Month: July 2023

On The Ethically Depressing GOP Presidential Field

/ Jack Marshall / 113 Comments

The New York Times gave us the chart above, in an article about how the “he could shoot someone at high noon in central park and we wouldn’t care” Trump “base” will make a Republican effort to nominate a responsible, respectable, competent candidate for President difficult if not impossible. Look at that array! And my sister, a Democrat, complains that her party’s options are terrible, which they are.

How can a nation this large and diverse have no leaders who seem capable of doing the top job ethically and well? This is a societal, cultural, systemic failure.

That a character like Donald Trump, former POTUS or not, can have that kind of overwhelming support in the midst of indictments, the long, long trail of ridiculous and offensive statements, and his disqualifying conduct of refusing to accept his electoral defeat yet tells us that something is deeply rotten in the state of America. And whatever that state of rotteness is, returning either Joe Biden or Trump to the White House would be an invitation to too many disasters to contemplate.

But let’s start from the bottom of the list, where hope blooms. Nobody wants Chris Christie to run. Good. He was an ethics villain in 2016, knocking off Trump’s adversaries in the debates when he had the rhetorical tools and ammunition to take out Trump the way he reduced poor Marco Rubio to a laughing stock. Then Christie endorsed Trump, whom he knew was unfit, in a corrupt quid pro quo deal, probably to be Vice-President, which Trump reneged on. Then Christie was out to get Trump again, but it was too late. The one-time rising GOP star’s star was already permanently tarnished by his George Washington Bridge fiasco anyway. He’s running to get headlines and speaking fees, I guess. That he has almost no support speaks almost as well for the Republican voters as their support for Trump is damning.

Vivek Ramaswamy is the GOP equivalent of tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang in the last cycle for the Democrats. He’s not a serious candidate, and anyone who thinks he is doesn’t understand the American Presidency. Like Christie, he’s just static in the race, and a distraction. In a very important election like the one approaching, causing static and distractions is unethical.

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The Bizarro World Ethics Of “Disparate Impact”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This makes sense only in a distorted reality where people deliberately ignore the obvious and insist that facts don’t matter. You know, like Superman Comics’ Bizarro World, where the stupid populace eats the plates and throws away the food.

A complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) last week by the group HOPE Fair Housing Center argues that landlords who refuse to rent to applicants with a history of not paying rent and getting evicted are illegally discriminating based on the basis of race and sex. It’s the old disparate impact canard: “A housing provider that enforces a policy that denies the opportunity to rent to anyone who has an eviction filing or judgment is disproportionately denying housing to Black households and Black women in particular,” wrote HOPE Deputy Director Josefina Navar. Now, everyone knows why landlords don’t want to rent to people who have failed to pay rent in the past and gotten themselves evicted or forced the property’s owner to threaten eviction: landlords want to be paid what they’re owed, on time, without legal hassles and expense. That’s all.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Congresswoman’s Prayer Breakfast Joke

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Outspoken freshman Congresswoman Nancy Mace, (R-SC), decided to throw away her prepared remarks and riff at the beginning of her speech at fellow South Carolinian Sen. Tim Scott’s prayer breakfast last week. That was her first mistake.

“When I woke up this morning at 7, I was getting picked up at 7:45, Patrick, my fiance, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed. And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning,'” Mace began. “I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.”

Yes, there’s nothing better to warm up the crowd at a prayer breakfast like a pre-marital sex joke!

Seriously, how hard is it to avoid making comments about sex at a prayer breakfast? She probably embarrassed Sen. Scott thoroughly, who was metaphorically batting second behind the nookie narrative in her remarks as she praised him profusely. Scott is running for President, however futilely, and doesn’t need any silly but completely avoidable controversies. Mace also probably made Seacoast Church Pastor Greg Surratt a little uncomfortable, who had honored both her and Scott as a part of his congregation.

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky)

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments

I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.

Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.

