Month: November 2023

Ethics Quiz: This…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This resurfaced video of the Senate Majority Leader gleefully tripping the light fantastic with the New York Democratic Attorney General, one of the party’s several prosecutors engaged in an effort to use the criminal justice system to hamstring Donald Trump before the 2024 election, raises several ethics questions, but I’ll focus on just one.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is participating in this public spectacle ethical conduct for a prosecutor?

Before I comment, let me just say…Ick.

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“48 Hours” Revelations

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

For unexplainable reasons, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of “48 Hours” of late. You know the show, I assume: the CBS documentary/news magazine has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988, though in periodically mutating forms. It is currently the only remaining first-run prime time shows appearing Saturday nights on the four major U.S. broadcast TV networks, and as such illustrates what dinosaurs those networks are and where they are headed.

“48 Hours” illustrates a lot of other things too, I have discovered, many of them carrying useful, disturbing, or surprising ethical and cultural implications. Although the show’s format is sometimes chucked to cover a breaking news story, most of its astounding number of episodes are devoted to “true crime” tales, usually mysteries and recently solved cold cases.

The formula seldom varies: we get a quick description of a U.S. locale, snippets of local citizens describing it in glowing terms, then an ominous overview of the participants in the ugly event we are about to hear, almost invariably a shocking murder. Then the CBS host—here’s how old the show is: the original host was Dan Rather—is shown interviewing family members, witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, lawyers, jurors and other participants. The show is carefully apolitical, but it is still a fascinating series of snapshots of our society and the treatment of it by the news and entertainment media.

Among the striking impressions that emerge from the accumulated impact of “48 Hours”—

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Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh!) Megan Rapinoe!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I haven’t gone back and checked all of the Ethics Alarms “Don’t Make Me Defend…” posts, but its hard to imagine one involving a public figure I admire less than Megan Rapinoe. Her only legitimate claim to significance is that she was a talented player in a game I wouldn’t abandon my sock drawer to watch, yet she has used that narrow platform to bray a series of woke knee-jerk pronouncements that showed her to be ignorant, anti-American, and the kind of militant feminist who gives feminism a bad name. That, added to an abrasive and narcissistic personality, has made her a blight on the sports landscape and others. And yet…

…fair is fair, and unfair is unfair. Conservatives detest Rapinoe, naturally, and today they pounced on an off-the-cuff comment she made exactly the way the progressive media has deliberately attacked every statement made by Donald Trump that could possibly be interpreted as dumb, mean, sinister or otherwise objectionable when the same words would be ignored from anyone else. I sometimes call this “The Perpetually Jaundiced Eye.” I hate it, and I hate it no matter who the victim is. Yes, even Megan Rapinoe.

During the National Women’s Soccer League Championship, in what had been announced the final match of her storied soccer career, Megan tore her Achilles tendon. This, coming off her humiliating botch of a crucial penalty kick in her team’s loss in the World Cup gave Rapinoe an exit that was approximately the exact opposite of Ted Williams’ (or Roy Hobbs’) home run in his last at bat.

In the post-match, post-injury, and post-career press conference, Rapinoe said, “I’m not a religious person or anything and if there was a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t. This is fucked up. It’s just fucked up. Six minutes in and I eat my Achilles!”

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Breaking! The Supreme Court Finally Issues Its Own Code of Judicial Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is a rarity: genuine breaking ethics news. The U.S. Supreme Court just released a SCOTUS code of conduct, signed by all nine justices. I have already read that the code “largely follows an existing code for other federal judges.” That code is here. I disagree. The new SCOTUS Code is significantly more detailed, with special emphasis on family conflicts (no doubt prompted by the criticism of Justice Thomas’s wife, a conservative activist.)  I find it fascinating, after decades of arguing that the general precepts of judicial ethics were to be presumed in the very core of our nation’s most powerful judges, when they finally codified their ethics, it yielded the most specific and extensive judicial ethics requirements in existence.

I want to flag two important features. First, the word used in all of the five Canons is “should,” not “shall.”  That makes these best practice guidelines, but not absolute requirements. Second, the code does not include any mechanism for enforcement, discipline, or public oversight. Presumably the Court is still  entirely self-policing.

Here is what was released today; I apologize for the funky formatting. WordPress made a lot of strange changes when I copied and pasted, and I had the patience to fix only the worst of them… Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Jim McGreevey Rises Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

It comes down to two alternative words: redemption or chutzpah.

Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey resigned from his position in 2004 after announcing to the world that he had been living a lie and was gay, as his crushed wife stood loyally by his side. (She then divorced him as soon as she could.) He’s been wandering in the wilderness ever since, but yesterday he formally reentered politics by announcing his intention to become mayor of the state’s second largest city, Jersey City, last week.

A lawyer with the Georgetown Law Center degree and a Masters from Harvard, he was considered a rising Democratic Party star with a picture-perfect family and obvious ability. But a man he had appointed to a position in his administration under odd circumstances threatened to sue McGreevey for sexual harassment, and shortly thereafter, the governor was making a sensational statement at a press conference in which he revealed that he was a “gay American” and that he had engaged in an adulterous affair with a man. He then announced that he would resign, which McGreevey did, though he delayed long enough to avoid a special election.

