Month: April 2021

Unethical And Intolerable: Waters, Babbitt, Sicknick, Part 1.

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

intolerable

The United States is now being consumed by a wave of audacious double standards and hypocrisy, rooted in racial bias and oppressive partisanship. Exposing it, condemning it and opposing it is to invite “cancellation” and being tarred as an ally of white supremacy. In the words of George H.W. Bush to Saddam Hussein, “This will not stand.”

I. Rep. Maxine Waters.

By any fair and reasonable standard, Waters’deliberate attempt to incite violence and law-breaking among already agitated and agitated protesters in Brooklyn Center, the Minneapolis suburb where Daunte Wright was killed, should earn her serious sanctions from Congress, her own party, and by the standards previously asserted by her party, the justice system. She exhorted the potential “mostly peaceful” mob to “get more confrontational” when the city had already seen burning, looting, and attacks on police. She directly threatened the jury in the Chauvin trial just a few miles away. In response, the judge in that trial, Peter Cahill, castigated Waters by name as the trial went to the jury, saying that her words were “disrespectful to the rule of law,” and adding,

“I’m aware that Congresswoman Waters was talking specifically about this trial, and about the unacceptability of anything less than a murder conviction, and talk about being ‘confrontational.’ [I wish] elected officials would stop talking about this case…I think if they want to give their opinions, they should do so in a respectful and in a manner that is consistent with their oath to the Constitution, to respect a coequal branch of government.Their failure to do so, I think, is abhorrent.”

Then, whistling in the dark, he tried to deny the obvious, saying that her comments wouldn’t affect the jury because he had instructed them not to pay attention to them. Right. Everyone knows that the old “pretend you didn’t hear what you heard’ command is a perfect remedy. (See: “The Verdict.”) Pathetically, Cahill said that one congresswoman’s opinion “really doesn’t matter a whole lot anyway.” Then why did the judge take the extraordinary course of mentioning it during the trial?

Cahill’s refusal to sequester the jury after Wright’s death was a terrible error, and it is coming back to haunt him quicker than anyone could have predicted, thanks to Waters. Later, the truth battled its way out of his mouth and he blurted out that Waters “may have given” the defense grounds “on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.”

And yet Nancy Pelosi, who led a contrived impeachment of Donald Trump for urging demonstrators to peacefully protest because she claimed it sparked an “insurrection,” claimed nothing was amiss with Waters’ speech. “Maxine talked about confrontation in the manner of the Civil Rights movement. I myself think we should take our lead from the George Floyd family. They’ve handled this with great dignity and no ambiguity or lack of misinterpretation by the other side…No, I don’t think she should apologize.”

The rule, then, appears to be that a Democratic Congresswoman can cross state lines to urge an already inflamed crowd to get “more confrontational” while threatening a demonstration showing that it “means business’ if a jury does not provide the verdict she demands, while a Republican President should be impeached and charged with a crime for urging demonstrators to peacefully protest what they and he believe to be an undemocratic election.

Is it material that the Congresswoman inciting a riot is black, and the President who called for a peaceful protest is white? Are we allowed to wonder? Is it permissible to consider reality?

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More Evidence Of How The Presidency May Have Been Stolen. More Is Surely On The Way…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

President Trump was wrong to keep claiming that voter fraud was responsible for his 2020 election loss; indeed he was wrong to be the one to question the fairness of election at all. However, the constant mantra in the mainstream news media that his complaints that the election was “stolen,” “rigged” or “fixed” are “false” meets the classic standard for “protesting too much.”

The 2020 election was rigged, as I explained here. The rigging by the mainstream media began from the second Donald Trump was elected, causing Democrats, progressives and especially journalists to abandon tradition, sound democratic principles, fairness, responsibility and ethics to do everything in their power to undermine the elected President of the United States, because they didn’t vote for him, didn’t like him, and refused to accept Hillary Clinton’s well-earned defeat. Out of this, what I have (correctly) termed the worst ethics breach in our society since at least the Second World War, we got the succession of Big Lies and the series of plots to remove Trump from office, including two unjustified and unethical impeachments.

