Author: Jack Marshall

Inauguration Day Ethics [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I can honestly say that I have greeted every inauguration of a newly-elected President with hope, respect, optimism and good will, every one of them, with no exceptions. I fervently believe that this is how all Americans should regard Inauguration Day, and for most of our history, that was how the vast majority of the nation did treat the swearing in of a new President. A major kick to the solar plexus of that tradition was delivered by former Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell when he said, though well after Barack Obama was sworn in, that he saw his party’s mission as making sure Obama was a one-term President. In this he was tracking the rhetoric of the late Rush Limbaugh, whose similar sentiments about Democratic Presidents were routine during the Clinton Presidency.

There is hope: the Democratic and progressive demonization of President Trump pales compared to what he was subjected to in 2016, but the Trump Deranged are probably more vocal and more numerous than they were then. It is only that there are more open-minded, reasonable Americans now willing to welcome a new President, even Trump, since the Democrats have left such chaos in their wake.

As I noted in a post yesterday, Joe Biden’s unethical prospective pardons got Inauguration Day off to an ugly, deplorable start. The anti-Trump press, that is, most of the news media, certainly were not in a patriotic or generous mood. “Trump Celebrates in Washington at Rally Laced With Exaggerations and Falsehoods,” said the Times on its front page. On my Facebook feed, most of my friends were behaving like petulant children rather than informed citizens interested in giving a new leader a chance. “Buckle up, y’all. They’re likely to overplay their hand. But that is going to suck even if we can turn them back.They’re also going to use every story, algorithm, and lever they can to divide the resistance. It’s how they got just over the line last November. Let’s not be played like the MAGA marks got played,” wrote one. “A lot of dystopian fantasy literature with evil rulers I have loved for many years has been resonating very differently with me since 2016,” wrote another. “Someone like Trump, an amoral, power-hungry demagogue, is what the founders feared most when they created the presidency,” was another friend’s unbiased analysis. This post was wildly liked: “I will be employing the ‘unfollow’ and ‘unfriend’ buttons with ruthless precision. Some of you… I love you, but you backed the bad guys, and your boasting about it when it’ll directly harm my family and my community and my neighbors… is indefensible. Yours is a door I won’t be knocking on for refuge if I ever need it. ”

Nice.

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Unethical Quote of the Day (or “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Quote of the Day): The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Trump paints grim picture of America in his Inaugural speech”

—-The New York Times today in its “Breaking News” section online.

This got so much ridicule on social media that I bet it’s been stealth edited away…let’s see..I was right! Now it says, “Taking office, Trump casts himself as a rescuer of a nation in disarray.”

Well as to that, since all polls indicate that a large majority of the country believes that the nation is in a mess on multiple fronts, it is fair to say that the nation is in fact in disarray. But no one who listened to Trump’s speech who doesn’t regard the fact that Trump is now President as grim could possibly call the speech grim. It was, to the contrary, optimistic, hopeful, triumphal, ambitious, and a traditional embrace of the promise of the United States of America, its past achievements and its enduring strength. Though far less eloquent or memorable for its rhetoric, the speech essentially repeated the themes of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

What kind of listener would regard today’s speech as grim, or portraying a grim situation? That’s easy: someone who hates Donald Trump and who is in denial about the problems Trump ticked off that he promised to solve. How can a speech that begins like this…

“From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first. Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end. And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free. America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before. I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success, a tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before”…

…be called “painting a grim picture”? Sounds pretty good to me! And later,

“From this moment on, America’s decline is over. Our liberties and our nation’s glorious destiny will no longer be denied, and we will immediately restore the integrity, competency, and loyalty of America’s government.”

That is only a “grim picture” to those who still, against all evidence,believe that the radical leftist policies of the last four years were competent, responsible, appropriate and represent the direction the country should move toward while rejecting its outdated values, archaic principles, racist culture and shameful history on the way.

The Times quote is as vivid example as one could want to prove why our current journalists are so biased and politicized they cannot accurately report what unfolds right before their eyes.

