For the record, the 18 are U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, and U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
They all signed a letter urging the Biden Administration “to take all available actions to streamline pathways to lawful status for undocumented immigrants.” “Undocumented immigrants” are illegal immigrants, and that is all you need to know to assess the unethical and irresponsible nature of the letter, as well as all the signatories to it, which is pretty much a Rogues Gallery of the most radical and destructive Senators in the upper House, with a few surprising exceptions.
White House correspondents are constantly stealing things from Air Force One. In February, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Kelly O’Donnell , felt compelled to send what was described as a “terse email” to her colleagues reminding them taking items like embroidered pillowcases, wine glasses, whiskey tumblers, blankets and gold-rimmed dinner plates “reflects poorly” on the press corps as a whole.
Really? I did not know that! Who would have guessed? Thanks, Kelly!
Actually, O’Donnell’s warning received no responses at all, reportedly, though one member of the press corps apparently returned a pillowcase he had pilfered.
Politico reports that this has been going on for a long time, with reporters stealing taxpayer purchased items with the Air Force One insignia on it being treated as a “rite of passage.” “On my first flight, the person next to me was like, ‘You should take that glass,’” one current White House reporter told Politico. And then the corrupting correspondent “was like”—OK, guess the rationalization.
Come on, guess! I’ll give you 30 seconds….
Time’s up! Politico quotes thusly: “They were like: ‘Everyone does it.’” Ah yes, the #1 Rationalization of them all, and the watermark of the ethically unlettered, “Everybody Does It.” Politico: “Several colleagues of one former White House correspondent for a major newspaper described them hosting a dinner party where all the food was served on gold-rimmed Air Force One plates, evidently taken bit by bit over the course of some time” and ” Reporters recalled coming down the back stairs after returning to Joint Base Andrews in the evening with the sounds of clinking glassware or porcelain plates in their backpacks.”
Politico apparently thinks this is all hilarious, ending its story with a facetious, “Are you IN POSSESSION OF AIR FORCE ONE DINNERWARE? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.“
We receive our information about the work of our President and his staff through the filter of people without even rudimentary ethics alarms: arrogant, unprofessional, untrustworthy and self-indulging assholes.
The photo above, showing three illuminated cross along Lower Manhattan Skyline in New York city symbolizing the three crosses on Calvary, contrasts sharply with Item #3 of the previous post noting that the White House viewed Easter egg decorations with “religious symbols” inappropriate for the day’s festivities.
I ask, without irony or innuendo: “Is this progress?”
My family was schizophrenic about Easter, since the church we regularly attended in Arlington, Mass, the Arlington Congregational Church, had its Easter service on the regular day while the Greek Orthodox Church, in which my parents were married, celebrates on a different day entirely (well, most years—this year, Greek Easter falls on May 5). The Greeks dye all Easter eggs red, which is a bit boring, but play a game where everyone in the family picks an egg and takes turns smashing its end against another family member’s egg (hitting an egg in the side is cheating). The Marshalls had this competition on regular Easter with multi-colored eggs; my mother often secretly dyed an unboiled egg and gave this one to my father, so his egg would shatter into a gooey mess when they had their egg duel. Today my sister is making me a traditional Greek specialty, avagolemono soup. My grandmother made it: Mom didn’t have the patience. If you’ve never tried it, you should.
That Easter hymn above was always sung at our church (which was riddled with scandals: a deacon leaving his wife and two daughters to run off with a gay lover; a beloved, charismatic young minister being revealed as a serial adulterer with female members of the congregation; the young woman who ran the Sunday school program hanging herself in the church bell tower). It’s by my pal Sir Arthur Sullivan, who was one of those freaks like Richard Rodgers, Edvard Grieg, Irving Berlin, Carol King and Paul McCartney who could create catchy melodies without breaking a sweat (unlike, say, Stephen Sondheim).
My Easter celebration, as always, began this year with my umpteenth viewing of the guilty pleasure champion film of all time, Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” which I first saw as a child and which planted the seed that made me aspire to being a director. The production’s ethics lesson is “If you are going to do something, do it right.” The grand, incomparable epic also stands for the principle that important stories in our culture should be told to rising generations in a manner that will cement them in their brains forever.