I doubt that any President in our history could have overcome the deliberately biased news coverage and the barrage of fake negative news Donald Trump was attacked with for four straight years. It’s impossible to say, since no elected President, not even Richard Nixon, was subjected to anything similar. It is also impossible to say, it must be emphasized, that the despicable and unethical journalism used to undermine Trump actually caused his loss. This is, however approximately the same argument the defense in the Derek Chauvin trial is making. The media’s knee was on the President’s neck, but there were other things that might have killed his Presidency. It does not make the news media’s conduct any less wrong.

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Ethics Irony: The Day The Author Of The Declaration Of Independence Sold An American To The Author Of The Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

John-Freeman-sale-to-JM-LOC

April 19 is a pretty bad day in U.S. history generally. In 1775, the Revolutionary War started with a rout in Lexington, Massachusetts, just a few minutes by car up Massachusetts Avenue from my childhood home in neighboring Arlington, then Menotomy. 700 British troops, having shot up that hamlet and its defenders on the way, found 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker opposing them on Lexington Green, now a large traffic circle. It took a just few minutes to kill enough of the barely trained Colonists for the ragtag army to disperse, but the British marched into a much larger force at nearby Concord Bridge, and a much worse result for the Empire. In 1993, a botched siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas ended with 22 children and almost 80 adult religious cultists burning to death. In 1995, the U.S. was introduced to domestic terrorism on a grand scale with the Oklahoma City bombing. But none of those events create the ethics trauma of considering a little noted financial transaction between the former third President and the newly sworn in fourth.

On April 19, 1809, Thomas Jefferson, seemingly always lacking cash, prepared a contract to transfer ownership of an indentured servant with the ironic name of John Freeman to freshly installed President and fellow Virginian James Madison.

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Ethics Villain: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Cal.)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I seriously considered not posting this, because Waters’ ethical villlainy should be obvious to everyone, and Ethics Alarms generally doesn’t post on the obvious.

It has certainly been obvious to Ethics Alarms from the beginning: in 2009, in one of the very first posts here, I noted that CREW (Citizens for Responsible Ethics and Responsibility in Washington), the Democratic Party-bolstering fake “non-partisan” ethics watchdog, had labeled Waters one of the “Most Corrupt” members of Congress. This served their masquerade at the time, because it is so obvious that Waters is corrupt that she was “low hanging fruit”: by listing her on their unethical Congress members docket, CREW could claim that they really were bipartisan. (If CREW didn’t list Waters, it would make the group look like the sham it is.) Democrats know Waters is unethical; they simply lack the guts and integrity to say so and do something about her.

As I wrote in another post about Waters, “Never mind though: Waters is black, so by the infinitely adjustable weaponizing definition of racism used by progressives, black activists and Democrats for the previous eight years, to criticize her at all is to be a racist.” There is no member of Congress—maybe no one in government—so brazenly reliant on this principle as Waters. She also girds herself in gender, so pointing out the obvious about her—that she’s a demagogue, a racist, an embarrassment to her her party, a disgrace to Congress and not very bright in the bargain—gets a critic tagged as a bigot AND a misogynist. The fear of this is so great that even Bill O’Reilly, himself an ethics villain who seldom crumpled in the face of race-baiting, groveled an apology for mocking Waters’ helmet-hair in 2017, saying, “As I have said many times, I respect Congresswoman Maxine Waters for being sincere in her beliefs. I said that again today on ‘Fox and Friends,’ calling her ‘old school.’ Unfortunately, I also made a jest about her hair, which was dumb. I apologize.”

Defenders of slavery were sincere in their beliefs. Flat-earthers are sincere in their beliefs. Charles Manson was sincere in his beliefs. Stalin was sincere in his beliefs. The old guy with empty look in his eyes who stood with his old Weimaraner day and night near our street where I grew up, thinking he was still an air raid warden in World War II was sincere in his beliefs, and he was harmless, unlike Maxine Waters.

It’s kind of fun, in fact, to read the Waters dossier at Ethics Alarms, and I was selective. I almost literally could have posted about her ethics vacuum every time she opened her mouth. I had forgotten for example, that she posted this on Twitter:

But history teaches that eventually those who think they are immune from accountability go too far, and if the latest from Maxine isn’t an example of that, it should be. Continue reading →

On Supreme Court Packing

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Guest Post by Steve-O-in NJ

Yesterday, the Democratic party, or at least an element of it, unveiled legislation which is history- making, but not in what I think is a good way.

