, like the New York Times did, to its eternal shame. No, President Obama is above such demeaning obfuscations and alibis. He simply re-wrote history, and claimed that he said (well, “we” said) words that he never said at all. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Virginia Democratic Lieutenant Governor Candidate Ralph Northam

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Democratic Party candidate Ralph Northam cannot possibly lose the Virginia Lieutenant Governor race today; in fact, he should win by a landslide. His Republican opponent, African-American minister E. W. Jackson, is so conservative he makes his running mate, gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, look like Saul Alinsky, and I’m only exaggerating a little bit. From the pulpit, he has made statements that sound like they were ghosted by Pat Robertson in one of his crazy moods, like when he seemed to be suggesting that children with birth defects were being punished for their parents sins. Jackson doesn’t believe in evolution, thinks that government programs have done more harm to blacks than slavery, and could fairly be described as homophobic.

Still, he is a citizen, a candidate and a human being, so when he offered his hand to his soon-to-be victorious opponent Northam following a TV debate, there was only one decent, civil, ethical, statesmanlike response for Northam: take it, and shake it. That is traditional, civilized, and polite, and for Northam to do what he chose to do instead—ignore Jackson and his hand and snub the Republican, refusing even to look him in the eye—on live TV, no less!— shows him to be an arrogant, unmannered, uncivil jerk of the breed that has brought American politics, government and discourse to a new low. Continue reading →

Workplace Ethics: 62 Things That Are Legal, But 22 Of Them Are Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
"Oh, sure, he's hell to work for, but he never breaks any laws, so you'll be fine."

“Oh, sure, he’s hell to work for, but he never breaks any laws, so you’ll be fine.”

I have been remiss in not adding the terrific blog Evil HR Lady to the Ethics Alarms links, and will finally do so as soon as I post this entry. No profession deal s with ethical nuances and dilemmas more frequently than human resources professionals, and they can be very difficult, even gut-wrenching. In a recent post, EHRL searched through the archives of questions she has answered over the past years, and compiled an eye-opening list, especially for non-lawyers, of the conduct employers could engage in legally, which is to say, get away with and not be successfully sued, to employees, together with some questionable kinds of conduct that are legal for employees to do to each other.

She listed 62 of them, many of which are reasonable ( it’s okay to fire an employee for “being a jerk”) and some are obvious, or should be;  it is legal to quote the Bible in the office, for example. What is legal is not always good, fair, or right, however, and I perused the list with an eye out for legal workplace conduct that was legal but still unethical. About a third of the types of conduct on the Evil HR Lady’s list made mine. What follows is the sub-list of the 62 things it is legal to do at work, the 22 things it may be legal to do at work, but which are still unethical. The reasons for my unethical verdict follow Evil HR Lady’s items.

Here’s the list of the unethical 22 workplace practices: Continue reading →