And this kind of thing is why I stopped watching Sunday Morning public events shows more than a decade ago. The disgraceful exchange, on “Meet the Press,” which has fallen apart in chunks since its glory days with Tim Russert:
Author: Jack Marshall
States Are Running Unethical Numbers Rackets That Take From The Poor, Legalized Casino Gambling Is Spreading Gambling Addictions Across The Land, Legalized Online “Gaming” Threatens The Integrity Of Our Sports, And What Do Democrats Want To Ban?
Betting on elections!
Brilliant.
U.S. Reps. Andrea Salinas (D-Oregon) and the reliably absurd Jamie Raskin, (D-Md), introduced a bill in Congress last month mirroring a bill introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), earlier in 2024, to prohibit election wagering. It’s called the “Ban Gambling on Elections Act.”
“Betting on elections degrades them from an investment in leadership to a profit-maximizing game,” Merkley said in a statement. “In addition, this practice is corrupt since those betting can influence the outcome by funding late-cycle smear campaigns. It’s like betting on a baseball game when you control the umpire. It’s a great step forward to have House leaders like Rep. Raskin and Congresswoman Salinas take on this fight.”
No, it’s moronic. One can hardly get addicted to election wagering: first, the pay-offs aren’t very big, and second, big elections only come along every two years. Unlike any other form of gambling, the election wagering actually conveys useful information: due to the “wisdom of crowds,” the betting tends to be more accurate in predicting outcomes than polls. The idea that anyone would spend money to fund a “smear campaign” to win an election bet is so bonkers it doesn’t even warrant a rebuttal.
In contrast, banning state lotteries would do some real good; finding ways to dial back casino gambling and online gambling would also save families and marriages from ruin. Slot machines are licenses to steal. So, of course, these three Democrats choose the least harmful and sinister of all gambling platforms to grandstand over. I can’t figure out what motivated this nonsense. Are the Democrats mad at the betting sites because they predicted Trump’s win?
I’m betting their bill rolls snake-eyes.
Political Cartoon Ethics: Talk About Picking The Wrong Hill To Die On!
Ann Telnaes, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist” (So what?) for The Washington Post, announced that she was resigning after editors rejected a cartoon depicting WaPo’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
On her substack, Telnaes called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”
Riiight. The cartoon shows Jeff Bezos and other media figures prostrating themselves to Trump, which is not only untrue, it’s juvenile. That cartoon could have been published in a middle school newspaper. The Post has had a succession of knee-jerk, shrill progressive scolds as political cartoonists in an unbroken line since the partisan-biased Herb Block was also a “Pulitzer Prize winner”—- you know, like the Post was for its false reporting on the Russian Collusion hoax. Like Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times were Pulitzered for creating the anti-America propaganda screed called “The 1619 Project.”
Ethics Alarms has long maintained that political cartoons don’t warrant presence on editorial pages because 90% of them or more communicate grade-school level political sophistication through the jaundiced eyes of artists lacking education, perspective and critical thinking skills. That drawing above illustrates the Ethics Alarms position nicely.
Telnaes is throwing a hissy-fit because she isn’t allowed to publish an obnoxious and simple-minded cartoon—it also isn’t remotely funny—attacking her employer with a cheap shot. The Trump-Deranged, progressives and Democrats on the Post—that is, 98% of the staff, were triggered because Bezos chose not to have his paper endorse Kamala Harris, the worst candidate a major party has run for President since, oh, maybe Horace Greeley in 1872, except that Horace was smarter than Kamala and he never waffled on his positions, which were a matter of record.
It would be a different if the cartoon the artist is so determined to see promoted was interesting, trenchant, original or clever, but it isn’t. The baseball equivalent would be a .216 hitting player quitting his team because the manager chose to leave him off the line-up card.
Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls” Blogger Nina Bookout
“This sentencing decision by Merchan is, in my opinion, based upon pure spite.”
—-Nina Bookout, one of several conservative female pundits who populate the “Victory Girls” blog, correctly assessing the planned conclusion of one of the many contrived “lawfare” cases against Donald Trump that ultimately failed at their mission, which was to stop him from returning to the White House even at the price of emulating totalitarian regimes.
Gee, ya think, Nina?
There has been a lot of spite emanating from the Angry (and justly humiliated) Left lately, with Biden giving civilian honors to the likes of Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. The latter, among other revolting uses of his billions, funded anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas/pro-terrorism demonstrations on college campuses. Bookout’s particular focus regarding spite is New York’s Judge Merchan ruling last week that President-Elect Trump will be sentenced on January 10, less the two week from his swearing in as POTUS. Merchan also made it clear that the sentence will include no jail time, an “unconditional discharge,” which is what New York criminal courts call a non-jail and non-probation sentence that carries no other obligations.
