Month: November 2022

Finally Giving Cherokee Nation A Delegate In The House Is An Ethics No-Brainer

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The  treaty imposed on the Cherokee Nation in 1835 facilitated the Trail of Tears, and was the surest sign yet that the eventual fate of North America’s native population was going to be ugly, violent, and tragic. But the Treaty of New Echota, which forced the Cherokee to relinquish their ancestral lands in the South, also included the promise that the Cherokee Nation would be “entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” It is almost 200 years later, and Congress still hasn’t made such a provision.

Well, if we searched the Rationalization List for the excuse for this disgraceful betrayal, we would find several candidates on the very first page, mutations of the hoariest rationalization of all, #1, “Everybody Does It,” but represented by such variations of the theme as, It’s done all the time,”“It’s always been done this way,” “It’s tradition,” “Everybody is used to it,“Everybody accepts it,” and  “It’s too late to change now.” The United States broke too many treaties with the various tribes to count, but this one has an especially ugly story behind it.

On Georgia lands guaranteed by the United States to the Cherokee in yet another, earlier treaty, the tribe was attempting to create a model of what might have allowed all the Native American tribes to flourish in the new European-settled nation that was clearly not to be denied. The Cherokee Nation had foresworn war, was working with white communities, creating commerce and launching a hybrid culture that could be integrated into the U.S. while preserving Indian culture. The plan was working too— too well. Georgia exercised the then-current doctrine of nullification, a states rights principle holding that a state could nullify Federal law. The Georgian legislature wanted the Cherokees’ land, and declared the Federal treaty leaving it in their control null and void. The Cherokee sued Georgia in the U.S. Supreme Court and won. President Jackson, however, even though he had earlier condemned South Carolina’s nullification attempts in the strongest possible terms (Jackson threatened to hang Senator John C. Calhoun with his own hands), hated Indians. In an unprecedented demonstration of abuse of power and raw defiance by a President, “King Andy” refused to enforce the SCOTUS decision and backed Georgia. Continue reading →

Thursday Ethics Thurstquencher, 11/17/2022: Unethical Law, Unethical WaPo, Unethical “Equity,” Unethical Law School, Unethical Police…And A Surprise!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

My wife and I are now in the throes of a painful ethics dilemma for any parent of an adult. Our son unexpectedly broke up with his long-time live-in girl friend, apparently ending a relationship that seemed serious, loving, and built to last. We both love his now ex-, a wonderfully candid, gentle, courageous young woman who has overcome a lot of tragedy in her life, and whom we know loves our son passionately. (She is also arguably Spud’s favorite human being on Earth.) Our son keeps his own counsel and always has; he gave us the news in his usual unadorned, unrevealing, terse manner. He did not ask for advice or counsel, and we know him well enough to understand that he would not appreciate our offering any; indeed, his trademark is taking the opposite course of that suggested by anyone other than him. So we will do the ethical thing, which in this case is also the only option available to us: mind our own business.

1. Speaking of my dog, Spuds-like dogs will continued to be cruelly and stupidly discriminated against in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which passed an ordinance in 2005 that outlaws the possession or sale of “pit bulls.” That’s in quotes because it is clear that the ignorant dog bigots who passed the law have no clue what a pit bull is: the law defines the “dangerous breed” as “any dog that is an American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, Staffordshire Bull Terrier,” or any dog with a majority of the physical traits of one or more of those breeds. In other words, the law adopts the cretinous terms of the anti-pit bull breeds website Dogsbite.com, which says that “if it looks like a pit bull, it’s a pit bull.”

Owners of pit bulls sued the city in federal court, claiming the ordinance violates their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. A U.S. District judge dismissed the suit on summary judgment, which the dog owners appealed.

A three-judge panel of the S Eighth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s ruling, holding that the dog owners had the burden of negating every conceivable basis that might support the ordinance.

“The record here does not negate every conceivable basis for the Ordinance’s rationality,” U.S. Circuit Judge Duane Benton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote for the unanimous panel. “While the resulting ordinance may be an imperfect fit, this court cannot second guess or judge the fairness of legislative choices on rational basis review.”