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I’m Sick Of Hearing These Arguments That College Admissions Favor The Wealthy And Privileged Because The Problem Is Easy To Fix. So Fix It.

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Nicholas Kristoff, a another New York Times progressive pundit but one who occasionally makes sense, has an intermittently valid op-ed in today’s paper titled, “The Real College Admissions Scandal,” which is, he argues, “affirmative action for the rich and privileged.”

Kristoff immediately knee-caps his own credibility by writing, perhaps to please his Dark Woke Masters, “I wish the Supreme Court had ruled differently on affirmative action for race, but unfortunately it blocked that path for diversity.” It’s a stupid statement. The Constitution blocked that path, and so did the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What his statement literally means is that he applauds “good racial discrimination and prejudice”, but deplores it when it adversely affects groups he cares about.

He also comes close to setting off the hypocrisy alarm, but at least is transparent. While including “legacy admissions” in his list of “affirmative action for the rich and privileged,” Kristoff says, “I was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is currently a member and previously served on the Princeton and Cornell boards; our three children also attended Harvard.” Hmmm. So, having benefited from the policies he condemns while doing nothing to reform them, the pundit now want to stop others from benefiting from them! Cool. He also is silent about how much money he has given to his alma mater over the years. Donors also get an edge for their kids when they apply to prestige colleges.

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Our Woke Education Apocalypse Update: The Failure Of The “I Promise” School, And Other Horrors

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

With great fanfare, NBA immortal LeBron James established the “I Promise charter school in 2018 to educate “at-risk” students. The I Promise School, which teaches children from 1st to 8th grade, promises:

With education as the driving force of change, the LeBron James Family Foundation is not only spreading that impact and improving lives of inner-city students and families, but also shifting the course of an entire community. Focusing on his hometown of Akron, the Foundation’s I PROMISE program provides year-round resources, access to opportunities, supportive skill development, constant encouragement and other wraparound supports to more than 1,300 Akron Public School students who have all been guaranteed college scholarships if they do their part. These efforts have culminated in the groundbreaking new public school – the I Promise School – that is taking an innovative approach to providing a challenging, supportive, and life-changing education, creating a new model for urban public education.

Soaring and inspiring words…it’s too bad that the Akron Beacon Journal reported this week that the 2023 “class of eighth graders at the I Promise School hasn’t had a single student pass the state’s basic math test since the group was in the third grade.” Moreover, “The state has also issued its first concern about the school: two of I Promise’s biggest subgroups of students, black students and those with disabilities, are now testing in the bottom 5% in the state, landing the school on the Ohio Department of Education’s list of those requiring targeted intervention.”

The response from those responsible? “Huminahuminahumina…” Stephanie Davis, the new principal of the school this year who was introduced as “the perfect person to lead the I Promise School and all of our families to the success we know they will achieve,” according to the school district, had no immediate explanation.

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Ethics Verdicts On Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s Outburst

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first verdict is “What an asshole!”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a freshman GOP Congressman from Wisconsin, walked in on a group of high school-age Senate pages lying on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda to take cellphone photos of the Rotunda dome. According to an alleged transcript of his outburst prepared by one of the pages, Van Orden said, “Wake the fuck up you little shits…Get the fuck out of here. You are defiling the space!” Van Orden also called the teenagers “jackasses” and “lazy shits” according to the pages.

Maddy Pritzl, a former Senate page, took to Twitter to claim this was a tradition that she had observed herself seven years ago. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, engaged in a bipartisan pile-on, condemning Van Orden for his treatment of the pages. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested that the incident may have been a “misunderstanding” and said that he planned on talking to Van Orden, who, for his part, refused to apologize or express regret for his conduct.

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Weekend Ethics Update, 7/29/2023: Navy Joan, “Payback,” Soccer Creeps, News Media Denial, UFOs, Trump’s Relationship With Jesus, And Hillary [Excellent Typo Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

Talk about a “day that will live in infamy”: on this date in 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the Nazi Party, aka the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party. You know the rest.

