Hardly anyone is reading or commenting today, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to clear the inventory…

1. Today’s incompetent elected official: Pennsylvania State Rep. Kevin Boyle (D-Philadelphia) is shown in a video that turned up on social media ranting and threatening people at a bar. It is unknown right now when the video was taken; from an ethical point of view, it doesn’t matter. Elected officials who disgrace themselves and their constituents like this…indeed, even less than this, should resign immediately. One time is too many. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania House Democrats blathered, “We are aware of a video circulating on social media. It is very troubling.” “Rep. Boyle has been open about his personal challenges,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are encouraged that our colleague and dear friend is seeking help. Our commitment to delivering mental health services does not stop at the Capitol Steps. One of the main reasons we advocate so strongly for mental health access is the reality that challenges can and do happen to anyone, and seeking treatment should be encouraged, not stigmatized.”

No. When an elected official behaves like that in public, his conduct should be stigmatized. He can seek treatment as a private citizen. He has no right to serve in a public position of trust when he has behaved that way.

The same, incidentally, applies to President Biden.

2. No surprises here, at least if you’ve been following EA. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requested that a grand jury examine whether “pharmaceutical manufacturers (and their executive officers) and other medical associations or organizations” partook in “criminal activity or wrongdoing” concerning “their involvement in the development, approval or marketing of COVID-19 vaccines.” The process was authorized by the Florida Supreme Court in December 2022, and now we have preliminary findings.

• It is “highly likely” that pandemic hospitalization numbers were inflated. Of course they were. The grand jury notes that the CARES Act passed by Congress and signed by President Trump “created financial subsidies for Medicare and Medicaid patients” and  for hospitals and other medical facilities “to report more than just hospitalizations for COVID-19 disease….in order to financially benefit the hospital[s].”

• The report confirmed that the Wuhan virus was statistically virtually harmless to children and also “most adults,” with the exception of individuals 65 and older.
• The grand jury  found what was already known about the efficacy of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” (NPI) such as lockdowns and masking was ignored by public health officials while the same officials and the media attacked anyone who referenced such research to question the validity U.S. pandemic policies.
• The  grand jury determined that the lockdown did more harm than good, because American society is “simply not organized in a way that could support long term isolation.” This had to be the easiest finding of all.
• The grand jury concluded that there has “never” been “sound evidence of [masking’s] effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 transmission.”

I believe that Ethics Alarms was 4 for 5 in anticipating these findings.

3. Good. A jury last week found Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley, guilty of four counts involuntary manslaughter. Her son was responsible for the deaths of four students at Oxford High School in November 2021. Ethics Alarms wrote about the case here, beginning,

With rights come responsibilities. I have never been able to understand why law enforcement has been so reluctant to hold the owners and purchasers of guns that are used in crimes criminally responsible when those weapons fall into the wrong hands. Maybe this case will finally be a tipping point, one that should have tipped long ago, and perhaps in other areas of parental negligence other than gun crimes.

In this case, the son was obviously disturbed and his parents bought him a gun (which he used in the massacre) as “an early Christmas present.” Indeed, the school was also negligent, but the first level of responsibility belongs to the shooter’s parents whose negligence placed a deadly weapon in his hands. I am seeing conservative sites fulminating over the prosecution and verdict, calling them a back-door attack on Second Amendment rights. I said in 2021 that this was an easy call, and I am comfortable with that verdict, and the jury’s.

4. Once again, we have a brilliant test of pundit, media and political figure integrity. Two, in fact: if someone is arguing that the law supports Colorado (and the Maine Secretary of State) banning Donald Trump from the ballot for insurrection without any authoritative court finding or legislative determination that there was an insurrection, much less that Trump “participated” in it, you know that bias has made them stupid, and that you should seek enlightenment elsewhere. Similarly, those who are claiming against all evidence that President Biden is not “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and with “diminished faculties in advancing age” are engaging in wilful Jumbos (“Elephant? What elephant?”). The New YorkTimes, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC (of course) and others have been teeming with “It isn’t what it is” efforts to deceive the public. Fact: the Fourteenth Amendment theory was garbage all along, just another effort by Democrats and the Trump Deranged to use illicit, intellectually dishonest and contrived means to prevent a candidate from running whom they fear might beat them. Fact: President Biden was unfit to be President at his intellectual zenith,which passed long ago. His obvious progressive disability threatens to put him in Woodrow Wilson territory before the November election: anyone pretending that it is responsible or reasonable to put him in the White House and expect him to last four more years is an Ethics Villain. With an incompetent and unpopular Vice President belonging to a gender and skin shade that the Left now holds render one exempt from meaningful measures of ability, Democrats are in a terrible fix.

Well, they asked for it.

5. Speaking of the “blacks can do no wrong” theory now rampaging across America, the self-evidently inept and corrupt Democratic Mayor of Dolton, Illinois, Tiffany Henyard flipped out at a town board meeting when she was criticized for profligate spending on personal items on the town’s dime. “Y’all got false narratives out there, and y’all should be ashamed of y’all selves,” she told her critics. “Y’all Black! Y’all are Black! And y’all sitting up here beating and attacking on a Black woman that’s in power. Y’all should be ashamed of y’all selves.”

6. Uh, they can’t do that. In Hawaii v. Wilson, the Supreme Court of Hawaii issued a bonkers and clearly illegal decision asserting that the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Bruen (2022), the Second Amendment case, does not control Hawaii, because its state constitution does not recognize an individual’s right to carry firearms in public. yes, the progressive mania has come to this. If Hawaii could enforce such a ruling, any state could amend its constitution to re-institute slavery or to punish free speech. [Pointer: Steve-O-in NJ]

7. For your consideration and discussion: this.

8. A final note regarding the critics of Tucker Carlson for interviewing Putin, something Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Charley Rose and other liberal journalists did without catching flack. A major criticism of the interview focused on Putin’s assertion that “the Poles forced Hitler to start WWII with him,” and condemned Carlson for not challenging the statement. Wrong. The statement is nonsense on its face, and getting into arguments over historical revisionism isn’t what Carlson was there for.