Time To Pass the “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act” (or to Consider Kicking Oregon Out of the United States)

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

In 2017, the “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act” (HR 3003 ) would have prohibited federal, state and local government entities from obstructing or restricting law enforcement actions related tothe enforcement of immigration laws. That and a similar House-passed bill in 2015 were blocked in the then-Democrat-controlled Senate, because the Democratic Party is committed to facilitating illegal immigration.

How much? This much: the Oregon Department of Administrative Services is conducting mandatory staff training sessions to ensure that its employees do not to cooperate with Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE). Oregon’s sanctuary laws prohibit state and local law enforcement and government employees from assisting federal immigration officials with immigration enforcement. This has to stop. Of course the laws are unethical, as are similar anti-law enforcement laws around the country.

This week Oregon’s Department of Administrative Services sent an email to 11,000 employees reminding them to complete its “Oregon Sanctuary Promise” training. Debbie Dennis, deputy director of Oregon’s Administrative Services, said in the email,

“A new training will be assigned to you in Workday (starting Friday, Jan. 17) and I want to explain its importance and the timeline for completing the training. The title of the training is Oregon Sanctuary Promise and it covers Oregon’s laws relating to our status as a ‘sanctuary state.’ Many of you know that Oregon was the first state to pass a law (in 1987) prohibiting state and local police and government from helping federal authorities with immigration enforcement. This training is about Oregon law and how it affects what state employees can and cannot do. The training will help you identify if you are witnessing behavior that violates the law, and you will know what action to take. And in the rare event that any of us are approached to assist in immigration enforcement, we’ll know the steps Oregon law specifies we must take. The training takes about 30 minutes, and we have 30 days to complete it. Workday will assign it to you Friday, Jan. 17, and I ask that you make completing it a high priority, working with your supervisor if you experience any workload or other issues that hinder this assignment.”

Now that polls suggest that even a majority of Democrats want at least the criminal illegals deported and with the entire party seemingly at death’s door, making the “sanctuary” movement illegal as it should be might finally be attainable. The cities and states behaving like Oregon have always been unethical: they appear to be under the delusion that enforcing our borders is the equivalent of the Fugitive Slave Act. The progressives’ insane attitude toward illegal immigration and the Federal duty to enforce the immigration laws has been unethical from the start. When ethics fail, the law steps in, and in this case, it is high time.

I don’t think there is any mechanism for expelling a whole state, but if there has to be a test case, Oregon would be an excellent choice.

The Prospective Pardons Are Legal But Unethical and Dangerous [Updated Twice]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

When Ethics Alarms decided what had been a close competition between Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden for “Worst President Ever,” I honestly thought all of the evidence was in. There were only eight days to go, after all; it had finally been made sufficiently clear that our so-called President was on his way to becoming a zucchini, and worse, had been transitioning for years under the protection of an Axis cover-up. But then came Biden’s endorsement of censorship and the most unethical exit speech in U.S. Presidential history, followed by Biden’s embarrassing announcement that he was ruling the 28th Amendment ratified when it was not. Today, I woke up to the news that Biden had issued prospective pardons to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who betrayed his country with unauthorized contact with China; Dr. Fauci, the perjuring, lying, Deep State hack who was significantly responsible for the disastrous response to the Wuhan virus, Trump Deranged former Representative Liz Cheney and all the other members of the Pelosi-rigged House committee that dragged out and manipulated a partisan investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.

The close call now is whether this last official act by Biden is the worst of the batch. It may well be.

To chase the metaphorical elephant out of the room, prospective pardons are legal, constitutional, and probably irreversible. Presidents have issued general pardons applying to groups of people involving many offenses yet to be proven, and many times. There have been at least thirty amnesties before puppet Joe entered the White House: Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson issued them during and after the Civil War to benefit Confederates, and Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for Vietnam war draft dodgers. My favorite was President Madison’s 1815 pardon of pirate Jean Lafitte and his crew, who joined Andy Jackson’s American forces at the Battle of New Orleans. Madison’s grateful proclamation covered all who assisted in the defense of Louisiana in the battle (that occurred after the War of 1812 had ended), granting “a full and free pardon of all offenses committed in violation of any act or acts of the Congress of the said United States touching the revenue, trade, and navigation thereof or touching the intercourse and commerce of the United States with foreign nations at any time before the 8th day of January, in the present year 1815, by any person or persons whomsoever being inhabitants of New Orleans and adjacent country, or being inhabitants of the said island of Barrataria and the places adjacent . . .”