And now…he’s baaaaack!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it ethical to give McGreevey another chance at elected office?

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Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Update: Tells, Hypocrites, Liars And A Jumbo, Part 3…It Just Keeps Getting Better, Doesn’t It?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

A protest sign at the massive Pro-Hamas rally in London last week

I have been procrastinating in finishing this series, waiting for a final shoe to drop and instead being buried by dozens. So let’s get it out of the way, admitting that the ethics rot being exhibited by the American Left’s anti-Semitism, obtuseness regarding the nature of war and appalling ignorance of history is now on full display for all to see and retch over. When it stops nobody knows, especially me. Ethical people can only hope that there are appropriate consequences. I can’t begin to thoroughly cover the revolting developments, but this is the best I can do…

1. Perhaps the most ethically head-exploding news was that four photojournalists who provide reporting and photos for major news media outlets like Associated Press , CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, and others were apparently embedded with the Hamas terrorists as they murdered Israeli civilians in the sneak October 7 attack.. The question being raised is: Did they have advance notice of the assault, and yet simply go along to get vivid photos to sell? Or to put it another, more pointed way, did the AP, CNN, the New York Times, and Reuters know about the Hamas terror attack in advance…a and do nothing to warn Israel? 

Of course they are all denying it. This would violate specific principles of journalism ethics, and you and I know how seriously this organizations take those….

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Say Hello To The Newest Ethics Alarms Term: “Unethical Salmagundi”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Properly, “salmagundi” describes a salad or cold plate made from disparate ingredients that may include meat, seafood, eggs, cooked and raw vegetables, fruits, pickles, or something else. Metaphorically, the word is sometimes used to describe a chaotic confluence of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent mess. That is how Ethics Alarms will use the term going forward. An Unethical Salmagundi (U.S.) will describe one of those mass collisions of people, situations and institutions that are devoid of ethical logic, discipline or comprehension. An ironically named U.S. will be more disorderly and incomprehensible than an ethics rain wreck, and impossible to sort out. Here is an example from the weekend’s news:

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Ethics Pop Quiz: Why Does Amazon Sell “From The River To Te Sea” Merchandise But Not Anything Featuring A Confederate Flag??

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I find this perplexing, and perhaps attention should be paid. Amazon sells several versions of that attractive shirt above, but stopped making anything with a Confederate flag available in 2015. The impetus for this move was, as you might recall, Dylann Roof, a lone, racist wacko, shooting and killing nine African-Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina church. Yet more than a month after approximately 1,200 Jewish civilians were murdered by Hamas in a carefully organized surprise terror attack, merchandise with the Palestinian slogan calling for Israel’s eradication, in accordance with the Hamas charter, is still selling briskly on Amazon to U.S. customers. The U.S. Congress just censured its racist, anti-Semitic “Squad” member Rashida Tlaib for endorsing the very same slogan. The American Jewish Committee regards the phrase as antisemitic.  The White House finally condemned the use of the “inspirational phrase,” as Tlaib called it. Amazon claims to have a policy prohibiting “the sale of products that promote, incite, or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance” and”prohibits or promote organizations with such views, as well as listings that graphically portray violence or victims of violence.”

How do you reconcile the contradictory treatment of the Confederate flag, which is a far more ambiguous symbol with important significance in American history, and an infamous anti-Israel rallying cry?

Some possible answers are offered below:

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Stop Making Me Sort Of Defend Donald Trump!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One reason (out of , oh, a thousand or so) that I dread another four years of Donald Trump is the inevitable avalanche of “get Trump!” stories from the mainstream news media, trying to instill fear based on what he reportedly said or thought or considered as reported by some malign mole, or, as in this case, deliberately spinning some off-the-top-of-the-head careless musings into existential threats to the nation. These are sinister and disgusting breaches of journalistic ethics supporting Trump’s description of the media as “enemies of the people,” or, in the alternative—there’s that darn Hanlon’s Razor again!—move evidence that bias makes you, or in this case, them, stupid.

I have a confession: when I read the multiple headlines screaming that Trump had said that he would prosecute political foes if he was elected President, I just assumed that he really said that. What’s the matter with me? I know all of these sources are corrupt, dishonest, and determined to undermine Trump’s candidacy by any means necessary, and yet I still default to the romantic, Pollyanna notion that journalists can be trusted.

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How Can Any Democrat, Never Mind Anyone Else, Trust House Minority Whip James Cliburn (D-S.C.) After This Op Ed?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Heck, how can anyone trust a political party that would install such a calculated liar (or, in the other Hanlon’s Razor alternative, an utter moron) who would issue such cynical, obvious, “it isn’t what it is” piece of unconscionable gaslighting?

Clyburn has one of the most damning Ethics Alarms dossiers of any member of Congress, which is impressive, considering what an awful collection of corrupt and destructive incompetents “low-information voters” have elected to govern us. He, or more likely a soulless aide—the best defense Clyburn could offer for this thing is that he allowed his name to be attached to it without reading what it said—gave the ludicrous primal scream against democracy to CNN, which dutifully published it instead of handing it back laughing and saying, “Good one. Now where’s the real op-ed?”

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