Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.
The woman, Najen Naylor, 47, did not deny the story when approached by DailyMail.com at her home in the New York millionaires’ playground, The Hamptons.
She would not comment, except to say, ‘I’m kind of freaked out right now.’
A close friend with direct knowledge of the affair and pregnancy told DailyMail.com that Naylor did not keep the child – though her social media shows a video of a mysterious baby girl named Brook in 2009, the year the baby would have been born.
Another friend, Stacey Brooks, who mothered twin boys around the same time as Naylor was expecting, also did not deny any of the claims – but said she would not divulge further information without Naylor’s permission.
What happens, in these situations, is that a non-profit, charity or activist organization becomes so impressed with its own virtue as it chooses to define it that its leaders decide self-enrichment is not only justifiable, but a right. Why should they sacrifice and suffer, when the for-profit executives and leaders whose companies inflict scars on the earth, the culture, society or the public, live in comfort and extravagance? It is so unfair!
And thus we get repeating stories like what the New York Times published yesterday about GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. [ I like GLAAD: it nominated one of my theater’s shows for a local award!] As you might imagine, the group is riding high these days, flushed with victories in legislatures and the courts, seeing the culture supine before it in fear of being branded discriminatory. Things are going particularly well with GLAAD’s efforts to encourage children to change their genders without input or interference from their parents. Hooray.
Not exactly ethics, but proto-ethics: our beliefs vastly affect, even control, how our ethics alarms are calibrated, what makes them sound, and what disables them. Beliefs can be biases (not all biases are bad), but they also constitute what our linear constant is for navigating the chaos of life—and we all need that. Beliefs define our values as well as how we interpret the world.
In the most famous scene from the cult baseball film “Bull Durham,” Crash Davis, the iconoclastic minor league catcher played by Kevin Costner, is asked what he believes. He answers (unrealistically rapidly, as if he had memorized the speech in advance, which has always bothered me from a directorial perspective, but I digress)
“I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”
My list is better (and longer) than Crash’s, and I’ll probably post it later, but right now I’d like to see what the readers here believe.
I started to think about this when I realized that I have no idea what one of the Presidential candidates believes, and I am not entirely sure what the other one believes either. I think that Donald Trump, based on his family background and the culture he was raised in, believes in the capitalist system, individuality, entrepreneurial spirit, minimal government interference with personal liberties, traditional male and female roles, strong leadership, not being a weenie, America as a force for good in the world, American exceptionalism, that abortion is wrong, that he is almost always right and is the one person he can trust to fix what he sees as wrong with our government, and that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
I have no clue what Kamala Harris believes.
This is a problem.
What do you believe, if you are comfortable revealing it?
______________
[I thought everyone should be reminded that the great Frankie Laine sang songs other than “Rawhide.”]
Grilled by a CNN reporter over Donald Trump’s comments at the black journalists convention about Kamala Harris’s, uh, fluid ethnic identification, his running mate replied that they “don’t give me pause at all.” Vance continued, “Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon. She goes to Georgia two days ago, she was raised in Canada, she puts on a fake southern accent. She is everything to everybody and she pretends to be something different depending on which audience she’s in front of. I think it’s reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did.”
Bingo.
Trump needs an effective interpreter to periodically decipher his stream-of-consciousness riffs, and since it is clear that attacking, spinning, and misrepresenting the GOP Presidential nominee’s words as proof that he is a lying madman, racist, sexist Hitler monster Marvel supervillain is going to be the primary approach the mainstream media will take to cover this campaign, it is very fortunate that Trump named an articulate and fearless interlocutor to share the ticket with him. Vance is an interpreter.
