Go into the light! Talk about ethics!
Which reminds me, somewhat related to this post: why in the world did Hollywood re-make “Poltergeist”? After years of avoiding the bad copy starring Sam Rockwell, I finally saw the thing, and it was even worse than I had heard. With the exception of Sam, the cast was inferior, the special effects weren’t so much better that they justified a new version, and the movie lacked any humor or quirkiness, which were the major reasons the first “Poltergeist” was fun despite being completely off-the-charts absurd. Why change the little girl’s name from Carol Ann to “Madison”? Who thought replacing the odd Little Person female psychic (Zelda Rubinstein, above) with a male actor reminiscent of an aging Richard Harris would be an upgrade?
Why not come up with an original idea?
Ethics Alarms 
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12652605/Gazas-tragic-victim-Doctor-places-body-unborn-child-mother-died-seven-months-pregnant-alongside-two-daughters-Israeli-airstrike.html
Wait. What? The death of a fetus is tragic? I thought it was a constitutionally protected, inherent right?
Was this the result of an Israeli airstrike?
Whether one agrees with Matt Gaetz or not my question is should the few unwilling to elect a conservative speaker because of Gaetz’s tactic be held up as patriots or petulant children.
My take is that McCarthy would not have been speaker had he not agreed to the demands of the eight who wound up voting him out when he failed to fulfill the promise of establishing regular order so he failed to deliver and deserved ouster.
Those seeking to deny Gaetz any victory are creating the problems we see now in my estimation. How can Republicans demand accountability if they accept sub par performance within their own ranks.
I think all factions come off as petulant children. The conservatives need to understand, that when you have a majority by 1.5 people, you are not going to be fundamentally altering anything, period. Best you’ll get is the ship sailing steady, with a few tweaks here and there. The moderates need to understand, that if they keep up the silliness of not voting in a speaker, they’ll be voted out of their moderate districts anyways, because of a blanket perception of Republican ineffectiveness. All this unserious bullcrap is caused by some showboating wacky hair assholes (Gaetz) and spineless lizards (Mace) for reasons unknown to themselves. These are the moments one can envy the party discipline Nancy Pelosi had and the power she wielded. So it goes, we have a stupid party and an evil party.
Aleksei
McCarthy took 14 votes to get elected and had to make promises to the 8 holdouts. He agreed to the one person vote to vacate and made promises to get a budget passed in the House. Is it grandstanding to hold someone to their promises? I don’t think so.
I thought conservative values included accountability, responsibility. It seems to me that the current members who are voting for people not even running are causing more damage to the brand than Gaetz.
Thanks for your input
CM
Chris Marschner,
McCarthy made that choice and took the risk. I don’t think he expected that the handful of Republicans would vote with every Democrat to get him out. So when the hateful 8 succeeded and the dog caught the car, now what? If the Republicans lose congress and get a principled moral victory and become a minority, I guess you can take that to the bank.
The fact that there are unserious and silly people in all the factions of the Republicans, that causes damage to the brand, period.
I thought McCarthy was asking for trouble for making so many compromises and promises he could not possibly keep, and agreeing to a single member vote for removal was naive.
That said, Gaetz and Co. made a stupid decision. There is a narrow GOP majority in the House, and Gaetz picked a time with a razor thin majority to pick this fight. How is that the DNC consistently votes for Jeffries but the GOP can’t seem to keep its coalition together.
jvb
The speaker fight is over whether or not congress is going to continue wasting ungodly amounts of money or not. That is it. Some Republicans are determined to continue lining their own pockets by bankrupting the country, while other Republicans think it might be time to stop, or at least make it less obvious what they are doing. All the rest of this supposed battle is just window dressing.
Null Pointer,
I hate to break it to you, this will not stop the spending of ungodly sums of money. There is a chance to improve that spending, but you need power to do it. And this food fight does not add to the ability to hold power.
In general, I think there is no incentive for elected politicians to curb spending, since it will impact certain constituents, via social security, medicaid, medicare, food stamps, etc. The problem will get solved when we run out of money, but not before then. There is no politician, that will work up a career to high office, to then reform everything and have their political career die a horrible death the second after. There are just no incentives for that. We do not have enough nobility in our civil servants to fall on the sword for these necessary, but painful reforms.
We neither have an electorate that wants reform, nor media that reports on the aeguments for reform.
I didn’t say it would work, I said that was what it was about. There may not be much political appetite for spending reform amongst the elites, democrat voters, independents or even certain segments of the Republican voter base, but there is an ENORMOUS appetite for spending reform amongst some subset of Republican voters, and those voters are very vocal.