The objective, Bookout surmises, is so the resistance, Democrats and the corrupted mainstream media (the cabal that Ethics Alarms refers to with the term, “The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or “Axis” for short) can continue to deride Trump as a “convicted felon” and the “first U.S. President to be convicted of a felony.”
Tales of the King’s Pass
During the baseball off-season the MLB channel on DirecTV has a lot of dead time to fill between the periodic announcements of trades, free agent signings and post-season awards and honors. Lately it has been re-running an old Bob Castas show called “Studio 42” (that’s Jackie Robinson’s number) where the perpetually boyish-looking baseball commentator, who now really is Old Bob, interviews retired players and managers about significant games and moments in their careers.
In an episode I happened across this morning after my dog woke me up and then stole the bed as soon as I got out of it, Costas’s guest was the late, great manager Whitey Herzog, like so many successful baseball managers, a mediocre-to-poor player in his Major League career. Whitey told a story that is as good an example of the King’s Pass, #11 on the Rationalization List, as there is.
He said that in one game between the old Washington Senators (the first Senators, the team that moved to Minnesota and became the Twins) and the Red Sox in Boston, Ted Williams had drawn a walk on a 3-2 pitch right down the middle of the plate that the umpire had called a ball. Williams was famous for his plate discipline and above-average eyesight, and umpires frequently let him, opposing players complained, call his own balls and strikes because unpires acknowledged that he was better at it than they were. Herzog came to bat late in the same contest having walked four times and with a chance to set a record by getting five bases-on-balls in a single game. He told Costas that the umpire called him out on strikes on a 3-2 pitch in the dirt.
“I turned around and said to the ump, ‘You give Williams five strikes and give me only two. It should be the other way around!'”
This struck me particularly squarely because I had been thinking about the Judicial Conference declining to take any action against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the subject of a Senate Judiciary inquiry ever since ProPublica revealed that the Justice had neglected to report around half a million in luxury travel and gifts as legally required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.
Why Are Women Still Screaming In Movies?
This has bugged me for a long time, but my pique came to a head yesterday when I was watching the early Ray Harryhausen effort “It Came From Beneath the Sea”—you know, the one with the giant octopus that attacks San Francisco?
A lovely actress whom I had never been aware of before named Faith Domergue played a female scientist specializing in marine biology. Throughout the movie, despite being Kenneth Tobey’s love interest (You remember him, right? The hero in the original “The Thing From Outer Space”? Later a villain in “Billy Jack” and one of the air traffic controllers in “Airplane”?) she was completely professional, always composed, bristling at sexist comments and assumptions from the male pigs around her (this was in 1955, remember). And yet when the giant octopus that she had insisted was real while everyone else pooh-poohed the idea finally appeared, she screamed like a teenage girl at an Elvis concert. Why would she do that? She was the only one who was expecting to see a giant octopus! The men around her, in contrast, looked startled or went into action (getting the hell off the beach); only the woman screamed.
From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Ford’s Anti-Israel Tweets
Some questions present themselves, such as,
How much trust should we place in the management of a company that can’t staff and oversee its social media accounts better than this?
Is mere firing sufficient punishment for an employee who would post those? Such an egregious level of betrayal of an employer should carry a lifetime brand, like the scarlet letter.
What could someone guilty of such conduct do to redeem himself?
Ford’s headquarters are in Detroit, an area with a large Arab-American population with strong pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel sentiments. You would think that this incident would be sufficiently predictable that special care would be taken to avoid it. Clearly, that didn’t happen. The incident is also magnified because of the ugly legacy of the company’s anti-Semitic founder, Henry Ford, who among other things promoted the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Henry’s company’s apology was about as inept as one would expect from one that allowed this to occur: “Our X account was briefly compromised and the previous three posts were not authorized or posted by Ford,” a spokesperson said. “We are investigating the issue, and apologize for any confusion caused.”
Ford apologizes for the “confusion”?
Curmie’s Conjectures: What the Hell Was ESPN Thinking?
by Curmie
[My post yesterday about ESPN’s decision to ignore the pre-game events at the Sugar Bowl attracted almost no commentary at all, but it did prompt this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures, which makes it all worthwhile. This is cross-posted on Curmie’s blog; once again, I encourage everyone to visit it regularly. Curmie doesn’t post often, but as Spencer Tracy says of Katherine Hepburn in 1952’s “Pat and Mike,”…what’s there is cherce.” —JM]
There’s a lot of brouhaha at the moment, including Jack’s apt commentary, about ESPN’s coverage of Thursday’s Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans, or rather of the pre-game. The game was postponed for a day in the wake of the horrific events of early New Year’s morning only a few blocks from the Superdome, where the game was played.