Among the myriad reasons that Presidential nominees have selected their VPs, almost none of them having anything to do with whether the selections have sufficient experience, ability and qualifications to lead the country, that’s a better reason than most.
a) a demented President who has been forcibly removed from his party’s ticket despite already engaging in a Presidential debate and being voted onto that ticket by millions of Democrats,
b) a DEI VP who has never received a single vote from anyone to be President being summarily installed, Soviet-style, by a shadowy body of party leaders, some out of elected office (like Barack Obama), as the new candidate,
c) the anointed Presidential candidate and the actual President who was kicked to the metaphorical curb both making appearances and meeting with foreign officials like they were President when quite possibly neither is acting in that role, without
d) the news media showing the least curiosity about…
…and instead following DNC memos dictating that it keep emphasizing that the DEI VP didn’t do what she really did, hadn’t said what she really had, and is “exciting” while it concentrates on calling the Republican VP candidate “weird”—you know, like Harrison Butker-–and throttling him for what he blathered indelicately in a single interview seven years ago, as
I sure am glad I had the sense (for a change) to wait a while before writing about what is likely to be the most lasting ethics controversy of the 2024 Paris Olympics. The initial hysteria in the conservative media didn’t add up. My prize for the worst headline goes to the conservative sports blog Outkick: “Olympic Boxer Pretending To Be A Woman Pummels Opponent in 26 Seconds, Making Her Cry.” Nice.
What happened to launch this mess was an Olympic women’s boxing march pitting Algerian Imane Khelif and Italian boxer Angela Carini against each other. After 46 seconds Carini quit, something that almost never happens in in Olympic boxing. She didn’t shake Khelif’s hand after the referee raised it, then sank to her knees, weeping. She told reporters that she quit because of the pain from those opening punches from her opponent, saying that she has never been hit so hard in her life. Instantly, critic made the episode part of the trans women in sports controversy, a la Lia Thomas et al. That was simply wrong, careless, sloppy and unethical. Here is how the conservative commentary collective PJ Media described the scene:
On Thursday, the Olympics put on a disgraceful show, pitting a man with XY chromosomes against a biological woman. Algeria’s Imane Khelif won the 16 welterweight bout over Italy’s Angela Carini after pummeling his opponent’s head over and over again. After having her head slammed by the biological male for 46 seconds, Carini was done. She removed herself from the match and then crumbled to the mat in tears. Everyone who watched saw that the Italian boxer was no match for the Algerian, who had been disqualified from previous competitions for testing positive for male chromosomes.
Wrong. Imane Khelif is not a biological man, but intersex, meaning that the proper analogy for her dilemma in Olympic competition is the intersex runner, Caster Semenya, whom I most recently discussed last fall. Here is how that post ended…
“Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris…and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public…. While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues.”
—–Black Lives Matter in a statement released last week.
I did not see that coming. What a wonderful example of how one must always try to judge the message rather than the messenger. The BLM position is true beyond dispute, and in some respects BLM is the ideal messenger to deliver it, were it not for the little matter of the organization being corrupt, racist, dishonest and untrustworthy. Let’s check: does the BLM website still say that Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown were murdered because of their race? Why yes, it does!
In January, the mayor filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies that had transported asylum seekers to New York City from Texas and Florida.. The lawsuit alleged that the bus companies violated New York’s Social Services Law by dropping off the illegals without providing a means of support, and sought over $700 million to compensate the city for the cost of shelter, food and health care. The suit was breathtaking in its hypocrisy—sanctuary? Hello?—as well as about as close to frivolous as a law suit can be without making me file an ethics complaint against the lawyers. The New York Civil Liberties Union said that the Mayor’s actions were unconstitutional. The court agreed.
Ugh. I always forget that the Olympics inevitably sparks lots of ethics controversies that I have to cover here despite finding the spectacle boring, corrupt and annoying. So I’m bound to miss some juicy issues—like this one, Australian swimming coach Bret Hawke accusing the Chinese team of cheating because a swimmer’s performance in the pool was “not humanly possible.” They used to say that about the four minute mile, if I recall. Or is this just more “Don’t trust China; China is asshole” stuff?
You don’t have to write about Olympics ethics, of course. But the starting pistol is loaded…
Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.
After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.
Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.
Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?
Ethics Alarms 