Month: June 2021

Incredibly, A Unanimous U.S. Supreme Court Rules Against The Democrats’ Theory That Illegal Immigrants Can Be Transformed Into Legal Immigrants After The Fact

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

See? The government isn’t completely crazy. Not for the first time, the Supreme Court has emphatically sided with the rule of law, confounding the Biden Administration and such Democratic Party stars as Senators Mazi Hirono (D-Hawaii), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), among others. Along with them, we also had the Democrat attorneys general of Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, California, and 17 other states arguing for one more step on the way to open borders.

Best of all, the slap-down opinion was authored by Obama appointee Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote in Sanchez v. Mayorkas, issued today,

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A “I Must Be Missing Something” Ethics Quiz: Arizona’s Execution Option [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

gas chamber

Usually ethics quizzes on Ethics Alarms involve borderline ethics conflicts or dilemmas that I can’t make up my own mind about. Not this one: on this one: my mind is virtually made up. The arguments that the Arizona plan to use cyanide gas in future executions is an ethics outrage because of previous uses of cyanide gas seem contrived, emotional, and, frankly, weird, with no ethical validity whatsoever. But the intensity of these arguments make me wonder if I’m missing something, and Voilà! An Ethics Quiz!

The state of Arizona allows condemned inmates to choose the gas chamber, rather than lethal injection, if they committed a capital offense before November 23, 1992. Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, is seeking to complete the execution of two men who committed murders before that date, and Arizona officials are reconditioning the state’s mothballed gas chamber in case they pick gas over a shot. Arizona authorities plan to use, if it comes to that, hydrogen cyanide to concoct the fatal agent of death. Cyanide gas is a particular gruesome way to die. It takes almost 20 minutes, in some cases, and this is a problem for some people.

Not for me: I find the obsession with making sure executions of the upper tier monsters who earn capitol punishment as pleasant as a spring day to be incomprehensible, and always have. We’re killing someone. It might hurt a little, and it won’t be pretty. An 18 minute judicially sanctioned death isn’t “cruel and unusual,” especially if the subject chose it. What I find cruel and unusual is the way our endless system of appeals dangles executions over the heads of Death Row inmates like a Sword of Damocles from Hell.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/7/2021: “The Masks Come Off At The Local 7-11” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

phantom-of-the-opera

Last night, when I had to run an errand to our local 7-11, I realized a milestone had been reached: the “Please wear a mask” signs were down outside and I could see the clerk’s face for the first time in over a year. Virginia, thanks to its blackface aficionado Democratic governor, the ridiculous Dr. Ralph Northam, has been one of the more extreme states in its oppressive pandemic edicts (I think taking down the tennis court nets was a low point, but there were others). Where and when one wears a mask should have always been an informed ethical and rational decision, but knee-jerk partisans made sure that it was widely regarded as an anti-Trump/pro-Trump declaration, or a science/anti-science statement. I resented that from the start, and I resent it now. I wore masks when patronizing businesses that wanted me to wear masks, since that was their right, or stopped using businesses I thought were being obnoxious about it, since that was my right. I refused to wear masks outside when I was not going to be too close to anyone, and eventually, as I was able to puzzle out how tenuous the social distancing assumptions were, stopped wearing them outside at all. I know the staffs of our local businesses that we patronize often and they know us; I recognized the bind they were in, so I followed their rules whether I thought they made sense or not. Now I’m just thrilled to not be regarded as making a divisive political statement by not knuckling under to power-abusing would-be dictators, like Ralph Northam.

1. Speaking of masks, Dr. Anthony Fauci just took the lead in the race to be the Ethics Alarms Asshole of the Year. Yesterday, smirking, untrustworthy and partisan MSNBC talking head Rachel Maddow hosted Fauci on her program, and in an example of the hard-hitting, objective journalism for which she has become famous, fawned all over him in an interview that began with the assumption that poor Fauci is being cruelly ganged up upon by right-wing Neanderthals. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Her very first question signaled I’m on your side, poor baby!: “First of all, let me just ask if I’m being fair. Am I building you up to be thicker-skinned about this than you are? You’re actually worried about this new sort of re-upping of attacks on you?”