So why is the photo for this piece of a baseball game? Allow me to explain. I have been a fan of the New York Mets since 1962, the year of the team’s inception. I can tell you with certainty that the biggest home run in Mets history had nothing to do with their World Series championship years of 1969 or 1986. It was Mike Piazza’s two-run, come-from-behind, homer in the bottom of the 8th inning in Shea Stadium on September 21, 2001. That’s what you see above.
It was the game-winning hit and it came against the best team in the division, the arch-rival Atlanta Braves. Vastly more importantly, it was during the first major league game to be played in New York after the attacks of 9/11. And, for the first time in a week and a half, the locals had something to be happy about. That night, anyone who wasn’t a Braves fan per se (and probably a fair number who were) needed that home run. Not just Mets fans. Not just New Yorkers. Americans.
We’d been told the everything was going to be OK, but we needed more. David Letterman going back on the air helped, but everything was still somber. The Bush jokes that would cement the resolve—you don’t joke about the President if your country is in crisis—were to come later. But first, there was Mike Piazza. Sometimes, sports matter.
In the winter of 1980, I lived in a small town in rural Kentucky. I remember watching the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game on the TV. After the incredible upset of the powerhouse Soviet team by a bunch of American college kids, after the most famous line of Al Michaels’s career—“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”—there was a lot of noise outside, loud enough to be not merely audible but intrusive in my second-floor apartment.
Outside, there was a string of cars with horns blaring; their windows were down (even in Kentucky it can get a little nippy in February), with a bunch of mostly teenagers leaning out and chanting “USA! USA! USA!” I’m willing to bet that I was one of fewer than a dozen people in the entire town who’d ever seen a hockey game live, but here were these kids who didn’t know a poke check from a blue line getting excited about the Olympic semi-final.
In the midst of the Iranian hostage situation, with the country only showing the slightest signs of emerging from the energy crisis (is it any wonder the incumbent President was routed in the election a few months later?), we—again, all of us—needed something to grab ahold of, something to suggest that we’d weather the storm. There have, of course, been other moments that transcended sports: Jesse Owens dominating at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round, Billy Miles appearing from nowhere to win the 10,000m in the Tokyo Olympics; we might even add Spiff Sedrick’s improbable sprint to glory in the women’s rugby 7s in this year’s Olympics. But this year’s Sugar Bowl was most like that baseball game in September of 2001: what made it special wasn’t who won, or what political statement could be wrangled out of the victory, but the mere fact that the game went on was a sign of determination and perhaps a little bit of defiance. If you’re a Georgia fan, you’re disappointed that your team lost, but you were reminded before kickoff that there are more important things than football games.
Ethics at Half-Mast
Former President Jimmy Carter died on December 29, so according to traditional protocol, U.S. flags are to fly at half-mast until sunset on Tuesday, January 28, 2025, in his honor. This means that the flags will be signifying national sorrow on January 20, when Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States when the nation, also according to tradition, is supposed to embrace our peaceful transfer of power, our unique system of government, the glorious history of the United States of America, and the hope that should accompany each new Chief Executive into the office where Washington, Lincoln and the rest served our nation.
I’m sure the Axis news media will engage in an orgy of smug satisfaction at the symbolism of the flags signifying mourning upon the return to power of Donald J. Trump. I am similarly certain the the Trump Deranged will similarly puff up their little chests with pride at the condign justice the circumstances have imposed on the MAGA celebrants. Meanwhile, Trump is ticked-off and, being Trump, unable to restrain himself from saying so. On Truth Social, his now superfluous social media platform created when the censors at Twitter silenced his account, the President-Elect whined,
NewsGuard, WaPo, and the Unethical Mobius Strip
The Global Engagement Center, the State Department’s foreign disinformation center and a sinister censorship invention of the Obama Administration, lost its funding after the re-written continuing resolution in Congress to resolve the budget stand-off was approved. The original version, killed in part by the opposition of President-Elect Trump, included funding for the agency of around $61 million, supporting 120 people on staff.
Good riddance. Elon Musk had, correctly, called the GEC the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation.” Along with the Biden Department of Homeland Security, it provided taxpayer funds to NewsGuard, the laughably biased “non-partisan” news disinformation “watchdog” that the Axis media uses to deny that it is what it is. “This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped,” a Washington Post disinformation piece was headlined on Chritsmas Eve. Here is literally the only thing you need to know about both the movitations of the Post and the neutrality and objectivity of NewsGuard. Are you ready?
Ethics Alarms 