The fact that this vague and general sweeping Presidential pardon was issued by James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, makes it about as irrefutable a precedent as one could ask for. And thus the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the pardon power “extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency or after conviction and judgment.”

Nonetheless, just because one can do something (or get away with it) doesn’t mean it is ethical, prudent, responsible or right. Biden’s pardons for alleged crimes never investigated or proven to individuals holding his favor stretches the existing precedents to the breaking point, or perhaps gagging point is a more apt description. After all, Jean Lafitte was a pirate; the Confederate soldiers fought against their country, and the draft-dodgers were, you know, draft dodgers. Even Richard Nixon, pardoned by President Ford in what may be the nearest thing to a precedent for Biden’s pardons today, was a President of the United States whose potential indictable crimes had only been uncovered in the course of a House impeachment inquiry. At that point, the precedent could have been limited by those not insignificant details. Then came Biden’s Once and Future pardon of his black sheep son for crimes he had been convicted of committing and anything else he might have done yet undiscovered, just in case darling Hunter has been a serial killer when he wasn’t high. Today’s pardons take us to the end of the slippery slope.

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Two Unethical Books: One Not Fit For Toilet Paper But I Want A Crate of the Other

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

What appears to be a controlled experiment to determine “Just how stupid are members of the American public who can read?” the White House risibly claims that Joe Biden “plans to write a book after leaving office giving him an opportunity to try and shape the narrative around his presidency and the tumultuous weeks leading to his historic withdrawal from the 2024 race.” Axios, a card-carrying member of the progressive propaganda machine, writes as if this is credible, when everyone without a see-through head knows it is not. “If the book project comes to fruition, it will be a chance for Biden to lay out, in full, his views on what he accomplished and why he handled the 2024 cycle the way he did,” Axios says. No, it will be a chance for Biden’s spin team, puppeteers, pardoned son and wife to concoct a fantasy worthy of Frank L. Baum.

The Speaker of the House revealed this week in an interview with Free Press that Biden insisted to Speaker Mike Johnson that he never issued an order to freeze new liquid natural gas export permits. Biden had in fact signed it less than a month earlier. Johnson told podcaster Bari Weiss that he believes Biden “genuinely didn’t know what he had signed.” And that account is from January 2024!

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New Rule: Bill Maher Deserves No Credit For Rants Like This…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This much-praised clip from Maher’s HBO show goes into the Ethics Estoppel file.

Not that it isn’t a thorough and effective defenestration of the Democratic Party for its role in the disastrous LA fires, it is. However, its excellence only magnifies the revolting hypocrisy that is, and always is, Bill Maher.

Maher, an amoral, anarchist libertarian, has been a pimp for progressives and Democrats and their policies for his entire career, except when they directly threaten his comfort and interests. He is an a enabler and propaganda agent for the Left who periodically has these loud and much-praised outbursts of the obvious to create the illusion that he has integrity and is a truth-teller. You know he voted for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom and Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and probably even Adam Schiff. He actually anticipated the Wuhan lockdown’s role in putting Democrats in power, saying on the HBO show that the economy crashing would be “worth it” if the result would be getting rid of Trump. Maher wouldn’t dare say that the Palisades fires would be “worth it” if it meant putting Republicans in power in California.

I’d begin changing my opinion of Bill Maher if he owned this disaster, which is a direct result of the ideology and party he supports 90% of the time. He doesn’t and won’t. Like the slightly less despicable Jon Stewart, Maher is a clown-nose-on/clown-nose-off hubris-radiating phony as well as an odoriferous hypocrite. I’d applaud that monologue if it was performed by J.D. Vance or Greg Gutfeld, or, in the alternative, if it was really funny. Maher doesn’t even warrant the “Welcome to the party, pal!” clip.

Asshole.

Ethics and American History Dunces: The Fox News Team [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ugh. Where are factcheckers when you need them?

Just now I made the mistake of lighting on Fox News for about a minute, and now my ceiling has bits of my brain and skull all over it following a violent head explosion.