Every director, especially opera directors, can learn from the astounding Exodus scene, which thrills me every time I see it. CB spares no expense or imaginative detail: everything is going on: an old man praying is stampeded by geese; a small boy is nosed by a water buffalo (no mere oxen for CB!) ; the Nubians have a huge vulture flapping away on their cart. Brilliant colors, wild sounds, such organized chaos—and all those people are real, not CGI fakes. The fantastic boffo sequences are all so good you can forgive (if not forget) DeMille’s vulgarity and cornball instincts, as with the giggling daughters of the Sheik of Midion basically drooling over Charlton Heston, and various characters, but especially Nefertiri (played by Ann Baxter, who could be an effective actress, like she’s in a John Waters movie), saying, “Moses, Moses!” repeatedly. My favorites, other than Moses leading the thousands out of Egypt: the raising of the new obelisk…the burning hail—the plague of the first born moving down alleys and streets in a sickly green mist right out of a horror movie—God writing out the Ten Commandments with animated flaming lightning that does loop-de-loops and other stunts on the way to the tablets—-the parting of the Red Sea (of course), and CB’s insanely over-the-top orgy around the Golden Calf: Where did all those flower garlands come from in a desert?
I don’t understand why anyone continues to live or work in California, a state with a culture that lurches between stupid, irresponsible and deluded.
The headline above does not refer to the recent, bone-headed decision to give fast-food workers up to a 25% raise, with cooking Big Macs the minimum wage jumping to $20 an hour in that sector next week. “It’s a big win for cooks, cashiers and other fast-food workers ” says taxpayer-funded progressive propaganda organ NPR. Right. Fast food wages have been growing at a faster clip than almost any other sector since the pandemic, with the result that more outlets are moving to automation, which means, as has happened every time the minimum wage jumps, lower-paid workers—whose skills often aren’t worth the minimum wage— will lose their jobs. Meanwhile, fewer people with strained budgets will buy fast food because of the duel problems that it’s no longer fast, and is absurdly expensive, and California is already one of the most expensive states.
Oh, who knows: maybe all those vegans and health nuts in the Golden State want to wreck the fast food business. More likely, however, it’s just that legislators there—Suspense! Will they actually vote to make all Californians-of-the-right-color millionaires?—don’t understand economics, cause-and-effect and reality.
But I find the proposed law this post concerns more offensive from an ethics point of view if less destructive. California Assemblyman Matt Haney wants California to be the first in the country to give employees the legal right refuse to respond if their superior calls after hours. Then the law would permit workers to ignore emails, texts and other work-related communications until the next day after the work day has begun. “People now find themselves always on and never off,” the Nanny State fan said. “There’s an availability creep that has reached into many people’s lives, and I think it’s not a positive thing for people’s happiness, for their well-being, or even for work productivity.”
Oh, shut up. The law aims to give workers a legal right to be unprofessional. If you have a job and believe in ethical work values, you believe in diligence, responsibility and self-sacrifice. If you believe in personal autonomy and character, you believe that human beings need to be able to make intelligent choices about their life, including their careers, without being bolstered by the legal right to stand up to bullies, jerks and unreasonable supervisors.
I wrote about the Hensel twins—that’s Abigail, the bride, above on the left, and Brittany, the maid-of-honor (I’m assuming) on the right—back in 2012 after the conjoined twins agreed to star in a reality show. The post was titled, “Are Freak Shows Unethical? Because They Are Back.” In the post I confessed my sadness that the twins, whose amazing story I had followed since they were todlers, had cashed in and allowed themselves to be exploited:
I first learned about Abigail and Brittany Hensel many years ago in a Life magazine feature about the remarkable conjoined twins, who to all observers appear to be a two-headed girl. That article talked about how accepting and protective their community was of Abigail and Brittany’s privacy and dignity, and how, except for the fact that they shared a single body, the twins were happy and well-adjusted. Later, when they were teens,there was a documentary about the girls on one of the network news magazines. Again, they seemed smart, lively and and normal by any standard, not just for a “two-headed girl.” They spoke enthusiastically about wanting to have careers and families, and sounded like any other teenager. I found the story both hopeful, inspiring and depressing, especially when Abigail said that she wanted to be a commercial airline pilot and Brittany said that she wanted to be a lawyer. How, exactly, were they going to pull that off?