I don’t care if the House ever gets another speaker for as long as I live. They can stay gridlocked forever and I would be happy because they can’t do anything while they are gridlocked. A useless government is better than a tyrannical government. Let the government shutdown. They fulfill essentially zero actual purpose anymore, anyway.
Is it ethical to blame politicians if the electorate does not want to curb profligate spending? Why should anyone disparage AOC when she says we can just print more money if they are not willing to have to trim their wants? I find the hypocrisy about spending or cutting others spending totally unethical. We can prioritize our spending that will lessen the impact on the taxpayers by requiring other nations to step up.
If all that is said is true, I bet when people are scrounging for a scrap of bread or cannot afford to heat their homes if they have one because their money is worthless then maybe the incentive to curb spending will exist.
The problem is that it is likely they will have to become a member of the CCP before they can get out of the work camps they are forced into to pay off the debt owed to China.
Glad I’ll be dead by then and if not I’ll work to accelerate that process.
We cannot blame politicians if they are carrying out the wishes of the majority. I’m glad to be in the minority on this issue.
On this particular issue I don’t blame the Democrats, I blame the Republicans. They use the debt as a political talking point instead of doing what they say they will do. No one made the Republicans in the House rubber stamp the ridiculous budget proposal this last go round. They did it because they wanted to. Hence my indifference to the perpetual gridlock. McCarthy deserved to lose the speakership.
The Democrats lie to their voters and tell them endless spending won’t cause any problems. That they can be blamed for.
We do not have an electorate that demands these reforms.
I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this position except that one of the big reasons McCarthy was unable to get the various appropriations bills done (regular order) was that this same group blocked him from doing so — and then complained that he didn’t get the bills passed.
The other thing is that, when one goes to depose a leader, it really behooves one to have an alternative ready to hand. Gaetz and his crew evidently had no plan of action besides beclowning their party and counting coup on McCarthy.
I don’t normally make political contributions but it has been running through my mind that it might be a good thing to see if there is anyone looking to primary Gaetz. I assume he is in a fairly safe Republican seat unless he’s an idiot as well as a jerk.
Given the extremely tenuous grip Republicans currently have on the levers of power in Washington, I thought McCarthy was actually getting stuff done. You simply can’t reasonably expect major changes when you only (barely) control one half of one branch of the government.
Mitt Romney had no idea what Burisma is.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/20/mitt-romney-admits-he-didnt-know-anything-about-burisma-during-trumps-ukraine-impeachment/
I see Mittens is also saying Fox News has ruined the GOP. Just can’t help yourself, can you Mitt? This guy is the GOP’s own John Kerry. And empty suit that looks like a senator from central casting.
And I voted for the guy twice to be President (with serious misgivings both times.)
Who was the alternative?
First, Obama, and I’d vote for Mitt over him any day, and the other time Hillary or Trump. I’d take Mitt over either of them, too. But I’d also take Spuds…
A neighbor once posted a campaign sign for his dog, “Super Cooper”; I was happy to finally have a presidential candidate I could get behind!
In 2016, I wanted to legally change my name to ‘None, Of The Above” and run for president!
I believe we actually should have ‘none of the above’ as an option for all elected offices. If ‘none of the above’ gets a plurality, a new election is held, paid for by the 2 major parties. The 2 major parties get on the ballots automatically and it is their job to provide decent candidates for each office. If they can’t do that, they should pay. If they don’t want that responsibility, they can circulate petitions to get their candidates on every ballot, like everyone else.
It would be hard to pass up the opportunity to get lots of people like Cher (poor baby) to move out of the country: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cher-says-shell-leave-us-if-trump-retakes-white-house-in-2024-i-almost-got-an-ulcer-the-last-time/ar-AA1iwfiR
There was no justification for the impeachment.
Did anyone watch the President’s short talk last night regarding Israel, but mostly Ukraine?
I thought he looked as though his makeup had been applied with one of those machines that sprays the popcorn texture on your ceilings. And I didn’t think his delivery was very good, either.
If the goal was to make him look super grizzled and super feeble at the same time…well…mission accomplished.
He looked really bad, worse than I’ve seen him. I wonder can he finish his term?
I should have watched the address on a much lower-resolution TV. High definition made for a very bad experience.
Today, I finished the book “Counting the Cost: A Memoir” by Jill Duggar Dillard and her husband Derrick. This followed a viewing of “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets” on Amazon Prime.
For many years, I have been interested in the experiences of children growing up in the entertainment business. It was by following Paul Petersen’s organization “A Minor Consideration” that I found Ethics Alarms via a guest column our host wrote about a family of biking enthusiasts who took their two school-age sons on long-term bike trips.
