Month: August 2024

Another Day, Another Fact-Free Anti-Trump Smear From The Axis

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One can safely add Yahoo! and the Los Angeles Times to the massive list of media organs that are ethically estopped from calling Donald Trump a habitual liar, since they habitually lie about him.

The most recent example comes from the Times uncritically and deceptively reporting on a series of hyper-partisan, hysterical rants by LGTBQ+ Democrats in San Francisco (well, its San Francisco). Yahoo! then circulated the propaganda under its own banner online. Like the good little Axis of Unethical Conduct members they are, the LA Times and Yahoo! dutifully reported pure Trump Derangement fiction as news, and it was biased, dishonest, unethical journalism from the headline to the finish.

Which, ironically, is not news either. This is how the news media has been operating where Trump is involved for ten years. This is how it plans on winning the Presidency for the Democrats again.

The headline is “‘Our lives are on the line’: Why many LGBTQ+ people hope for a Harris win.” Not one LGBTQ+ American’s “life is on the line” in this election by any stretch of the imagination. Trump does not oppose gay rights or same sex marriage. He has made it clear that he believes in treating such citizens as anyone else should be treated. Believing, as most conservatives, Republicans and people who haven’t been brainwashed or bullied do, that LGBTQ+ lifestyle propaganda does not belong in public school classes does not endanger LGBTQ+ rights or lives.

But the Times (and then Yahoo!) lied, because that’s what progressive journalism does now. It begins,

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Biden Withdrawal Ethics Train Wreck Update: No, Trump’s Condemnation Was Not “Noble”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Conservative pundit Stephen Green wrote today that Donald Trump’s statement saying “….Out Loud What Everybody in Washington Is Afraid To” was a noble act. Green went quite a bit further, too, concluding,

“I don’t care who you are — Republican, Democrat, MAGA, progressive, NeverTrump, traditional conservative, or even a filthy communist — if, at this moment, you can recognize this simple truth about what Trump said today. It was noble.  Biden was more than Trump’s political rival. He’s a man who has spent the last five years smearing Trump (and millions of Trump voters) as a racist, a phobic, a hater, a would-be dictator, an authoritarian, and worse. But now that Biden is as low as any president has been since Richard Nixon was forced out of office 50 years ago this week, Trump spoke the truth about what Biden’s own party did to him. If someone can’t recognize the nobility in that, then I still don’t care what they are because they’re a filthy commie at heart.”

Steve got just a teeny bit carried away. And I guess I’m a filthy commie, because I see nothing noble in Trump’s condemnation of Biden’s being pushed out. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is plenty to condemn in the entire scenario. But Joe’s forced exit, when it finally happened, isn’t one of them. And while I’m ready to accept the possibility that Donald Trump may possess, somewhere, deep down and well hidden, the capacity for nobility, today’s self-serving statement wasn’t evidence of that.

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Faster, Higher, Stronger…Cuter? Funnier? Graceful-er? Should Donald O’Connor Have Been In The Olympics?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

There’s a gold medal right there if I ever saw one. (And shame on TCM for sticking in a promotion before Donald’s big finish.)

But seriously folks: is the Olympics about sports and athletic competition, or has become just a long TV variety show? The institution of “breaking” as an Olympic event is an ominous slippery slope that was already too slippery. The fact that an activity—like dancing—takes athletic ability still doesn’t mean it’s a competitive sport.

I became convinced that the dancing in the Olympics was one more reason I eschew the whole mess after reading a lament from a New York Times sports columnist titled, “Female Gymnasts Have to Dance. What if the Sport Actually Valued It?” I have a better idea: what if the Olympics just cut dancing the hell out the games entirely?

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Good To Know: Major League Baseball Demands More Accountability Than The U.S. Government.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Chicago White Sox announced this morning that manager Pedro Grifol has been fired. “As we all recognize, our team’s performance this season has been disappointing on many levels,” general manager Chris Getz said in a statement within this morning’s press release. “Despite the on-field struggles and lack of success, we appreciate the effort and professionalism Pedro and the staff brought to the ballpark every day. These two seasons have been very challenging. Unfortunately, the results were not there, and a change is necessary as we look to our future and the development of a new energy around the team.”

Ya think? Under Grifol, the White Sox just finished tying the all-time American League record for consecutive losses at 21. He leaves with the third worst winning percentage of any manager in Major League history who has managed more than a single season. But believe it or not, his two and a two thirds-season tenure at the helm of the ChiSox was even worse than those stats indicate.

