Month: July 2024

Jill Biden: An Ethics Villain’s Route to Power

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This explains a lot…

Since there is some reason to suspect that Jill Biden has been doing an Edith Wilson impression for at least some of her husband’s ill-starred term as President, a substacker decided to do a deep dive into Dr. Jill Biden’s dissertation to assess exactly how intellectually qualified she is to be shadow-President. What she found was, to understate it, horrifying….and yet, all in all, not surprising.

To summarize, the doctorate of education Jill received from the University of Delaware in January 2007 was based on a “scholarly” dissertation that was objectively crap. It is riddled with typos, mathematical errors, and horrible writing. Holly Mathnerd (not her real name, presumably) writes in part (this is a huge essay),

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“The Ethicist’s” Streak of Really Dumb Questions Continues…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Are there really so few genuine ethics dilemmas to discuss that Prof. Appiah, aka.”The Ethicist,” has to resort to answering dumb questions like this? An inquirer asks,

I’m in my 30s and have multiple motor and vocal tics that started in my early teens and have never gone away. As far as I can tell, I fit the diagnostic criteria for Tourette’s syndrome… Can I say I have Tourette’s without being formally diagnosed? I’m wary of doing so, given that self-diagnosis is looked down upon for medical issues generally and specifically in the case of Tourette’s; there has been a recent rash of people on social media falsely claiming to have it. But I feel that telling people that I have Tourette’s, which is a label many people recognize, would allow me to talk about my tics more freely and in so doing help counter the mild shame I have around them. It might even educate others on the range of severity with which Tourette’s can present, i.e., that it’s not always so noticeable. But I’m very concerned about seeming to co-opt a group’s struggles, and I don’t know if I need a formal diagnosis to be welcomed into groups for people with Tourette’s, either. What is your view?

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Apparently Whom A Presidential Candidate Chooses As VP Hardly Matters To Voters. Should It?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Is the Pop Catholic? Is Joe Biden demented? Of course the VP choice should matter. In fact, it is irresponsible and incompetent for voters not to regard the second slot on national tickets as potential deal-breakers. However, who is running for VP is firmly in shrug territory for the vast majority of Americans, and always has been.

Rasmussen Reports found in a recent survey of both Democrats and Republicans that Trump’s VP, soon to be announced, won’t make “much of a difference” on Election Day. 82% of Republicans and 81% of Democrats said that they didn’t care. Just 12% of Republican and Democratic likely voters told pollsters that Trump’s VP might tip the scales for them on Election Day.

I’m surprised it was that high. Not only voters, but parties and Presidents have been insanely unconcerned with the qualifications and leadership ability of Vice-Presidential candidates from the very first one, John Adams, who had no governing experience when he was named George’s back-up and was temperamentally ill-suited for leadership—as he quickly proved when he was elected President to succeed Washington. [Note: for some reason I gave Adams a pass when I posted the first installment of the “Worst President Ever” series, and have revised that post. He wasn’t the worst President, but he was definitely one of the worst.]

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I’m Curious: What Would You Call The Results of This Newsbusters Study In Addition To “Unethical”?

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Newsbusters has the results of a study it performed to examine the political orientation of Late Night TV Guests. It isn’t a surprise to me in the least, yet seeing the results still gave me a jolt. As I write this, I am trying to figure out what this obviously intentional practice of the networks and entertainment industry is, exactly. But first, the study…

It tallied the guest appearances on five daily late night comedy shows: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. The period examined was the nine months from October 2, 2023, to June 27, 2024.

In that period, progressive/Democrat guests outnumbered conservative/Republican guests 137 to 8, or 94% to 6%. If you just count partisan officials, the count was 34 Democrats to 5 Republicans.

Colbert—naturally—had the greatest cumulative discrepancy at 14-1. The Jimmy Kimmel balance count was 7-0. Seth Meyer’s was 3-0, and Jimmy Fallon, who is mostly apolitical (except in his monologues) was 1-0. Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show came in at 9-4.

In the category of journalists and celebrities, the slant was 104 progressives to 3 conservatives.

