I’m pondering whether to stop subscribing to the Washington Post digital version. I only do it for Ethics Alarms, and even then I am only moved to check the site every ten days or so. Now the once-essential newspaper is falling apart in chunks, and whether it can be saved—or should be— is very much in doubt.
Jeff Bezos is trying to do a Elon Musk imitation, saving the icon by making it less flagrantly biased and such a shameless progressive and Democratic propaganda engine. The problem is that when all of a paper’s subscribers, or most of them, are Trump-Deranged, pro-totalitarian leftists who want their news media to be a tool of a single party and the government if that party has it by the throat, making a sudden commitment to objectivity, fairness and ethical journalism will not be welcome.
The President has no say whatsoever in when proposed Constitutional amendment have been ratified (or not). He can express his approval of one, and lobby for it with legislators, but he cannot make a ruling that the [completely superfluous, virtue-signaling] Equal Rights Amendment has been properly ratified (it hasn’t been). He might as well put out a statement that Barry Bonds should be voted into the Hall of Fame, or that broccoli is good for you. This is the President whose party made failure to uphold “democratic norms” one of its main Big Lies against Donald Trump, and Biden’s Presidency has ignored more norms than any Presidency at least since FDR tried to be President For Life. (Come to think of it, he succeeded!)
Making this presumptuous and gratuitous endorsement even worse is the fact that everybody knows now that Biden is in no shape to declare anything of substance, especially a matter of constitutional law debate. This isn’t Biden talking, it is some phantom activist in the White House using Biden’s name and office to advance a personal agenda.
Since his historic, DEI VP was selected by his party’s oligarchs to run for President without any components of the modern nomination process (and I doubt that Harris would have even survived the old-fashioned “smoke-filled room”) Biden—-that is, his puppeteers—has set an all-time Presidential spite record by filling his final months with obstructions for Donald Trump, as well as leniency for murderers, civilian honors for despicable civilians, more unethical student loan waivers, obstacles to U.S. energy independence and climate change grandstanding. Then there was this week’s head-exploding call for censorship in his Orwellian farewell speech.
Meanwhile Ruy Texiera, a generally objective, fair, and honest analyst, is having none of the obsequious claims from the Axis that Biden, in addition to being a figurehead President, was somehow also a good one who will be vindicated by history. On his substack “The Liberal Patriot” he authors a much more exhaustive description of Biden’s failures than I did in selecting poor Joe as “The Worst President Ever,” as well as chronicles Biden’s betrayal of the voters who thought they were voting for a moderate in 2020. (They also thought they were voting for a cognitive functioning leader rather than a marionette.)
It’s a superb piece, and you should read it.
Even if Biden puts out a statement saying that you shouldn’t.
Caroline Glennon-Goodman, a Cook County judge, shared a meme that depicts a smiling black boy and a black child’s leg with an electronic monitor on it, a fake ad for “My First Ankle Monitor.” The judge wrote “My husband’s idea of Christmas humor.” It was supposed to go to a friend, but she sent it to the wrong person, another judge ( #@!%^!& autofill!) Oopsie! That judge reported her and the post became public.
Glennon-Goodman has been reassigned by the Circuit Court’s Executive Committee, and ordered to undergo bias training and will face a state disciplinary investigation. The executive committee wrote that Glennon-Goodman’s alleged actions “may violate the Code of Judicial Conduct” and it said it was temporarily reassigning her and referring the matter to the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board “to promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”
I heard some talking-heads blather about the release of incoming President Donald Trump’s new official portrait on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, and quickly decided it was not worth my time. Then I looked at the thing and decided it was worth a little bit of my time after all.
It is a remarkable choice by Trump, since he obviously approved it, something we cannot say with certainly about the current President’s portrait, or anything he did or said, amazingly. On the Trump-Hating news outlets, they have been saying that it bears an uncanny resemblance to his immortal mug shot…
…which is only true in the sense that he isn’t smiling in either of them and both are images of Donald Trump.
Well, today has started like so many other mornings lately: by me being kicked out of bed by my dog. (We’re going to have to talk about this.) Then, like so many Fridays, I find myself thinking about how the entire weekend is going to be devoted to work and depressing chores, causing me to feel like I owe myself a tiny break today, but I won’t really take one, just slack off enough to make me feel lazy and irresponsible.