I’m talking about Jerry Nadler and Ed Markey’s proposed legislation to add four justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has been composed of nine justices since before the beginning of the 20th century. The last time anyone even considered anything like this was in 1937, when FDR developed a plan to add six more justices to “pack”  Court so that he could continue to push through his ambitious New Deal programs. SCOTUS had been slapping them down as unconstitutional. He cloaked is as an attempt to make the court more efficient, since justices tended to serve well past the average retirement age even then, and the idea was that the institution would benefit from younger judges. Both his own party in Congress and the public saw this for what it was, and the backlash was swift. The President would not get to stuff the Supreme Court with his own judges with rubber stamps in hand.

Still, some said that the message was sent and received, as  Justice Owen Roberts, who had previously sided with the conservative block on the Court, known as “The four horsemen,” suddenly sided with the liberal wing of the Court in the matter of West Coast Hotel v Parrish, upholding the constitutionality on minimum wage legislation.  We will really never know, since the earlier Justice Roberts took the unusual step of burning his notes and papers before the end of his life. Supposedly, however a memo he provided to Justice Felix Frankfurter indicates that he was planning to rule that way before FDR threatened to pack the court.

In any case, FDR continued past two terms and was able to stuff the federal judiciary with his own people more than any President, since the rest were limited to two terms either by self-restraint, tradition or law. The influence of his justices  and those appointed by his successor Harry Truman cast a very long shadow over the Supreme Court for quite a while, although not as long a while as you might think. In fact, Richard Nixon was the president who appointed Harry Blackmun, author and longtime defender of Roe v Wade,  arguably before the question of liberal versus conservative justices became so pronounced. It wasn’t until Carter couldn’t nominated a single Supreme Court Justice and Reagan and Bush the Elder nominated five between them that the question of liberal versus conservative justices versus qualified justices became as divisive an issue as it is now.

No president has had enough slots open during his administration since then to decisively move the court one way and give it either a solid liberal majority or a solid conservative majority. Part of that, no doubt, was due to so many justices hanging on to their seats long after they should have retired, so as to not allow a President who disagreed with them to appoint their successors. That’s why Harry Blackmun remained until Bill Clinton was safely elected; that’s why Antonin Scalia died in the saddle, and that’s why Ruth Bader Ginsburg gambled and ultimately lost her  battle to last until the 2020 election before her 86-year-old, cancer ravaged body giving out.

Neither party likes the idea of the needle moving farther away from them on the Supreme Court and possibly undoing their significant and important legislative accomplishments. The Democratic party is particularly bitter now, since it had counted on Hillary being elected right after Obama and being able to add more liberal justices on top of the two that Obama had appointed.

They are also bitter because of the dangerous but ultimately successful gambit that Mitch McConnell managed to pull off after the death of Justice Scalia. The Democratic party believes Merrick Garland should be sitting on the Supreme Court right now, and two more liberal justices should have joined him. They should be enjoying a solid liberal majority on the Supreme Court and be watching Hillary lick her chops waiting for the three remaining conservative justices to die or retire, with the dream that either she or her Democrat successor can create a fully liberal and transformational Supreme Court.

That dream has been pushed out of reach now, and the Democrats are facing a 6 to 3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that is likely to foil many of their plans. So they are ready, willing, and able to use the political capital that they  have from this past election and the Black Lives matter movement to change the rules so they don’t have to wait for the Court to change the old fashioned way.

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What A Beautiful Day! I Hate To Darken It With These Four…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s the April 18, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake as portrayed in the 1936 Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy-Jeanette McDonald classic “San Francisco.” Jennette had just finished singing “San Francisco,” the song, and then all hell broke loose. The scene is evidence of some outrageous unethical behavior by the director, W.S. Van Dyke, wanted the crowd to react spontaneously, so without their knowledge or consent, he had the nightclub set built on giant foundation that would start shaking violently at the push of a button. They thought a real earthquake had hit, and many of those terrified expressions are genuine.