Last season, Keynan Middleton publicly criticized the White Sox’ clubhouse culture after he was traded to the Yankees. The pitcher said that there were “no rules” and “no consequences;” he said he knew of instances of “rookies sleeping in the bullpen during games” and players skipping team meetings and fielding drills. Veteran pitcher Lance Lynn was asked if Middleton’s comments were just the complaints of a disgruntled ex-, and he said that Middleton was “not wrong.” This year there were reports that the White Sox had a “fractured” clubhouse that wasn’t helped any when Grifol told his players that they would be remembered as the worst team in MLB history if they didn’t shape up. One player told a local sportswriter, “It’s been really tough in there. Pedro is a really good guy, just not the man for the job.”

So he was fired. That’s what’s supposed to happen to the leader of an organization that falls flat on its metaphorical face with terrible consequences. Was the White Sox losing all those games—nobody expected the team, which is a re-building mode, to be good this season, just not so spectacularly bad—as spectacular an organizational failure as, just to pick a random example out of the air, the Secret Service? Nobody has been fired for its astounding incompetence in Butler, Pa., although many culprits have been identified. Nobody has been fired from a leadership position during the entire Biden Administration, although the culture of incompetence is throbbingly obvious. (I guess Joe himself comes the closest to having been fired.)

In an essay on substack, conservative law professor and blogger Glenn Reynold sees the culture rotting from the head down:

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Gov. Walz Doesn’t Believe in the First Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There is no context that can make that clip anything but vivid evidence of the totalitarian mindset of Harris’s VP pick and the Democratic Party.

Many, many Democrats have made equivalent statements, recently and years ago. So have many of their media allies, though the only one I can think of right now is Chris Cuomo, and to be fair, he’s an idiot.

There is no genuine controversy, not doubt, no question: “hate speech” and “misinformation” are protected under the Bill of Rights. For a Vice-Presidential candidate to think otherwise is disqualifying. Heck, it is disqualifying for a governor, even of a state as ethically addled as Minnesota. It’s disqualifying for a mail carrier. A third grade teacher.

Ironically, Walz’s statement itself is misinformation (Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time?). By his own deluded and anti-American values, Walz shouldn’t be allowed to make it.

Democracy! The Biden Administration Tagged Biden Critic Tulsi Gabbard As a Potential Terrorist

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yesterday Matt Taibbi, the red-pilled former “Rolling Stone” reporter who turned against the Axis (that’s the Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC: “the resistance,” the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media) when he realized he was working for the bad guys, revealed what should be a “Holy crap!” story about former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

She has been targeted by the Biden Administration as a potential terrorist, placed on a no-fly list, and harassed at multiple airports. Coincidentally <cough> this came just a few weeks after Gabbard again criticized the current regime’s conduct and rhetoric.

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Ethics Observations on the Tim Walz Military Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Boy, Major Jack Marshall Sr. would have hated this guy!  

Are you caught up? Here:

The Minnesota National Guard confirmed today that Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ newly-minted running mate to the cheers of the woke everywhere, did not retire as a command sergeant major like he has claimed for years, including on his official gubernatorial biography.

The reality is that Walz “retired as a master sergeant in 2005 for benefit purposes, but he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Army Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s State Public Affairs Officer informed the media.

In 2018, a National Guardsman claimed on social media and in a paid ad that that Walz, then running for governor, declined to deploy to Iraq for combat duty in 2005 and forfeited his title of command sergeant major. But Walz’s biography, published on the state’s official website, says that “Command Sergeant Major Walz” retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 while he was serving as one of the highest ranking members of the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion.

The timeline seems to be that Walz was promoted in September of 2004 in anticipation of his going into battle. When Walz’s battalion was ordered to mobilize for an active duty deployment to Iraq in May of 2005, however, Walz “quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its soldiers without its senior non-commissioned officer, as it prepared to go into battle. Two Command Sergeants Major confirmed this version of events.

J.D. Vance, who fought in Iraq, “pounced,” stating, “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”

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For Ethics Alarms Readers: Announcing “Project Race-Lighting”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Somebody’s got to have the guts to do this, and it might as well be me, well, us. Introducing Project Race-Lighting.

For more than a couple of years now, I have been intending to spend at least 72 hours watching commercial TV and to record the racial and ethnic categories of the actors in the ads. I watch a lot of television and always have, but although I have felt the need for someone to do a study of the phenomenon that I believe is taking place, I have also had substantially less time to do it since Grace died at the end of February. At one point she had agreed to start the project, stuck as my wife was in a chair in front of our TV while she was rehabbing her (mysteriously) painful knee. She also had the same impression I did. Trust me, that was not always the case in other matters.