I found Petersen’s indictment of the reality show model particularly compelling. His arguments that these shows (which are, by no means, reality anyway) exploit children who do not have the same protections that are afforded professional child actors, especially when they are filmed in states with lax laws. The children cannot give meaningful consent to have their lives filmed for years at a time and often don’t realize until they are adults the impact of millions of people seeing their worst child moments – tantrums, diaper changes, potty training, family drama.
It seemed reasonable to believe that these children’s camera antics were not natural. They were performances. The children are working. They are playing to the camera just as fans at a football game do when they see themselves on the Kiss-Cam or Jumbo-Cam. With few protections, the children – who are nearly always the reason why people watch these shows anyway – were likely not seeing any of the money paid to their parents.
So it was that I was one of the few evangelical Christians in my circle who really questioned the wisdom of the Duggars.
Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar had a few children already when Michelle had a miscarriage that they blamed on birth control pills. They began to get involved in the Institute of Basic Life Principles run by an unmarried, childless guru named Bill Gothard who presented a series of steps designed to keep life running orderly in a family. The umbrella of authority put God at the top, the husband/father second, the wife/mother third and the children underneath. By staying under the umbrella of authority, families could avoid the problems plaguing American society that had concerned many people in the ’70s and ’80s.
The father directs all activity in the home, the mother supports him, she and the children obey. Adult unmarried children stay under this umbrella of authority. They do not date. If there is a young man interested in a girl, the father arranges a meeting, vets the guy, the young couple spend supervised time together only with not even a kiss. The courtship process is monitored to the wedding day. The couple have as many children as God wants them to have with nothing inhibiting conception. Bill Gothard himself paid for many women to have tubal ligation reversals so they could have more children.
Jim-Bob and Michelle began having children right and left. When Michelle was pregnant with her 15th child, they were noticed by Discovery execs who put together a few specials featuring this unusual family. The popularity of the specials turned into a television show featuring the whole clan as more children were born. Americans tuned in to this cute family with well-behaved children and their quaint ideas about marriage and parenting.
Full disclosure here: when I was in college and on my first marriage (long before the Duggars had their first special), I was invited to an IBLP seminar that several people from my church attended. I went through the lessons, I thought Gothard himself was a bit old-fashioned, but he told engaging stories while drawing in front of the audience, creating beautiful artwork. A couple of years later, he was invited to speak to my first husband’s church and sat right next to me in the pew. He asked me why I was going to college, as if it were a rebuke. I explained myself; dismissed him as old-fashioned but harmless.
I watched a couple of the Duggar specials but did not watch any version of their show. I already knew that these children couldn’t give informed consent, they weren’t really living reality while on TV and they were certainly not getting paid.
Behind the scenes, however, there were problems I couldn’t have imagined. The type of authority Bill Gothard advocated works only if those at the top of the chain do their due diligence. For many husbands and fathers – and Gothard himself – the umbrella of authority facilitated abuse and the covering up of it. There is a website called recoveringgrace.com that covers the harmful teachings of IBLP and contains story after story of those were abused at home, at IBLP facilities and those who fell under the manipulation of Bill Gothard himself.
Jill Duggar’s book takes her life from a small family living in their small house to a huge TLC-subsidized home and opportunities most people can only dream of through an IBLP-approved courtship with what turned out to be an amazingly-supportive husband and the realization as an adult that she had worked for years with no pay, tricked into signing contracts she didn’t understand and how little her upbringing had prepared her for an independent adult life…particularly since the umbrella of authority didn’t seem to remove her parents from the equation even after her wedding. Her brother Josh’s problems escalated. Josh Duggar was caught with pornography. His parents tried to handle it. He was caught in his sisters’ bedroom, touching them inappropriately. His parents tried to handle it. It wasn’t enough. In trying to protect their television brand, they exposed their daughters to the scrutiny of the press and the world when the story inevitably exploded.
Counseling has helped Jill set the boundaries she was never taught to establish, affecting her relationship with her family to this day. To her credit, she expresses her gratitude to her parents for the wonderful things they did right while acknowledging that they let the show bungle priorities.
If only they’d been exposed to Paul Petersen instead of Bill Gothard.
Here’s an article that’s expressed something I’ve been thinking about for years now:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/high-priced-sports-analysts-don-t-know-when-to-shut-up/ar-AA1ixszs?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=a785b1af5044487698b2f90a9fd3d311&ei=60
MLB playoff broadcasts have to be listened to on mute. Ron Darling and Smoltzie are insufferable. They never shut up. It’s not rocket science, guys, it’s a game and it’s pretty darned random. Be quiet from time to time. Sheesh.
