Month: July 2024

Well, I Think This Definitively Answers Any Lingering Questions About the Competence and Critical Thinking Skills of the Nation’s Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

A Morning Consult poll released this week reports that 34 % of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday’s shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and less than half, 45 %, agreed that the conspiracy theory is not credible at all.

Be proud, Democrats!

You can read here about various theories, reasons and comparisons regarding this idiocy: I really don’t care. I know idiots when I see them. This tells us that less than half of all registered Democrats have the critical thinking skills of the average meat loaf.

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Ethics Hero: Jack Black

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I took a while to research this story before awarding Black, an actor/comic/ musician with a reputation for being a genuinely good guy, an EA Ethics Hero designation. After checking various sources, I am now persuaded that he deserves it.

Black has apparently made enough money as a movie actor that, like Kevin Bacon, Gwyneth Paltrow and a few others, he can indulge his musical inclinations and modest talents and get people to pay to see him performing with a band. That would be Tenacious D, a comedy-rock duo Jack Black shares with Kyle Gass. Tenacious D was in Sydney as part of a tour, and Black brought out a cake at the ICC Sydney Theater on Sunday to celebrate Gass’s 64th birthday. He asked Gass to “make a wish,” and Gass said, “Don’t miss Trump next time!”

The video of the crack went viral. Black, who appeared to laugh at the line (he’s been featured at Biden fundraisers), had a statement posted on social media two days later saying he “was blindsided by what was said at the show,” and that he “would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form.”

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More Weird Tales of The Great Stupid: Post-Debate/Post-Assassination Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

It is astounding what obvious garbage one can hear and read officials, journalists, pundits, activists and academics state in public for popular consumption these days…

1. In an interview shortly after her Secret Service failed its mission and disgraced itself, Kimberly Cheatle actually said that one of her top priorities was to attract more diverse applicants to the agency.

Ethics Note: The interviewer, a standard issue hack, naturally didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question: “Why is diversity a priority at all in an agency with the assignment of the Secret Service? Who cares what gender, ethnicity or color the agent is who saves the life of a President? Why does it matter? If every agent was a 6’4″ black man who can run a 4 minute mile, dead-lift 400 pounds, score 160 on an IQ test and shoot a wing off a fruit fly at 300 yards, why would the director feel that isn’t an ideal force for the job her agency is committed to do?”

Her only priority should be ensuring that the Secret Service has competent and well-trained agents, and she’s failed at that.

2. Kamala Harris said that J.D. Vance was picked to be a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s “extreme agenda” and that “he will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country. If elected, he will help implement the extreme Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term.”

Ethics Note: One would think that Harris, having been Vice-President, might be aware that the VP has no power to “rubber stamp” or even help implement anything. Every Vice-President is completely loyal to the man who chose them as #2: I can find no example in history of a Vice-President not working, for whatever good it does, to accomplish the President’s polices. (I don’t count Pence refusing to try to stall the 2020 election certification, which was the equivalent of Trump asking him to fly to Jupiter by flapping his arms.) Meanwhile, Harris, as a VP who actively deceived the public—you know, our country?— regarding Biden’s fitness to serve is ethically estopped from complaining that anyone else might put loyalty to the President over duty to country, especially a Marine like Vance.

“Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, a Jumbo for the ages.

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Today’s “Nah There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” (Or “Nah, The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want to Rig The Election!”) Note Of the Day…[Expanded and Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

From Axios…

Nice.

There have been a lot of iconic or otherwise memorable photographs of Presidents over the decades that placed a sitting POTUS in a positive or sympathetic context. They were all liberally used to promote that President’s leadership and popularity. Such as…

and…

and

and…

and…

and..

and…

and…

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Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.

