The issue right now is simple. Someone with access to Justice Alito’s draft majority opinion in THOMAS E. DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL., PETITIONERS u. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, ET AL. leaked it to Politico. This is the worst breach of professional ethics in the history of the Court. It is the worst breach of professional ethics in the history of the federal court system. If a lawyer, such as a law clerk, was responsible, he or she should be, and probably will be, disbarred.
I haven’t read the draft: the thing is 67 pages long, and I just got it. The conclusion, however, is clear:
We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.
The judgment of the Fifth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Apparently so, at least for some members of the teaching profession whose judgment parents are supposed to trust blindly, according to President Biden and others.
Just a few days ago, Ethics Alarms discussed [#3] the vile treatment of a social studies teacher by the San Francisco’s Creative Arts Charter School, which suspended her and forced her to grovel an apology for bringing cotton bolls, into her class as part of a lesson on the cotton gin and its impact on slavery and the Industrial Revolution. Commenter Curmie, a teacher himself, properly condemned the school’s reaction in a post on his own blog, here.
However, a Rochester, NY white middle school teacher told his class of mostly black students to pick seeds out of cotton bolls during his lessons on slavery in a seventh-grade social studies class. In another fun exercise, the same teacher brought in handcuffs and shackles for the black students to put on. White children were allowed to opt out of the cotton-picking, reportedly, while black students were not. When a black child balked at putting on the shackles, the teacher threatened her with punishment.
In his Comment of the Day this morning, history-besotted commenter Steve-O-in NJ writes regarding the question of whether Biden, as the Washington Post ludicrously claimed in an editorial, is a “huge” upgrade over President Trump, “Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46.”
From a purely academic perspective, having a clear and unequivocal Worst President Ever would be useful for future ranking purposes, just as George Washington has been an invaluable role model against whom all of his successors must be compared. However, the operative words regarding Biden are “is headed.” It would be unfair, not to mention foolish, to grade Biden as the worst of the worst before he has even served half his term. True, there is little reason for optimism, but the President generally regarded as sharing the Top POTUS title with George, Honest Abe, was looking like a national disaster at this point in his first term.
How do we assess which of our leaders was “the worst”? Without objective standards, any ranking is going to be poisoned by bias and partisanship. When I first began studying the Presidency, Jack Kennedy’s house historian and shameless boot-licker and old New Dealer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was considered the authority on the subject. He essentially ranked all the Democrats he could as “great” or “near great” and saved the low rankings for Republicans. He even rated Woodrow Wilson, a true villain in U.S. history, as “great.”
This was the beginning of my distrust of historians that has only grown since.
This series has to be shorter than the topic requires, so I will aim at providing a solid foundation. First we need to settle on who the contenders for Worst President Ever are. I’ll disqualify some along the way. Here are the possibilities among our first ten Presidents:
Well, today we stopped getting the New York Times on our lawn in the morning. The price went up again, and almost a hundred bucks a month is too much for the convenience of seeing where the Times places its propaganda, even though those blue tubular plastic bags the paper arrives in are perfect for cleaning up after Spuds on his walks. And I’ll have to find something else to read in the bathroom….
1. Priorities, Ann. Jeez.Focus! Perceptive but decidedly weird blogger Ann Althouse isn’t interested in the Times devoting thousands and thousands of words smearing Tucker Carlson as a racist, but she is perplexed that the paper used the term “stick-up.”
One more example of how intellectuals who consider themselves above it all are useless, if not worse, during periods when their influence might be helpful.
2. On the other side of the activism spectrum, Noam Chomsky said in an interview that “one Western statesman of stature” is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it, and “his name is Donald J. Trump.” Now what is the ethical response to that? Chomsky has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that his is a toxic, biased, anti-American world view. Does this show his integrity? Or is the responsible reaction, “Why the hell would anyone care what Noam Chomsky thinks?”