Of course, the best ethics story on an April 18 was memorably told—I should know: I memorized it!— by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

…

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

And imagine: All for slavery! Paul’s fellow midnight rider, who never gets proper credit, was William Dawes. He rode through my home town, Menotomy, Mass., now Arlington.

1. Bill Maher is shocked—shocked!—that his fellow Democrats believe mainstream media propaganda about the Wuhan virus. On his HBO mostly anti-conservative bitchfest, the comedian, sort of, expressed outrage that according to a Gallup survey, Democrats flunked the question of how likely it was for someone who had the virus needed to be hospitalized. Just 10% gave the correct answer—less than 5%. 41% of Democrats believe more than 50% of those infected would need to be hospitalized.

Really Bill? That’s a surprise? Your pals in the mainstream media hyped the virus mercilessly—they still are doing hit. Ethics Alarms has followed that story. You’re the one who said on your show that it would be worth crashing the economy to get Trump out of office, and that’s what the pandemic hysteria helped accomplish. You should be thrilled: it worked!

Bill also professed to be upset that that the same survey shows that Democrats greatly over-estimate how dangerous the Wuhan virus is for children. Why, Bill thinks this could be why the majority of schools systems that have remain closed are in Democratic Party-controlled cities and states!

Ya think, asshole????

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Ethics Observations On The Shooting Death Of Peyton Ham [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There were no mostly peaceful protests in Leonardtown, Maryland this week, despite the similarities between the 16-year-old high school student’s shooting death at the hands of a Maryland state trooper and the sensational death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland six years ago. Why is that?

Ham was fatally shot by a state trooper who had responded to two 911 calls about someone “acting suspiciously” and armed with a pistol. A witness to the event told police that troopers encounter Ham in a driveway “in a shooting stance” using an Airsoft gun. A trooper opened fire on the teen and wounded him. A second witness said the wounded boy then took out a knife and tried to get up, whereupon he was shot dead.

Airsoft guns are realistic replicas of real weapons. They shoot plastic BBs. My son collected them; once we had our parked car surrounded by police because he left some of them in the back seat. Pointing an Airsoft at a police officer is an excellent way to get shot, and justifiably so. But the reason there were no protests, demonstrations or riots after his death is that Peyton Ham was white. There is no other reason. (Well, it also wasn’t Portland. More about that later…)

Because the victim was white, there was no immediate presumption of racism and police brutality. Nobody argued that police should have tried to “wing” him. Nobody argued that a social worker rather than police officers should have responded to the 911 call. Ben Crump didn’t immediately make a statement that this was yet another “execution” of an innocent, promising young black man due to cop brutality and racism, and a racist system. The story wasn’t even national news.

Yet the family played by the script that has become so familiar. It quickly put out a statement that made Ham sound like the perfect son. It described him as “an incredibly smart, gifted sweet young man” with a “Alex P. Keaton” type personality, referring Michael J. Fox’s character on the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties.”

“Our family is absolutely heart broken and shattered over this sudden, unexpected loss of life of a talented young man, filled with promise,” the statement says. “Words cannot express the gratitude our family is feeling with the overwhelming love and support being extended by our friends and family in our amazing community.”

Speaking to the AP, Ham’s mother described her son as “an awesome young man.” You know, like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. This kind of statement, which made no sense whatsoever in the context of the facts of Ham’s death, was calculated to spark anger and suspicion against the police, and to shift responsibility from the shooting victim to those trying to protect the community. If Ham had been white, there would have been the assumption of a cover-up, and the presumption of a deliberate racist killing of an innocent boy.

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The Corruption Of Education In America, Public And Private: A Tweet And A Parent’s Letter

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Yes, that’s the tweet. No, I’m not kidding: that’s a real tweet. The Tweeter is the head of the American Federation of Teachers, herself a teacher. You can’t get more res ipsa loquitur than that, can you? Don’t tell me that anyone can make a mistake: THAT 115% mistake can only be made by a rank incompetent, and she’s the leader of the national teacher’s union. She’s a teacher, and yet she made a second grade-level math error on a tweet she knew would be circulated nationally. And about 200 teachers, who have been teaching children while suffering from Randi’s level of ineptitude, with perhaps some victims of the educational system they have polluted mixed in, actually liked this message.