I think I first became cognizant that something strange was in the air or “going on” (“What’s going on here?”—the starting point for every ethical analysis) when “Jake from State Farm” magically turned black in 2011: it was one of the more ham-handed examples of pandering to the Obama-led movement to make affirmative action, DEI’s predecessor, a cultural norm. A decades later came the Black Lives Matter, reparations, DEI, CRT, “Great Stupid” tsunami in the wake of the George Floyd Freak Out. The trend had been subtly underway before that, as Jake indicated, but Madison Avenue attacked the white actor job market with a vengeance. Now, the way TV commercials represent U.S. society appears (I don’t have the data yet, so it all could be in my imagination) to show a nation where whites are a small minority, somewhere close to the percentage of Asian Americans (about 7.3%), and two out of every three marriages are bi-racial, meaning that most children are mixed-race.

The real percentage of whites in the US population is almost 70%: yes, white people are still a majority in the population. But they are evil, as you know, and at fault for all the ills around us, so the society corporate America pretends we live in is very different. How different? That’s why I am launching “Project Race-Lighting.”

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I Know It’s Indelicate To Ask Right Now, But What Did The Late Billy Bean Do To Justify The Public Tributes…Or His Job?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

My main awareness of ex-Major League player Billy Bean before I read of his death yesterday was that he was always getting confused with Billy Beane, with an “e,” the Oakland A’s executive credited with inventing “Moneyball” and who was played by Brad Pitt in the movie of the same name. Yesterday I read about No-E Billy dying at 60 of a dread disease:

“Former MLB outfielder Billy Bean, who has served in the commissioner’s office as senior vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as a special assistant to the commissioner, died at his home today following a battle with acute myeloid leukemia per an announcement from the league… Following the end of his playing career, Bean followed in the footsteps of former Dodgers and A’s outfielder Glenn Burke in 1999 to become just the second MLB played in history to publicly come out as gay…After playing 272 games in the majors with three organizations across six years, Bean returned to baseball in 2014 when he was appointed as the league’s first ever ambassador for inclusion by then-commissioner Bud Selig. He continued to serve in the commissioner’s office under Rob Manfred and was eventually promoted to the senior vice president role he held until his death. In his role with the league, Bean worked with all 30 organizations and is credited with instrumental roles in developing education programs and expanding mental health resources available to players all across affiliated ball.

The New York Times obituary in its captive sports publication is no more revealing. This may sound harsh, but it appears that Billy Bean was given a lifetime sinecure with baseball for no other reason than because he had sex with men. After that, MLB could always point to the fact that it had a VP of “inclusion” to show it was properly woke and “with it.”

The previous Commissioner of Baseball, used-car-dealer-to-the core Bud Selig, hired Bean to deflect negative publicity from LGBT activist groups (there was no “Q” then) for no other reason than that Bean had written a briefly sensational book about being a closeted gay in the Major Leagues and was now “out.” The current, marginally less slimy Commissioner, Rob Manfred, naturally had to keep Bean around, and why wouldn’t he, especially as the George Floyd Freakout, DEI Madness and The Great Stupid devoured the land?

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“THIS Is CNN…”

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Here, in part, is how CNN’s objective, “just-the-facts, ma’am” senior White House reporter for CNN Politics described Kamala Harris’s choice of uber-progressive Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her VP in a story headlined, “Happy warriors Harris and Walz propose an antidote to Trump’s American carnage”:

It’s hardly new for a political party to sell hope and aspiration — it’s a staple of presidential election campaigns. But the fresh vibe in Philadelphia was striking because it emerged after one of the darkest chapters of modern US politics.

Americans have experienced a Trump presidency that threatened to tear the country apart, suffered through a pandemic that killed more than a million citizens and endured grinding years of economic insecurity caused by inflation and high grocery prices. For most of this year, the former president has promised a second presidency of retribution. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, had been delivering searing warnings that his rival was tarnishing the very soul of America, even as the haunting signs of the president’s advancing age became increasingly painful to watch.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the last GOP primary challenger standing against Trump, used to predict that the first party to ditch its old, White male presidential candidate in 2024 would get a massive boost. While Harris is yet to prove she can alter the fundamentals of a race against Trump, she’s proving Haley’s point, bringing some unexpected sunshine to an election year.

“We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down,” Harris said of her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Walz. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it?” the vice president asked before adding, “We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

This message is a mirror image of Trump’s political method, which relies on tugging at the fault lines of US society for political gain.

Walz rammed home the point, as if anyone in the packed arena filled by roaring cheers had missed it. “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” he told his new boss.

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