3. Who says the Supreme Court justices can’t agree on anything? In Shurtleff v. Boston, the court held 9-0 that the city of Boston violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment when it refused to let a group fly a Christian flag outside city hall. The guts of the opinion:
Steve-O-in NJ was inspired by the EA commentary on the Washington Post editors’ batty contention last week that Joe Biden was a “huge” upgrade over President Trump to write this Comment of the Day. I was reminded of it—I had intended to give Steve’s opus COTD honors earlier, but got distracted— when I realized that MSNBC was pushing the same gaslighting, prompting the previous post. The historical truth is that Joe Biden’s White House tenure so far wouldn’t give him a claim to being as a “huge upgrade” over any President using objective standards rather than partisan ones, as in “all Republican Presidents are worse than all Democrat Presidents,” which is the kindest way to explain the Post’s absurd assertion.
I am always interested in the topic of Presidential rankings, so after Steve-O has had his say, I’m going to follow up with an examination of how to assess who is the Worst POTUS Ever. Remember, leadership is also an official area of concentration for Ethics Alarms.
Just more proof that a lot of folks are so blindly partisan that they would not only vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it, but wouldn’t vote for God Himself if He didn’t. Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46. Grant probably no longer occupies the bottom of the ratings list. Harding was a corrupt, philandering son of a b****, but he had the wisdom to stand back and let the economy correct itself after the Panic of 1921. Obama was pretty feckless, but thankfully didn’t face any big new crises. Clinton was a pig, but the economy didn’t crash on his watch. So far, I can only compare Biden to Carter, the only president in recent history and even not so recent history who I can honestly and truly say has no strengths. Continue reading →
Yesterday on her MSNBC show, Tiffany Cross featured Fernand Amandi, a Democrat pollster and adviser, and a regular on hers’s over-heated far-left hysteria orgy. Just think, the New York Times spent 6+ full pages today calling for the metaphorical life boats because Tucker Carlson’s monologues criticizing the Times and its pals for their anti-democratic efforts are getting longer, while Cross is part of an entire network that deals in toxic narratives and bias from dawn til dusk that the Times barely never criticizes at all.
The Democrats have a wonderful story to tell! And I think it could be distilled to something as simple as: the Democrats saved your life. They saved your job. They saved the economy. And now they’re trying to save democracy from a Republican party that no longer believes [in] it.
Isn’t that great? Who besides Rob Reiner could say something so ridiculous on television and not have to leave with his head in a sack? Yes, Democrats really are going to continue arguing that if you vote Republican you’re going to die, that a tanking economy is a great economy, that the pandemic deaths (or deaths attributed to the pandemic to achieve maximum fear) under Trump were “blood on his hands” and the even greater number of deaths under Biden’s watch were still “blood on Trump’s hands,” and that the party trying to crush free speech, cripple the rule of law, weaken the integrity of elections, pack the Supreme Court and criminalize Democratic opposition is going to “save” democracy.
The bet is that progressive-dominated educational institutions and news media has left the public so ignorant and incompetent that this might sound reasonable.
Then Amandi provided the totalitarian strategy: to beat the GOP in the coming elections, all Democrats have to do is arrest them!
[I]t’s one thing to try and disqualify a Republican party that no longer believes in democracy, but you need a little bit of help. If the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General Merrick Garland, do not start issuing indictments, not to the front line of Proud Boys and picknickers of January 6th that led an insurrection, but to the perpetrators of the crime, the Members of Congress who we now know through text messages wereplotters, the ringleaders at the top echelon of the Republican party, up into an including the Republican president, Donald Trump, voters are not going to believe that, they’re gonna just think that it’s political back-and-forth. The Justice Department needs to hold the perpetrators accountable….If these Republicans gain control, they will not give it back. We will lose democracy. And if you lose democracy, it’s not the sort of thing that you get back…You may not see it again in your lifetime in this country.
Why of course! Why didn’t we think of that before! The way to win elections is to arrest the leaders of the opposing party! That will save democracy!