Then I visited my email, and told a website optimizer who claimed EA had “no web presence at all” to bite me. I wish it had more “presence” just as I wish I could figure out a way to make some money for the work I do here about four hours a day without minimizing readership, but I can’t, and that’s that. I didn’t start Ethics Alarms for profit, and I won’t run it that way.
Finally, as I stare at another blank “Add New Post” page, I find myself getting all warm, fuzzy, teary and grateful over the outpouring of appreciation and kindness I have received over the past horrible year from so many of you out there. I wish I were organized enough to write individual notes, but I’m not…that kind of thing was among Grace’s jobs, because I’m too scattered and easily distracted to do it competently.
This was especially true during the holidays. I got cards with messages that made me cry, gift cards, and checks: one of you even stopped by the house to deliver a gift (and give me some much needed human company and live face-to-face conversation.) I received almost as many seasonal greeting from the readers here as I did from people around the country I have actually met—hmmmmm, maybe that should tell me something.
It all meant a great deal to me, and does, and will. Thank you for reading, thank you for caring, and thank you for giving me something to look forward to during each and every day, especially during a year during which most days began with me hoping that everything was just a bad dream, and that I would find Grace in the shower, like Bobby Ewing at the end of that infamous fake season on “Dallas.”
Well enough mushy stuff: get to work. You have some brilliant comments to write, and I have to go argue with a pit bull….
I was going to shut down EA for the day since the previous post was both depressing and exhausting, then I stumbled across this to which, as Mrs. Loman says at the end of “Death of a Salesman,” “Attention should be paid.”
A national security expert was prepared to brief reporters on the breaking news of a tentative Israel-Hamas cease-fire yesterday, but Biden Paid Liar Karine Jean-Pierre refused to allow him to take the mic, forcing reporters and the nation to wait an extra hour before hearing the details of the American hostages being released, including their names. National security adviser Jake Sullivan personally asked Jean-Pierre to permit his top spokesman, John Kirby, address reporters moments after Biden announced the deal. She refused because, insiders say, it was her final White House briefing and she regarded it as her “farewell party.”
A source in the White House told the New York Post, “She kinda marketed it as a celebration of her and her tenure and unfortunately that took precedence over huge breaking news — and we haven’t had this kind of news in this administration for a long time.”
I really don’t feel like going through this; it’s reminds me of that old gross-out camp song about “great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat” and “concentrated chicken feet.” It degrades the office. It degrades everyone who listened to it. It degrades me to have to describe it.
Over at PJ Media, Ed Morrisey had an equivalent reaction, calling it “the worst case of valedictory projection ever” and writing in part,
Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … just gave George Soros a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … cajoled and pressured tech billionaires to comply with his attempts to censor speech and suppress dissent through his State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
But this offal from the Oval Ofiice demands a thorough fisking, much as I’d rather pound nails into my scrotum, so here we go. (The gift-linked Times transcript is here.)
During the debate over the House bill to stop males “transitioning” to glorious womanhood from injuring female athletes while cheating their way to taking their scholarships, records, championships and safety, two of the worst female members of Congress—and that’s quite an achievement, given the competition— showed (again) why the public no longer trusts its republic. The two women showed themselves to be ethics dunces, incompetent elected officials, disastrous role models and, to get technical about it, assholes.
We long ago reached the point where anyone paying attention swallowed comforting myth that any modern President delivers a farewell address that he really composed himself, but President Joe Biden’s scripted cavalcade of lies and hypocrisy is in a whole different category.
“He had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one. Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy.What I’m going to do is fix the taxes. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.”
….could compose, much less think, what he repeated off a teleprompter last night after resting all day.
Meanwhile, while Cuomo is spot-on, here’s a quote from alleged conservative intellectual David Brooks,who today leveled similar criticism, but discredited himself with this:
I can’t even tell if Brooks was being sarcastic; he has written so many outrageous things since his brain was surgically removed by the New York Times and replaced with a bag of Cheetohs. Sarcasm is not typically his metier. If Brooks was attempting sarcasm, he’s lousy at it: no columnist who wants to be taken seriously should ever, ever utter the words “Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent” in jest, irony, or God forbid, sincerity.
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