Some Fox blonde with horn-rims was enthusiastically telling a panel about this fascinating bit of history she had just discovered, that an early President, William Henry Harrison, had been inaugurated on a cold day and died as a result. The entire panel oohed an ahhed like she had just announced the discovery of another Rosetta Stone. I read about Harrison’s death when I was ten, so Fox’s assembled idiots treating this rather significant episode in U.S. history like it was obscure trivia was offensive. It was also an indictment of, oh, let’s see…journalism, our education system, and society’s ignorance of history.

Moreover, Harrison, though he was only President for a month before perishing of pneumonia, was a pivotal figure in Presidential history. His was the first modern Presidential campaign (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”) in 1840, and his death set the precedent for all Presidential successions to follow. W.H. Harrison was also the grandfather of a future President, Benjamin Harrison, who was sandwiched between Grover Cleveland’s two terms the way Biden is sandwiched between Trump’s (and while a forgettable, mediocre Chief Executive, Benjamin was considerably more successful than Joe).

That didn’t make my head explode, though. It was when some guy on the panel said, “And Harrison was a Republican too!” followed by the horn-rimmed blonde saying with a laugh, “Yes, but it was much different back then.”

William Henry Harrison was not a Republican! He was the first Whig President. The GOP wasn’t founded until 14 years after Harrison’s death, in 1854: Abe Lincoln was only the second Republican Presidential candidate and the first to be elected.

Fake news, fake history…morons. If our journalists can’t inform the public, the least they could do is not make them more ignorant than it already is.

______________

Aside: The Fox News discussion was, I assume, promoted by the Trump-Deranged social media post like this one, from one of my Facebook friends: “Just wait until they discover that their Dear Leader has left them behind in the cold so he can be snug and warm with his oligarch billionaire buds.”

Ethics Quiz: Mouse in the House

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I have caught over 40 mice over the past three years in the humane mouse trap my late wife insisted upon. We used to carry them over to the woods near our home in the trap, and release them as I sang “Born Free.”

But today, for the first time, I woke up to find a terrified baby mouse in the trap on a day when it is freezing (and snowing) outside. I do not want to care for a pet mouse; I have enough to worry about already. I do not want to put the little thing in a position where it is doomed to freeze—the spirit of my wife will start haunting me. I do not want to let it free into the house. It won’t warm up for at least a few more days. Now what?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is there any practical and ethical solution to this dilemma?

Comment of the Day: “Inauguration Prelude Ethics Round-Up, 1/18/25”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I woke up this morning to a much-appreciated gift from Steve-O-in-NJ, a well-researched, n excellent Inauguration Day prelude post that touches on several issues, but mostly the political history of outgoing POTUS Biden. In that sense, it is also a Comment of the Day on the final installment of the EA inquiry on The Worst President Ever, to which Steve-O already contributed an epic supplement.

Two notes before I hand the metaphorical floor over to Steve: 1) How I love it when there is a Comment of the Day covering ground that I was expecting to have to cover myself on a Sunday morning! 2) I am grateful to AM Golden for asking in a comment about whether Trump has any company as a “businessman,” which I responded to last night and that seems to have prompted Steve’s opus. The quick answer is that nobody on the list of 45 men could be called a businessman/entrepreneur/mogul except Trump. As Steve points out, Harry Truman had a modest haberdashery store [above] before going into politics, but for him to be compared to Trump as a businessman he would have had to own Brooks Brothers and Men’s Warehouse. 3)The survey of Presidential occupations and those of their fathers was a large section of my honors thesis, which could have been called “How to Become President of the United States.” In summarizing the facts, Steve omitted #17, Andrew Johnson, who may have the most astounding background story of all. Johnson is usually referred to as a tailor, but his pre-White House occupation could be arguably called “slave,” as he was an indentured servant who was literally owned until he ran away. It was a cruel twist of fate that his public image, such that he has one at all, is dominated by his disastrous tenure as President when his life story is perhaps the most amazing rise to power in in our history. He also shares with #47 an amazing comeback, being elected to the U.S. Senate as the final act in his public career.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,“Inauguration Prelude Ethics Round-Up, 1/18/25” :

***

I actually was looking up how many presidents have been exclusively politicians their entire professional lives, and the number is comparatively few. Most of them have had at least some other profession before entering the world of politics.