Yet the math mistake isn’t even the worst aspect of the tweet. The message is also outright deceit: it isn’t “child care” that made mothers leave their jobs. It’s the unnecessary shutting down of public schools that was engineered in great part by Weingarten’s members and has been extended by them for their own political and financial agenda. These are the people we entrust the minds of our children to when we use the public schools by necessity or choice. Far too many of them are not qualified to teach, intellectually or ethically. If they were, they would not tolerate leaders like Randi Weingarten.

The tweet, however, is just a small piece of evidence in a much longer indictment. That indictment can be found here, in a letter by brave parent, Andrew Gutmann, to his daughter’s $54,000 a year private school, Brearley, an all-girls institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He shared it with New York Times expatriot Bari Weiss, now writing at substack as so many rebel journalists and pundits are now.

His indictment applies equally to private and public schools for the most part, as well as colleges and universities. Liyyle of it, perhaps none of it, will surprise anyone who has been reading here at Ethics Alarms, or who has been paying attention.

Gutmann writes,

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Unethical Quote Of The Month (But Funny!): BLM Co-Founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“I see my money as not my own. I see it as my family’s money as well.”

—-Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Kahn-Cullors, explaining why amassing millions of dollars and spending them on luxery homes isn’t inconsistent with her professed belief in Marxism

I know, I know: using that movie clip was too obvious. Still, it could not be more appropriate. When I started to type this, Black Lives Matter was having a “mostly peaceful protest” a few miles away in D.C. This was entirely predictable, as every death of a black man in an altercation with police is automatically scored as racist and police brutality by BLM, and the cue for riots, chants of “No justice, no peace,” virtue-signalling by elected officials, and fund-raising. Facts don’t matter. Due process is irrelevant.

Black Lives Matter was launched on a lie (that Trayvon Martin was murdered by a racist “white Hispanic), gained steam based on another lie (“Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”) and really became profitable (about 90 million dollars raised) when George Floyd died under knee of a career bully cop who would have treated a white man just as brutally. Ethics Alarms pronounced BLM a Marxist, racist racket from the beginning: BLM skipped the initial stages of Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that every cause becomes a business, and eventually deteriorates into a racket, and went straight to racket. To give the group credit, it saves time.

Khan-Cullors is proof of how brazen the group has become; apparently it is convinced that the public will never have the guts to reject these cynical and divisive race-baiters for fear of their terrifying “Racist!” accusations. Senator Joe McCarthy made a similar miscalculation. though in his case the go-to cry was “Communist!”

Thus BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, an avowed Marxist, spent the BLM riots-filled summer months buying expensive real estate:

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Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 4/17/2021: No Good, Good, Good, No Good, and Good

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Some baseball ethics notes in italics, since a lot of you don’t care:

  • The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) issued Major League Baseball an overall grade of C+ , with a B+ for racial hiring and a C for gender hiring. (There was nothing about competency and qualifications hiring, for some reason.) The report also praised MLB’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta, proving that the organization is a partisan political group using “diversity” as a prop. Baseball should pay no attention to TIDES whatsoever. It is the Southern Poverty Law Center of sports.
  • There was a wonderful example of why baseball needs robo-umps in Wednesday’s game between the Red Sox and the Twins in Minneapolis. At a critical moment in a tie game with the bases loaded for the Twins, Sox pitcher Matt Andriese struck out the last Twins batter for out number three, ending the threat. The umpire, however, said the ball had been fouled into the dirt before bouncing into the Boston catcher’s mitt. The video showed that the bat had missed the ball by several inches, and no foul had occurred. When Red Sox manager Alex Cora came out to protest, the home plate umpire, also the crew chief said, “There’s no way I’ll be over-ruled on that call.” What he apparently meant was that the other three umpires would back him up even though he was obviously wrong, and after briefly caucusing, that’s what they did. Cora was thrown out of the game. Luckily for the umpires, Andriese struck the batter out with next pitch, so the mistake and cover-up didn’t matter. Moral luck!
  • Also Twins related: Twins shortstop Andrelton Simmons issued an articulate tweet about why he was declining to be vaccinated like his teammates, after considering the risks. He tested positive 24 hours later. Also moral luck!

1. NOW you’re telling us???. At 6:57 pm on April 15, I stumbled across this:

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