2. And speaking of vicious persecution and bad faith vendettas, The Washington Post, burying the lede, reports that it seems likely now that Donald Trump had no nefarious purpose in holding classified documents, that there were no nuclear secrets contained in them as speculated, and that the former President was probably keeping them as souvenirs he felt he had a right to:

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There’s So Much Wrong With This Eric Swalwell Tweet That Ethics Alarms Can’t Categorize it [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Over on his blog, Prof Turley was sufficiently disgusted by this that he has devoted two posts to eviscerating it in his usual professorial fashion, here and here. I encourage you to read both, though this is another one of those incidents where if it has to be explained to you what’s wrong, you probably are beyond help anyway. Still, Turley’s brief is impressive, and Ethics Alarms will just add a few (well, may be more than a few) points:

  • A really stupid tweet is typical of Swalwell; this one isn’t even his worst. In 2018, the same year he had the gall to announce he was running for President, Swalwell tweeted that any effort by gun owners to oppose gun confiscation by the federal government would be met with nuclear bombs. In another tweet, he wrote sarcastically, “It’s not like separation of church & state is in the Bill of Rights or anything…” This year, he tweeted, “The Republicans won’t stop with banning abortion. They want to ban interracial marriage.”
  • When I wrote last week about how there were so many unethical people running for office in 2022 that I couldn’t possibly narrow the list of the most unethical down to a mere dozen as I have in the past, I forgot to mention Swalwell. This the only member of Congress who somehow managed to have a sexual affair with a Chinese spy (in 2015, before he was elected to the House). Nonetheless, he was re-elected in his California district by a landslide. What Swalwell misses in all aspects of life and logic cannot be catalogued without devoting volumes to the task.
  • It’s astounding that anyone, even Democrats, would dare to evoke “experts” after the still unfolding pandemic fiasco and the near total failure of health “experts” to give competent advice.
  • As Turley also notes, the analogy matching teachers to doctors is absurd, though the professor is nicer about it than I am. Teachers aren’t “experts,” they aren’t professionals in the classic sense, and, to be cruelly blunt, like journalists they are nor recruited from among the best and brightest. There is no regulation of the teaching craft, just bars to entry. Professionals—those who devote themselves to the public good at personal sacrifice,  also don’t have unions, which by nature place the welfare of their members above the public’s interests…and no union has done this more flagrantly than the teachers’ union. The lawyer-client analogy is equally foolish. Lawyers are necessary because the have special training in laws and procedure. Children need to learn about how to navigate life, and parents have as much expertise in that subject as teachers.
  • Parents have been the primary teachers of their offspring, and successful ones, for eons. Comparing teaching to self-surgery is…well, it’s about what one would expect of a collectivist dim bulb like Swalwell.
  • Swalwell knows nothing about schools and little about parenting: his oldest child is just entering kindergarten, and probably at a private school. He has some nasty surprises waiting for him.
  • The educational institution culture has rotted through, with large numbers of teachers being motivated by peer pressure, ideology, and their own flawed education. It is easy to see this, unless the observer is deliberately ignoring the condition, or wants the condition to continue.
  • Parents passively and irresponsibly allowed schools to indoctrinate their children because they served as convenient child care after women finally could pursue ambitious careers. It was trust conferred by perceived necessity, not careful analysis. Now, perhaps not too late, parents are waking up and taking control.
  • Some teachers are genuinely intelligent, outstanding, capable adults who do justify parental trust. The problem is that 1) far more are not (yes, it’s anecdotal , but I find it telling that the most famously dumb member of my grade school class, with the lowest SAT scores I have ever heard of to this day,  became a career history teacher at the same school), 2) it is difficult to determine which, and 3) the administrators and school structures are overwhelmingly corrupt and incompetent, minimizing what even good teachers can accomplish.
  • That so many teachers and school administrators accepted the ideologically advanced revisionism that slavery was the primary motivation for the United States’ creation, and have engaged in the revolutionary endeavor of teaching young children to distrust other races while  deploring their own nation is strong evidence that these “experts” cannot be trusted, and that their judgment is terrible.
  • Teaching and public education has lost its way, and urgently need to be reformed and re-imagined. Those with the strongest ties to the well-being of rising generations must be the main architects of any reform, and that group is parents.

Finally, when someone of Rep. Swalwell’s amply demonstrated intellectual and ethical deficits declares anything “stupid,” the Cognitive Dissonance Scale comes into play. [ADDED: This principle should also apply to any journalist or publication who resorts to Swalwell as an authority or source. For example, we have Vanity Fair writing today, “The chamber under Kevin McCarthy, and with an emboldened right flank, may ‘exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation,’Rep. Eric Swalwell tells Vanity Fair.” ]

Ethics Dunce? Incompetent Elected Official? Unethical Tweet? Unethical Quote? Bad analogies? The Great Stupid exemplified? All these and more apply to Swalwell’s outburst. And this man is a lawmaker. Re-elected by a landslide.