You have two ex-players there who were considered unusually wise and educated (and fawned over by sportswriters—Ron’s from YALE ) so they have been conditioned to believe every word from their lips are precious pearls. I thought Tim McCarver was a know-it-all, but these two are worse. Ex-players with the reputation of being the smartest ones in the dugout—Kubek was another—often insufferable.
You’re right. I’d forgotten that Tim McCarver really endowed the playoffs know-it-all analyst’s chair. And yes, I do remember Tony Kubek being a little overbearing. But it is remarkable no one in the marketing arms of the networks has done any research on viewers’ reactions to this sort of broadcasting. Makes me miss Jack Brickhouse: “Ball one.” Twenty seconds go by. “Ball two.”
Boston has maintained its preference for color men and analysts who will shut up over the years, as well-as self-deprecating ex-players more in the mold of Dizzy Dean or Joe Garagiola: baseball savvy, but under no delusions about their IQs
Unfortunately, Joe Garagiola hung around way past his sell by date. His shtick just became tiresome. Which was too bad. In the ‘sixties, he was really a fresh voice and take on the game. He was fun to watch on Carson. Sort of a proto-Bob Uecker. It was painful when he’d announce Diamondbacks games on the main guys’ days off as recently as five or so years ago. Should have just gone fishin’.
Yes, just because Vin Scully was a freak who never seemed to diminish with age, now every old baseball broadcaster thinks its never time to hang up the mic.
Scully WAS a freak. It was as if he knew what was going to happen before it did.
I usually just listen to the radio feed, but if I’m watching I prefer to have the video feed along with the radio audio feed. I’m annoyed that mlb.tv doesn’t let you do that during the postseason broadcasts — when you can do it that way, video and audio are synced up.
However, I think I might have figured out how to do it anyway, watching on my PC and listening on my phone.
Lefty Hoisted On Their OWN PETARD.
The kicker?
They’re (heh!) doing all the heavy lifting!
PWS
It won’t slow them down, CG. Jew hate is wide and deep. Frankly, I’m stunned by how many liberal, cosmopolitan Jews always mix their measured criticism of Hamas with full throated condemnations of Israelis, particularly conservative Israelis, on account of the Israelis attitudes and policies toward the hostile forces and populations on their borders who want to murder the Israelis.
The U.S. allied with the Soviets in the 1940’s.
Surely Israel is not nearly as bad.
Wasn’t the Soviet Union also an ally of Israel back in the very first years of their existence?
The least bad option for Israel and therefore the most ethical option is to fully remove the Palestinian population from, at a bare minimum, the northern section of the Gaza Strip to a smaller enclave further south in the Strip.
MLB seems to delight in running numerous ads and PSA’s that are at best annoying. Here is one that just makes me scratch my head:
Basically it starts out with a guy saying “My daughter is biological and my son is adopted.”
I hear that and my first (and second and third) thought is that this is absurd, it makes no sense (and yes, I know perfectly well what it’s code words for).
Is his son not biological? Is he an android — I thought that was just on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Did he adopt a robot? Perhaps his son is an AI? A ghost? What other possibilities might there be?
—————
It also seems like about half the ads on MLB.com are PSA’s from NHTSA. Many of them I now pretty much know by heart. On the other hand they’re not ads for Planned Parenthood — those were more early season.
Many years ago the Atlanta Braves were the bugaboo of the Houston Astros, and the NY Yankees that for the Texas Rangers. Both those hurdles were eventually overcome in 2005 and 2010 and they went on to get smoked in their first World Series.
The past few years, the Astros have totally had their way with the Rangers, exemplified by what the Rangers’ broadcasters call the ‘murder series’ last month in Arlington, when the Astros just destroyed the Rangers in a three game series to take the AL West lead.
The Rangers won the first two games of the ALCS in Houston, leading us to hope that the Rangers were putting that ghost to rest, at long last. Then Houston bounced back in Arlington, culminating with Altuve’s game winning gut punch home run in the 9th on Friday night, giving the Astros a 3-2 lead.
I, along with all Rangers fans, was dismayed and sick over this twist of fate. I did not despair, but did remember that Eovaldi and Scherzer were pitching for the Rangers.
Another nail-biter yesterday and then today Scherzer was not the pitcher we hoped for — but the Rangers knocked out Christian Javier in the 1st inning. Finally, finally, the vaunted Rangers offence showed up and they’re up 8-2 now. It appears that this will be another series where the road team wins all 7 games (see 2019 World Series).
I am cautiously optimistic — but no lead is ever truly safe.
🙂
Congratulations. I love it.
But this one was!
Indeed, not only because the back end of the bullpen was good enough, but the Rangers’ offense never let up.