And Tiffany Cross said, ” Yeah! I think that is the message that voters need to hear.” Continue reading →
There’s vintage Disney—back before it decided it had a stake in having young children instructed in sexual matters by teachers, and when innocence was considered worth protecting. Yes, I recognize the irony in saying that about an “Alice in Wonderland” clip, given that Lewis Carroll was unhealthily obsessed with little girls, often asking their parents for permission to photograph them nude…and got it! (Alice was his favorite model.)
That’s the very strange and great Jerry Colonna voicing the March Hare, and Ed Wynn, of course, as the Mad Hatter.
Today is my “un-birthday.” My 94-year-old aunt, the last surviving member of her generation in my extended family called me up this morning to wish me a happy birthday. Since my real birthday is December 1, I was faced with an instant ethical conflict: was the right course to tell the truth, risking embarrassing her, or to play Birthday Boy, lying but being kind in the process? I opted for honesty, both using the Golden Rule—I wouldn’t want to be patronized—and deciding that my aunt, still sharp and always with a sense of humor, could, like Tom Cruise, handle the truth. She could; she laughed, wondered how she has the wrong date on her calendar, and we talked for an hour. SHE mentioned “un-birthdays,” causing me to recall the song.
1. Ethics lesson: Integrity should trump Loyalty. Elon Musk, responding to to the absurd ad hominem attacks from progressives calling him a fascist, a white supremacist and, worst of all, a conservative, provided this handy dandy sketch via, of course, Twitter, explaining that his beliefs have remained relatively stable, while his critics’ perspective has shifted:
2. And we trust these people with educating or rising generations…The University of Southern California former dean of the University of Southern California asked the law firm Jones Day to investigate allegations that its education school directed administrators to omit information from its U.S. News & World Report rankings submission to boost the school’s placement. at least as far back as 2013, According to the just-release investigation results, former dean Karen Symms Gallagher made sure that the Rossier School of Education only included information on its Ph.D. program, which has a lower acceptance rate than its Ed.D. programs, despite explicit instructions in the questionnaire to include both Ph.D. and Ed.D. programs. Gallagher stepped down in 2020 after 20 years as dean. She’s now a professor at Rossier.
The probe turned up what Jones Day referred to as “irregularities” in how the education school calculated and reported research expenditures, and it identified other possible misreporting of faculty metrics, online program enrollment, graduates’ job-placement rates and more. USC had pulled the school from consideration in the U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings prior to the report.
Will she be sacked as a professor? What’s your guess? Continue reading →
So many things jump to mind as Ethics Alarms considers the astounding front page attack on Fox New pundit Tucker Carlson in today’s Sunday Times, preceded by the article’s online release yesterday, first among them being “Stop making me defend Tucker Carlson!” Tucker Carlson is an unethical, dishonest, ambitious and cynical pundit whose sincerity and and integrity are ephemeral at best. I learned this long ago when he was still wearing bow ties to signal his conservatism, engaged in such activities as falling asleep on “Fox and Friends” and seeding his conservative news and commentary website The Daily Caller with soft porn to goose traffic. I won’t watch Carlson’s show unless I have to for Ethics Alarms purposes, and then only via videos.
Carlson has increasingly become a demagogue as his ratings have soared. Yet Ethics Alarms has condemned the efforts by progressives (you know: anti-free speech advocates) to bring him down and end his ability to counter the 95%-5% mainstream media pro-Left bias by employing boycotts of his sponsors. I am confident that Tucker, like Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olberman, Melissa Harris Perry, Dan Rather, Glenn Beck and other ethically inert media supernovas will eventually be exposed, disgraced, or self-destruct in an overload of narcissism and arrogance. It is almost inevitable.
Nevertheless, the unrestrained Times piece is the Dean Scream of progressive mainstream media fury over the fact that it no longer can control what Americans know and think. It is headlined in the print edition “American Nationalist,” which the Times appears to assume its readers will respond to as they would to “American Nazi.” Nationalism is commonly defined (by sources that are not politically committed to making the definition repugnant) as promoting the interests of one’s nation and the goal of maintaining that nation’s culture, independence and sovereignty. The Horror. The fact that the Times is so certain that being identified as a nationalist is so damning might be more significant than the attack itself.Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 