Given his cue, Fauci responded in part, “Well, I’m concerned about that more because it’s really very much an attack on science…What is the thread going through, what’s happening now, is very much an anti-science approach. So that’s a big, big difference. I mean, it is what it is, I’m a public figure, I’m going to take the arrows and the swings, but they’re just, they’re fabricated.”

It could have been worse, I guess; he might have said that the criticism of him was racist. His despicable answer settles any questions about Fauci’s character in my mind; he’s a manipulative creep and an ethics villain. “Attack on science” !? We have smoking gun proof that Fauci was mistaken about his conclusions, frequently lied or withheld information, and had unrevealed conflicts of interest. He allowed himself to be used as a partisan weapon to shut down the economy.

Come to think of it, Fauci’s answer to Maddow was exactly the same as a policy-maker-of-color playing the race card. Because he’s a scientist, he should be above reproach. No opposition is in good faith or justifiable. Any criticism of him is really anti-science bigotry.

Asshole of the Year.

2. Baseball ethics: A tipping point on “robo-calls’? I was happy that the Red Sox beat the Yankees last night, but this outrageous strike three call at a crucial point helped a lot:

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Déjà Vu: On The Response To The Winston”Boogie”Smith Shooting

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Smith riots

That the latest black shooting victim being used to justify rioting in Minneapolis had the same name as the doomed protagonist in “1984” supports a friend’s theory that a Supreme Being is just using us for his own amusement. But the latest set of reflex rioting—the rule is that if a black suspect/criminal/alleged criminal is killed by police under any circumstances, there must be riots—tells us more than that. It confirms what should have been evident quite a while ago: this process is social extortion, or, if you prefer, domestic terrorism. The aim is to threaten and punish innocent citizens and vilify police using the presumption of racism as an excuse, so that there can be virtually no enforcement of the law against African-Americans at all. “Black Lives Matter,” always a deceitful bit of rhetorical dishonesty, has now completely morphed into Facts Don’t Matter for anyone to see who is bold enough to accept the ugly truth.

Who was Winston Smith? He was convicted in 2017 in the assault and robbery of his ex-girlfriend and sentenced to two years in prison. The sentence was suspended for three years, on the condition that “Boogie” didn’t break more laws. Of course, he did. As a convicted felon, Smith was prohibited from owning or having a firearm. He was charged with illegally possessing a gun in 2019. The U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement that its task force was trying to arrest Smith on a state warrant for illegal possession of a firearm last week. When law enforcement tried to take him into custody from a parked car on the top level of a parking ramp, he “failed to comply with officers’ commands” and “produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject.” Task force members took life-saving measures, but Winston Smith was pronounced dead at the scene.

A woman who was also in the car was treated for minor injuries from broken glass. “Evidence at the scene indicates that the man fired his weapon from inside the vehicle. BCA crime scene personnel recovered a handgun as well as spent cartridge cases from inside the driver’s compartment,” the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said in a statement.

The big problem here is that was no video. For some reason the U.S. Marshals Service does not allow body cameras for officers on the task force. An investigation is ongoing; at this point, everything is based on what we have been told. Maybe Smith didn’t have a gun. Maybe the gun the investigators found had “Hasbro” on it; maybe they planted it. Maybe he had his hands up, and shouted “Don’t shoot!” or “I can’t breathe!” I don’t know, and neither do the rioters. The difference is that they are rioting and I’m not. All that matters to them is that the police killed a black man, and they want to make sure that officers never do that again, which will be a great help to black criminals. Smith’s conduct doesn’t matter; whether he shot at the marshals doesn’t matter. If police end up killing a black man, they are at fault, the system is at fault, white America is at fault, and people have to be hurt. That’s the script now. After all, it’s worked so far.

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Ethics (And Judicial) Hero: Federal Judge Roger Benitez

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

cartoon-guns

If one bothers to read his opinion, which most anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment zealots will not, including your outraged friends on social media, it is clear that that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California judge’s long overdue ruling striking down the state’s three-decade-old unconstitutional ban on so-called “assault weapons” is well reasoned, well-researched, and difficult to rebut. As usual, those who want to remove the right to bear arms from law abiding Americans (while law-defying Americans continue to do as they please) are resorting to emotion and dishonesty to argue their case.