It’s so depressing.

I Don’t Understand NBC’s “Misinformation” Policy. OK, OK, I Think I Really Do….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I am tempted to conclude that it involves an official distinction between “good” misinformation and “bad” misinformation, the former being fake news that benefits Democrats, and the latter being actual facts that undermine progressive narratives.

For example, NBC has suspended veteran reporter Miguel Almaguer, who has been MIA since he reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul didn’t let on that he was in danger when cops showed up at his San Francisco home right before he was assaulted with a hammer. His scoop story went live on “Today” and then was summarily retracted hours later.

That Pelosi’s attack was proof of how Republicans were a “clear and present danger” to the nation became a prominent part of the news media/Democratic Party last ditch effort to limit GOP gains in last week’s election, so Almageur’s inconvenient facts—if they were facts, and we do not know—were apparently an intolerable injection of objective journalism into whatever it is that NBC News does now. (Whatever it is, as Harry Reid would say, “It works!”) NBC says it is “investigating.” Funny, the Pelosi attack was daily fare before the election; now it’s already dated trivia. On CNN’s Headline News this moring, Robin Meade spend almost ten minutes reviewing last night’s results on “The Masked Singer.” Omigod! The Singing Avacado was kicked off the show!!!! How is Paul Pelosi doing? Has he elucidated any of the mysteries surrounding his attack? Any news about what motivated the wacko who attacked him? Who cares? The Democrats held on to control of the Senate! Paul Pelosi? Who’s he?

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The Return Of The Naked Teacher Principle!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Has it really been so long? Ethics Alarms hasn’t had a Naked Teacher Principle outbreak in more than three years! Oh, we’ve had related ethics tales of a naked Congresswoman (Katie Hill), a Santa in a MAGA hat, a naked ex-Miss Kentucky teacher who’s an idiot. a too-sexy firefighter scandal, the unfairly fired naked nurse, and this year’s ridiculous Cross-Dressing Future Congressman Principle  involving ex-GOP House member Madison Cawthorne. No authentic Naked Teacher Principle (NTP), however, which 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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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Our Pro-Totalitarian Senators

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

These are the Senators—36 of them—who voted against a joint resolution to discontinue the Biden Administration’s cynical cynical pandemic emergency, which now only serves to allow the President to bypass usual checks and balances under the Constitution.

The names on the list are all you have to know.

Baldwin (D-WI)
Bennet (D-CO)
Blumenthal (D-CT)
Booker (D-NJ)
Brown (D-OH)
Cantwell (D-WA)
Cardin (D-MD)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Coons (D-DE)
Duckworth (D-IL)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feinstein (D-CA)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Hassan (D-NH)
Heinrich (D-NM)
Hirono (D-HI)
Kelly (D-AZ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Lujan (D-NM)
Markey (D-MA)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Merkley (D-OR)
Murray (D-WA)
Ossoff (D-GA)
Padilla (D-CA)
Peters (D-MI)
Reed (D-RI)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schatz (D-HI)
Smith (D-MN)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Van Hollen (D-MD)
Warren (D-MA)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/16/22: It’s Werner Von Braun Day!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This is a pretty dark day for ethics, with the lowlight occurring in 1532, when Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, invited the Incan emperor, Atahualpa to a feast in his honor under the preetnse of peace and friendship. His force of less than 200 men then openeds fire on the unarmed Incans, killing over a thousand, After the massacre, the Spanish held Atahualpa, and forced him to convert to Christianity. Then Pizarro had him murdered anyway. This terrible episode in history did inspire the Broadway hit drama, “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” by Peter Schaefer of “Equus” and “Amadeus” fame. I guess that’s something.

Also on this date, in 1945, the U.S. made a devil’s bargain with 88 Nazi scientists, notably Werner von Braun (who Tom Lehrer famously sang about), as part of “Operation Paperclip,” aimed at speeding U.S. development of rocket technology. They cheerfully switched sides, as you would expect they would. Werner is buried less than 5 minutes from our Alexandria home, in a small church graveyard.

I have not visited his resting place.