Now the twins are young women—or a young two-headed woman?—and have apparently made the decision to become professional human oddities. They will be starring this month in a new reality show about their daily life and special problems. We can rationalize the show as an inspiring weeklydemonstration of the strength and determination the twins must muster to overcome their disability and to try to lead normal lives, but let’s be honest: this is a modern freak show, no more, no less. As engaging and courageous as Abigail and Brittany are, the primary appeal of the show to the vast majority of viewers will be the fascination of watching a real, live, two-headed girl go through life….Yes, I wish I could have read that they had graduated from law school and started a law firm, or married two wonderful, normal guys who love them and are able to deal with the fact that it is biologically impossible to have sexual relations with only one twin at a time, since they have just one set of genitals between them. It was not going to happen, though, and as the reality of their options dawned on the girls in adulthood, they came to a rational decision: cash in. People are going to gawk at them anyway, they might as well get rich from it if they can….
Now comes the news that one of the twins, Abigail Hensel, got married and has been married for more than two years. Yikes. What’s that like? The HBO series “Tales from the Crypt” had a very funny episode about this situation, but the real life complications are mind-blowing, particular, as I noted in the earlier post, the twins share a single set of sex organs. They have to cooperate to live: one twin controls the left side of what appears to be their single body, the other controls the right side.
The just can’t help themselves. In “Revisiting Florida 2000 and the Butterfly Effect,” New York Times reporter reminds readers (or as I would prefer to ssay, “whines”) that “the evidence is strong that Al Gore would have won had it not been for an infamous ballot design in Palm Beach County.” The Times will not, when Jimmy Carter dies, reminisce that “the evidence is strong” that if Jimmy Carter had not used the single Presidential debate against Ronald Reagan to appeal to the authority of his then 13-year old daughter Amy regarding nuclear proliferation, Carter would have been elected to a second term,” but then that wouldn’t have given the hypocritical paper an opportunity to claim, falsely and with complete knowledge that the claim was false, that Reagan’s history-altering election wasn’t legitimate. Nate Cohn, one of the rising leftist propagandists in the Times stable of dishonest pundits, does pivot to that claim regarding George W. Bush’s election.
If you thought U.N. staff in Gaza assisting in the Hamas terror attack wasn’t a sufficient sign of ethics rot, how about this: Abdulaziz Alwasil, Saudi Arabia’s envoy to the UN, was elected as chair of the….wait for it!— Commission on the Status of Women. He ran unopposed at the group’s annual meeting in New York this week. None of the 45 members present at the meeting dissented when the representative of that paragon of women’s rights and feminism—you can see typical happy, liberated Saudi women enjoying their status in the enlightened nation above—was elevated to the two year post. The U.S. is not a member; it just hosts the meeting and pays for the lion’s share of all U.N. activities.
The “Get Trump!” cabal is beginning to remind me of nothing so much as the Terminator as described by Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to a skeptical and terrified Linda Hamilton in the scene above. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.” One of the main reasons that I wish the country had some safer and more reasonable option than Trump with whom to seek refuge from the totalitarian-aspiring Democrats’ blundering attempts to remake American society into some kind of socialist hellscape is that again, the “resistance,”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) will be spending his entire term of office in furious efforts to to deny Trump the power and prestige of the Presidency while turning as much of the public as possible against him irrespective of his policies, actions or accomplishments. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They absolutely will not stop.
Rigid, incompetent and thoughtless systems that strangle humanity with red tape are much on my mind these days, since every 24 hour period since Grace’s sudden death has been marred by at least one and usually several confrontations with systems confronting me with a “you can’t get there from here” mentality or employees (or worse, bots) seemingly trained to make problems worse rather than providing desperately needed assistance.
China News reported on a ridiculous story from our favorite Chinese province that highlights the unethical rigidness of bureaucracies and the kind of government control by empowered morons that some would have the United States embrace:
“A man in Wuhan, who has no arms and uses his foot to tap a card to pass the gantry at the metro station, was asked to produce his disability certificate.People aged 65 and above, as well as disabled individuals, can ride the Wuhan Metro for free.
Ethics Alarms 