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Baseball’s All-Star Game : Another Tradition Rotted

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I watched it last night because there was really nothing else worth seeing on TV, but I hate what the All-Star game has become, and have hated it for a long time. Before inter-league play and huge contracts, the “Mid-Season Classic” was a real game, played as intensely as the World Series, for the honor of the two separate leagues. (Ask Ray Fosse how intensely.) Managers would try to get and keep the strongest possible line-up in the game: it wasn’t unusual for several stars to play all 9 innings. Starting pitchers went three innings, not just one. Players slid into bases and dived for balls. It was a real contest. In ethics terms, the All-Star Game had integrity.

For decades now, it has just been a bunch of rich guys going through the motions, joking with each other, making sure no one got hurt. The obvious objective of the managers is to get all 30 players on the roster on the field if possible, not to win. It’s a parade: viewers barely get to see a player display the skills that made him an All-Star. The event has the seriousness of a celebrity softball game…there’s no tension, no drama.

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There Is Hope! Another Incompetent “Squad” Member Is Headed For Defeat

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Above is one of “Cori Bush’s Greatest Hits,” the time in 2021 that she “explained” why she had taxpayers fund a security detail for her so she could advocate de-funding the police. This won her the Ethics Alarms title of “Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Year, Decade, Century, And Eon” at the time. Bush, a Democratic House member from the Missouri district occupied entirely by the brain-damaged, isn’t just an “idiot” in the sense that Ethics Alarms usually uses the word. No, the college drop-out and former nurse is a genuine, clinical idiot and an ignoramus to boot. Naturally, she is a member-in-good-standing of The Squad, where being the dumbest in the batch—dumber even than the recently defeated Jamaal Bowman—is quite an achievement.

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Ethics Dunce (Professional Singer Division): Ingrid Andress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.

Just listen to that caterwauling!

I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?

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Still More Ethics Reflections On The Trump Assassination Attempt Prelude and Aftermath…

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

I’m going to have to complain to the Politics Gods about their timing: letting the “Oh no! Biden just let everybody know that we’ve been hiding his dementia all this time!,” story, the “Trump only cares about himself but Biden won’t do the obvious responsible thing and step down and a candidate because that will hurt his ego!” and the Trump assassination attempt all overlap each other is just malpractice. It’s especially tough on me as I try in an election year to avoid my ethics blog turning into a politics blog. Hear my plea, ye Gods!

Meanwhile…

1. That graphic above is a screen shot from last night’s live broadcast of the GOP convention. Trump was a prominent audience member, which itself was historically unique: traditionally the putative nominee stays incommunicado until he makes his dramatic entrance to accept the nomination. Well, why shouldn’t he bask in the spotlight? Atheme of my honors thesis in American Government [“The Great Man Theory and the American Presidency”] was that a disproportionate number of our Presidents were “survivors” who lived through dramatic life-threatening ordeals that left them with convictions of their own invulnerability as well as the belief that they were destined to do great things. Trump didn’t fit that template, but he does now. Those death-defying incidents may have made Washington, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR and others very different men, and better leaders, than they would have been without them. It will be fascinating to see if surviving an assassins bullet by a nanosecond has the same effect on Trump.

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Ethics Villain and Contender for “Asshole of the Year”: Sumaya Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

18-year-old Sumaya Thomas of North Liberty, Iowa was supposed to go on a blind date with a young man she had met on an online dating app. But by the time her date arrived at her abode to pick her up on the evening of June 16, Thomas had changed her mind. Did she tell him that to his face, like any normal, decent human being, apologizing for wasting his time and dashing his hopes? Oh noooo. Did she text him, the weenie’s way out? No. Did she just leave him on her doorstep, knocking and buzzing while she hid under the bed? No. Did she sneak out the back door? No, not that either.

Instead, Thomas called 911 and said her abusive ex- was outside harassing her because she was seven months pregnant with their child. She said she needed the police to get him off her property as he was threatening to “hit, punch, kick and stab her.”

Nice! A police car was dispatched, and when officers arrived they found an apparently calm, confused young man in the process of walking away. Upon being questioned about the situation, he explained that he had arrived to go on a date with the woman inside the house, and that he had only met her online a week ago.

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