Colbert was again the most biased at 34-0. The Daily Show was second in bias at 29-1. Meyers had a 21-0 progressive imbalance, Fallon’s was 11-1, and Kimmel’s was 7-1. No journalists from conservative publications or platforms were allowed: here are the outlets represented:

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And Yet Even More Post Debate Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

I hate it when I have to post repeatedly on a single ethics issue. Yesterday I heard an angry Greg Gutfield proclaim the revelation that the Axis has been actively deceiving the public about Biden’s true condition a bigger scandal than Watergate. It might be. On that basis, the extra posts are justified.

1. I heard the pathetically incompetent Karine Jean-Pierre at the White House Press briefing repeatedly explain Biden’s cognitive crash as a “bad night.” Yeah, Abe Lincoln had a bad night on April 14, 1865. She used all the other agreed-upon talking points too: it was late, he had a cold, and the President knows he isn’t as young as he used to be and isn’t as “smooth a talker” as he once was. This is simultaneously a “Just how stupid do the Democrats think the public is?” test and a “Just how stupid IS the public?” test.

2. Part of Joe’s “I am not a vegetable” tour is apparently going to include a press conference and an interview with George Stephanopoulos. Would it be too much to ask for the interviewer not to be a former Democratic Party operative? I guess so…

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Attack of the Zombie Morons!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Again, not unexpected, just wildly depressing.

I really don’t have time this morning to do the analysis of yesterday’s latest SCOTUS decision that it deserves, or even to complete the deserved excoriation of the liars, hysterics and morons have made utter asses of themselves while making ignorant and gullible members of the public more ignorant still. I was grateful to see Prof. Turley’s essay this morning, which is exactly what I expected it to be.

But all anyone had to do was to read the damn opinion, which you can and should do here. It is a moderate opinion. It is a careful opinion, and it was an unavoidable one. It is also an opinion that would never have been necessary if the totalitarian Democrats hadn’t decided to weaponize the criminal justice system in a last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump from defeating their demented, puppet President.

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Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Honorary Degrees

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Hmmmm.

Here are the distinguished individuals Harvard saw fit to award honorary degrees to at graduation this year. (I’m sure some of them, heck, maybe all, are very fine people) :

  • Gustavo Dudamel, music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, his home country, and music and artistic director-designate of the New York Philharmonic
  • Jennie Chin Hansen, immediate past chief executive of the American Geriatrics Society, and past president of AARP—a pioneer in care for the elderly.
  • Sylvester James Gates Jr., Clark Leadership Chair in Science and Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a theoretical physicist who has worked on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
  • Joy Harjo, twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States, 2019-2022, the author of 10 books of poetry (plus plays, children’s books, and two volumes of memoir), and a performing musician who played for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and has produced seven albums.
  • Maria A. Ressa, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 (with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) for her brave, independent news coverage of her native Philippines.

(Former Harvard president Lawrence Bacow also got an honorary degree, but ex-Harvard presidents always do if they manage not to get fired for plagiarism, so he doesn’t count.)

Interesting. Out of five honorees, not one was a white American, not even a white woman, or a white LGTBQ warrior. A Venezuelan male, a female Filipino, Harjo is Native American, Gates is black, and Hansen is Asian American.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Week is…

Is there anything wrong with this roster?

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Rueful Ethics Observations On This Biden Campaign Email…

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Per conservative blogger Jim Treacher, the Biden Campaign sent this out to supporters today…

Wow.

Observations:

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Answering Prof. Volokh’s Questions…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

On his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy (which I have loyally followed from its independent days, to the Washington Post, and now at Reason), Prof. Eugene Volokh offers a series of rhetorical questions in his post, “Sad Thoughts About American Politics.” Volokh, whom I have corresponded with occasionally over the years, is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. More importantly, he’s a rational, fair analyst with keen ethics alarms. The point of rhetorical questions is to elicit a response inherent in the question’s phrasing and context. Nonetheless, I thought I’d warm up my faculties first thing this morning by answering the questioned he poses. These are just the question, now. In the post, he had considerable context and commentary. But I assume you know the context, and you can read the commentary at the link. Here are the questions…

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