1. The mainstream media is in some kind of an unethical headline orgy:

  • The Washington Post included in its coverage of the murderer of three UVA football players a story headlined, “Suspected U-Va. gunman had troubled childhood, but then flourished.” The shooter is black; I’m sure that has nothing to do with the weirdly sympathetic vibes of what reads like a puff piece except for that shooting spree detail. The Post took down the headline; the question remains of how it could have made it to the web at all. [Pointer: Willem Reese]
  • Here’s NPR, proudly displaying its Trump Derangement, with this headline: “Donald Trump, who tried to overturn Biden’s legitimate election, launches 2024 bid.” Stuffing unrelated negative commentary in a news story headline is truly barrel-bottom journalism. NPR managed to avoid the headline in 1979, “Ted Kennedy, who allowed a young woman to drown, launches 1980 bid.”
  • NBC News: “Trump, whose lies about the 2020 election inspired an insurrection, announces third White House bid.” No editorializing there!
  • Here’ he Washington Post again: “Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again.”
  • This is CNBC’s headline, a classic example of the unethical tactic called “poisoning the well”: “Donald Trump, twice impeached and under FBI investigation, launches 2024 White House bid.”

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OK, After This Ethics Alarms Officially Condemns Cheap Shots At Senator-Elect Fetterman’s Appearance…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I’m sorry, but that meme was just too funny to ignore, ethics or not. I’d like to think even Fetterman would appreciate it.

But that’s it for me. Mocking a political figure based on his or her appearance is the ultimate ad hominem attack, and there’s no excuse for it. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news source that has made useful contributions to public awareness when the mainstream media is in the process of burying a story that hurts its mission, ran a story yesterday headlined,

“John Fetterman Wears Suit to Capitol, Looks Terrible….like a funeral home director on trial for desecrating a corpse (multiple counts)“

Nice.

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Good Father, Malpracticing Lawyer

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Awwww. Lawyer Jerry L. Steering of California missed the deadline to file a response to a motion to dismiss the case that he had filed on behalf of a client. He had a good reason, he thought, having seen “Field of Dreams” a bunch of times. (OK, I’m guessing here.) U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton of the Central District of California, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, had already granted a deadline extension to Steering once, but he requested more time, he explained, because he was “presently in Chicago” to watch his son “play American professional baseball.”

What a good dad! What a bad lawyer! The judge didn’t grant the extension, and in an unpublished per curiam opinion that a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued yesterday, her decision was upheld. The lawyer’s “excuse for not meeting a deadline that had already been extended 90 days at his request was frivolous: Counsel chose to attend a ballgame instead of timely filing his client’s response to the motion to dismiss,” the 9th Circuit said.

Frivolous? FRIVOLOUS??? Watching one’s son “have a catch” for money and supporting him from the stands is “frivolous”? Well yeah, it is. This is a flaming breach of to many legal ethics rules to list, but competence and diligence will do. I have to assume that Jerry is willing to accept the consequences for his choice, which will include a slam-dunk legal malpractice and maybe disciplinary action from his bar association as well.

When family obligations conflict with professional ones, it’s tough. Still, the professional standards leave a lot less wiggle room than family duties; I think Junior would have understood.

Even if Kevin Costner wouldn’t.

 

Oh-Oh: Time For Another GOP Ethics And Intelligence Test Already…

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Republicans lost the chance to gain control of the Senate thanks to multiple ethical and logical mistakes, and now, as a direct result of that botch, Senate Majority Leaders Present and Future Chuck Schumer has announced that he will try to cement same-sex marriage into federal law. In July the House passed the Respect for Marriage Act, but the Senate delayed its vote on the bill until after the midterm elections. I’m sure, having a significant proportion of Neanderthals in their midst and being hell-bent on self destruction, the GOP was preparing to bury the bill once they had a majority, or filibuster it if they did not.

Morons. The hints in Clarence Thomas’s outlier concurrence in Dobbs that reversing the SCOTUS decisions declaring birth control and same-sex marriage as guaranteed rights may have cost Republicans more votes than reversing Roe v. Wade. Unlike abortion, which involves killing human beings (the question is “how human”), same sex marriage raises no such substantive ethical issues. Some religions oppose it: swell, they can refuse to allow it in their flocks. It is a down-the-metaphorical-middle-of-the -alley example of the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the vast majority of Americans accept it as one of those ancient taboos that made sense once but does no longer.

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