Most (31) have been in the military in some capacity at some point, and 12 (Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and of course Eisenhower) have been generals, albeit some “in name only.” Many were lawyers, judges, or bureaucrats, but there were also such diverse jobs as mining engineer, farmer, haberdasher, land surveyor, actor, teacher, executive, and publisher. Arguably Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt might qualify as polymaths, since both could do multiple things well.

Pure politicians, the Presidents who spent their entire professional lives or close to it in elective office, have been relatively few. FDR almost was, but his political career was derailed for a time by the illness that left him wheelchair-bound. LBJ comes close, since he taught only briefly before getting into politics, and left only briefly to serve in the Navy in WW2. JFK definitely was, since he came out of the Navy, spent something like a year and a half as a “special correspondent” for Hearst Newspapers, then ran for the House and never looked back. Bill Clinton has often been described as never having a “real job” outside of politics.

Biden was also pretty much purely a politician. He came out of law school, spent about a year in private practice, then possibly less than a year as a public defender (the history is murky, and he only “rediscovered” it when he needed social justice creds in 2020) before he ran for his first office and never looked back until the four years between being Obama’s vice president and running himself, during which he “wrote” a memoir and was an “honorary professor” at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Inauguration Prelude Ethics Round-Up, 1/18/25

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

My head just exploded. The New York Times. oh, about three years late, maybe more, does an exploration of the effort to hide Joe Biden’s increasing disability from the public. The key conspirators, the Times says, were “Jill Biden, the first lady, and Hunter Biden, his surviving son, fervently believed in his ability to win. Mr. Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the counselor to Mr. Biden, knew when and how to deliver information, along with Annie Tomasini, the deputy chief of staff. She and Anthony Bernal, the first lady’s most senior aide, took tight control over the president’s public schedule.”

I wonder if any of them were as capable as Edith Wilson.

The Times does not enlighten us as to why its crack reporting team never did any reporting about this Constitutional debacle while it was going on, perhaps because the answer is too obvious: the Times, like the rest of the Axis media, was complicit and wanted the Democrats to get away with it. Then the Times readers, who the now-banned Ethics Alarms defender of the Times always cited as evidence that the paper wasn’t as biased and unethical as it obviously is, mostly disgraced themselves with one or more of these positions: 1) It was worth electing Biden because he beat Trump in 2020; 2) Trump will be worse; 3) It was all Biden’s aides’ fault. 4) He was a good President. 5) Biden still would have done better than Harris. None accused the Times of betraying its mission and and its readership. Occasionally a lone commenter made an observation like this:

“In any other situation Biden would have been considered a part time worker and wouldn’t even have qualified for health benefits. Yet he was allowed to continue as president while working less hours than a crossing guard. This was a covered up coup where someone or some persons were really making decisions.”

Here’s a gift link to the piece.

Meanwhile,

1. What an unethical—and stupid—hill to die on. The House of Representatives passed legislation banning trans women who are biological men from competing in women’s sports. The vote was 218-206, with all Republicans present supporting the bill and all but two Democrats opposing it. Apparently the Democratic Party is unwilling to abandon the absurd argument that preventing female athletes from losing games, matches, scholarships, championships, records and maybe an eye by having to compete with newly-minted women who are taller, heavier, stronger and better due to the advantage of going through puberty as a male is just plain old discrimination. “Republicans fearmonger about the trans community to divert attention from the fact they have no real solutions to help everyday Americans,” ranted Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.). “Transgender students, like all students, they deserve the same opportunity as their peers to learn teamwork, to find belonging, and to grow into well-rounded adults through sports.” The first part of that statement is deflection, and the second part is misdirection. Transgender individuals don’t deserve the opportunity to have an unfair advantage and to endanger the safety of women they compete against. Doing what she does, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) said, “Let me tell you something: Trans people ain’t going nowhere, just like when the racists wanted to make sure that black people somehow were going to be dismissed in this country, we ain’t left either.” Now there’s a brilliant analogy, but it appears to be all the Democrats can come up with. You know, ‘Racial discrimination is based on prejudice and nothing else.’ The effort to keep trans women out of women’s sports is not “invidious discrimination” but the acceptance of reality.

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