It is unfortunate that the judge, who is not one of those evil Trump judges but a moderate appointed by President Bush II, began his opinion with an invitation to be misquoted and misunderstood. “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Judge Benitez wrote, so furious would-be gun-grabbers are aping California Governor Gavin Newsom, who tweeted,

“Overturning CA’s assault weapon ban and comparing an AR-15 to a SWISS ARMY KNIFE is a disgusting slap in the face to those who have lost loved ones to gun violence. This is a direct threat to public safety and innocent Californians. We won’t stand for it.”

This raises the question, so frequently encountered on Ethics Alarms, of whether a speaker is deliberately lying, or just stupid. In this case, it is also possible that he only read the first sentence, which is irresponsible. Benitez, as the rest of his opinion makes crystal clear, was comparing the versatility of an AR-15 to a Swiss Army Knife, not their characteristics as weapons. An important part of his opinion explains that when the California legislature banned semi-automatic rifles,it never even considered the weapon’s value for self defense, and not just as a “sporting rifle.” (The Red Sox have a utility player named Marwin Gonzalez, and I have heard him compared to a Swiss Army Knife because he can play almost any position; in other words, he’s versatile. No baseball writer has been so foolish as to mock the characterization by saying that the comparison is ridiculous because the knives aren’t alive, Gonzales isn’t Swiss, and he’s much, much bigger.) It is also a non sequitur to call a ruling based on black letter law a “slap in the face” to anyone. Not following the Constitution, as California frequently wants to do, is a slap in the face of democracy.

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Encore: “How Did I Not Know This About D-Day?”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

navy-memorial-normandy

On Veteran’s Day two years ago, I posted this after being stunned by learning new details about the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy. Since that time I have been on the lookout for attempts to publicize and inform the public about a crucial aspect of battle for Omaha Beach that have been completely ignored in most media accounts. There have not been many. So it seems like a good idea this June 6 to post the story again.

***

After all these many years of reading about and watching movies and TV shows about D-Day, June 6, 1944,  I discovered how the US Navy saved the invasion and maybe the world only yesterday, thanks to stumbling upon a 2009 documentary on the Smithsonian channel.

If you recall the way the story is told in “The Longest Day” and other accounts, US troops were pinned down by horrific fire from the German defenses on Omaha beach until Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum in the movie) rallied them to move forward, and by persistence his infantry troops ultimately broke through. Yet it was US destroyers off shore that turned the tide of the battle at Omaha, an element that isn’t shown in “The Longest Day” at all.

Though it was not part of the plan, the captains of the Navy destroyers decided to come in to within 800 yards of the beach and use their big guns at (for them) point blank range to pound the German artillery, machine gun nests and sharpshooters. The barrage essentially wiped them out, allowing Cota’s troops to get up and over without being slaughtered. I’ve never seen that explained or depicted in any film, and according to the Smithsonian’s video, apparently was part of the story that had been inexplicably neglected. No monument to the US Navy commemorating its contributions on 6/6/44 was erected at Normandy until 2009.

Here’s the relevant part of account from the  Naval History website on “Operation Neptune,” the Navy counterpart to Operation Overlord:

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish Kills: The Gun Policy Doubletalk Of Maya Wiley

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Authentic Frontier Gibberish,” or AFG, named in honor of Gabby Johnson of “Blazing Saddles” fame, is the public phenomenon of solemn and meaningful-sounding word clouds designed to make the naive and the barely educated (that is, most of society) feel certain that they are in the presence of superior intellect when in fact they are in the thrall of either con artists or morons.

Ethically, it falls somewhere under the categories of dishonesty, incompetence and disrespect, depending on the AFG culprit. It would be difficult to find a more blazing example than the “Gun Violence Prevention Policy” offered by Maya Wiley, the civil rights attorney and former de Blasio counsel who’s running for mayor along with approximately half the city. Gun-related violence has roughly doubled in New York City thanks to the weak law enforcement policies of her client, so Wiley is giving the same foolish voters who elected de Blasio twice a chance to emulate San Francisco and make the city even more dangerous and unlivable. At least I think that’s what she’s proposing. As with all “Authentic Frontier Gibberish,” it’s hard to tell, and that, of course, is the plan.