I’ve been remiss in writing Warm-Ups and similar multiple issue posts: on a time/views basis, they are the least efficient use of my own limited blogging time, as they take about twice as long to prepare and attract about half as much attention as the single issue essays—don’t ask me why. But looking at my list, if I don’t give due attention to some of these backed-up stories now I may never get to them at all. Soooooooooo…

1. The Navy Joan saga, cont. As discussed here, President Biden officially made his son’s 5-year-old love-child Navy Joan Roberts, a non-person by refusing to count her among his grandchildren literally, as he told staff that they were to only acknowledge that he had six grandkids, not seven. This, despite his repeated paeans to family and his love of his grandchildren. This is a major indictment of Biden’s integrity, fairness, courage and character, and the majority of commentators, even some in the pro-Biden propaganda corps, were appropriately critical. Enough so, it seems, that Joe’s”s advisors decided that he had seven grandchildren after all.

President Biden publicly acknowledged his 4-year-old granddaughter, Navy Joan Roberts, for the first time yesterday, saying in a statement that he and the first lady, Jill Biden, “only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”

The reversal deserves no applause. His initial cruel handling of yet another situation created by his Black Sheep son was signature significance: decent people don’t act like that, ever. That he changed his position only after it appeared that his already miserable poll numbers might suffer is redolent of the disgusting machinations of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, when a Dick Morris poll indicated that the public wouldn’t tolerate him lying about the affair. If you need a poll to tell you what conduct is unethical, then you’re hopeless ethically. Clinton was hopeless, and so is Biden.

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From Showtime’s Series “The Affair,” An Ethics Zugzwang “What Would You Do?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As I noted in this post, I am slogging through Showtime’s ethics series “The Affair ” (2016-2021) again after catching much of it pre-streaming. One of the issues raised during an episode was discussed here. At the climax of the second season, a wildly contrived scenario that determined the course of the whole thing occurred. I write ethics hypothetical for a living, and I could not come up with one filled with more ethics conflicts, dilemmas and rationalizations.

Here’s the set-up: The four parties involved in “the affair” are Noah, a late forties, insecure, narcissist writer; Helen, his wife of 25 years with whom he has had four children; Alison, a young, clinically depressed former nurse whom Noah encountered in a chance meeting at Montauk restaurant, The Lobster Roll,” while his family was vacationing, and who subsequently engaged in a mad, impetuous affair with him that broke up his marriage and hers; and Cole, her ex-husband, who ran the family ranch and dealt drugs on the side.

At the point when the incident in question occurs, Noah and Helen are divorced, as are Cole and Alison. Alison and Noah are now married but estranged because Alison just informed Noah that what he thought was their infant daughter is in fact the result of an impulsive post-divorce one-time-only moment of passion with Cole when they were both drunk and depressed. (Everyone drinks a lot in “The Affair.”) Helen and Noah have finally agreed to share care of their kids, especially after Helen having a DUI with her youngest daughter in the car made her case for full custody untenable.

Stipulated: all members of the shattered couples have lingering intense feelings for each other.

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Now THIS Is An Unethical Prosecutor…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It’s the second Costanza of the week! (Pointer credit and thanks to JutGory)

First we had the Incredible Texting Judge, but this guy, Burnett County, Wisconsin assistant district attorney Daniel Steffen, 52, actually engaged in conduct similar (but worse) than what George was trying to wriggle out of in the immortal scene above from the Ethics Alarms movie and TV clip archive.

You’ll recall that he was called on the metaphorical carpet by his boss for having sex on his desk with a cleaning woman.

Steffen, however, topped George by secretly recorded himself having sex with three women, one of which he was in the process of prosecuting. In one of his recordings, the ADA can be heard promising leniency in exchange for sex, according to the criminal complaint. “While the defendant and Victim #1 are still engaged in sex, the defendant looks at the camera, sticks his tongue out, and winks several times,” and can be heard repeatedly telling the victim, “Who’s in charge?” the complaint says.

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