I’m going to stick with the summary, by your leave, but you can try to make sense out of the whole thing if you are a masochist or an optimist. One part of both that is frighteningly clear: Wiley pledges to “Reduce the NYPD budget by $1 billion and invest those funds directly into the communities most impacted by gun violence.” The second part of that sentence is classic AFG, since “invest those funds directly into the communities most impacted by gun violence” is meaningless, but the first part is called “Defunding the police.” Almost 10% of the NYPD’s operating budget was cut in the last budget cycle, and the result was a crime wave. Obviously the best plan is to cut more!

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Ethics Dunce: Prof. Jonathan Turley

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Charliebrown-1-

Oh, fine. Now Professor Jonathan Turley, whom Ethics Alarms often relies on for sound, unbiased reasoning and constitutional expertise, is perpetuating an apparently unkillable progressive false narrative. And there is no excuse for it. Not for Turley, not for anyone.

I was going to reference his commentary regarding the idiotic and ignorant claim being pushed by deplorables—like Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a real embarrassment to the legal profession—that Trump could be “reinstated” as President once it is proven that the 2020 election was stolen and he really won. As shouldn’t even need to be explained, not by Turley, not by a community college volunteer civics teacher with a losed head injury, that cannot happen. Never. Even if it could be shown that Trump won, which is also so close to impossible that it’s not worth discussing, there is still no way to undo a Presidential election. Then, right in the middle of Turley’s explanation, I read this:

“In Florida, later tallies indicated that Al Gore likely won that state. It did not matter. George Bush was already sworn in as president.”

Et tu, Turley? That’s something Trump might write, but he’s not a professor or a lawyer. It’s something Powell might write, but she’s an idiot. Hey, I know blogging takes a lot of time, and checking the accuracy of what you write when you just want to get a post up is a pain, but people trust you, damn it. You have an obligation not to be careless. You have an even greater obligation not to perpetuate Left-wing lies and propaganda.

I trust Turley to such an extent that I began to doubt my own knowledge and research. Wait, could that be true? How did I get that wrong for all these years? It took me 42 seconds to confirm that Turley repeated an easily-checked partisan falsehood, probably because so many of his leftist colleagues at the George Washington law school believe it. From that infamous conservative lie machine, PBS:

Media Recount: Bush Won the 2000 Election

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An IIPTDXTTNMIAFB For The Ages!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I can’t let this pass. For four years, every hyperbolic President Trump boast about having “the best economy” was duly mocked and added to the contrived “Trump Lies” lists. What would the news media have done with Biden’s outrageous whopper? No jobs have been “created” by the process of allowing people to go back to work again after Biden’s party, with his endorsement, championed locking down the economy and killing jobs, businesses, recreation and whole industries.

In case you have forgotten, IIPTDXTTNMIAFB is Ethics Alarmseese for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”

Let me know if any mainstream media source has the integrity to call BS.

I won’t be holding my breath.

Saturday Afternoon Ethics Picnic, 6/5/2020

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Giant ants

And what’s a picnic without ants?

June 5, the day before D-Day, is another date chock full of ethics history. It doesn’t count, but Ronald Reagan died on this date in 2004: I was just thinking that the Great Stupid would have killed him. In Presidential history, this was the day, in 1888, President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill that would have given a pension to war widow Johanna Loewinger, whose Civil War vet husband died 14 years after being discharged from the army. He was discharged a little less than a year after enlisting for what the army surgeon’s certificate called chronic diarrhea. Loewinger received his pension until he cut his throat in 1876. When Johanna applied for a widow’s pension it was denied; his suicide was not considered to be caused by his military service. Johanna argued that the death was part of the insanity triggered by his war service, and appealed to a member of Congress to petition Cleveland with a bill. But the President declared all previous inquests into the former soldier’s unfortunate death to be satisfactory. Mrs. Loewinger got no pension.

I always thought this was gutsy of Cleveland (or something), since he had paid someone to serve in the Union army for him after he was drafted. But there were bigger ethics landmarks on June 5:

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