Author: Jack Marshall

Confronting My Biases, Episode 15: Pete Hegseth’s Tats (Corrected and Revised)

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I just saw the photo above on the web.

I’m sorry, I know its a generational thing, I know, I know.

But I cannot stop myself from believing that anyone who gets themselves tattooed like that is an idiot. I always will.

The idea of the United States having the Secretary of Defense with those tattoos is almost too jarring for me to bear. Some are writing that the chest tattoo is a white supremacy symbol. Is it?

This is a big correction: I was hit with two equivalent photos claiming that was Matt Gaetz, and I posted this originally about the ex-Congressman. Gaetz and Hegseth do look a little alike.

For some reason, the idea of an Attorney General being self-branded like that bothers me a lot more than having a Secretary of Defense with them underneath his suit. Hegseth fought “infidels” in the Middle East. Heck, maybe those tattoos will endear him to the military. You know, like if he had a tattoo reading, “Indiannapolis.”

Ethics Alarms regrets the error (kudos to Jg in SF for flagging it.

But the bias remains.

And I’m afraid to think about what Gaetz’s tats look like...

On the Other Hand (As Capt. Hook Liked to Say), There Are Columnists Like The Appropriately Named Sabrina Haake….

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Once again, I find myself asking, how can an alleged opinion writer issue utter crap like this and live with herself? How can a newspaper justify publishing it, or pay someone so dishonest or rock-dumb to write it? How can anyone with two brain cells to rub together read it and say, “Duhh..yup! Sound’s right to me!“?

This fraudulent authority is a trial lawyer who claims to specialize in First Amendment cases, though her screed here tells us that she doesn’t get that free speech thingy. Sabrina is also a failed Democratic candidate for Congress. Her essay is called, “Trump didn’t win; disinformation did.” If I didn’t write an ethics blog, that headline alone would be sufficient for me to eschew the pleasure of reading it.

Just listen (well, metaphorically) to this woman…

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Oh Look! Now That The Axis Has Been Slapped Down By A Majority In An Election, The Washington Post Is Factchecking Nancy Pelosi About Trump!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wait, I thought it was Donald Trump who lied all the time?

I pay as little attention to Nancy Pelosi as possible, and missed her ridiculous statement after the election, “I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Joe Biden than came under Donald Trump.” The Deranged , currently trying to get through life with their heads exploding constantly, will believe just about anything Democrats say in denial of their accountability for Harris’s election faceplant (after all, Trump voters are all racist, sexist, ignorant garbage), and dozens of lies were spread on their behalf during the campaign without factcheckers raising an eyebrow.

But that Pelosi nonsense was apparently too much. It was too much even after the usual “He/She didn’t say what she said or if she did she meant something else” squad, which reliably follows a Democrat’s whopper as reliably as the little man with mustache, the broom and the trash can who followed the Parade of History that began the “Mr. Peabody” segments on “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” rushed to rescue the ex-Speaker. She didn’t mean illegal border-crossers, she mean those deported,” they said. Well, not deported, maybe, but arrested.

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Stay Classy, Secret Service!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

No wonder Trump has nearly been assassinated twice.

Koryeah Dwanyen, in her self-published book “Undercover Heartbreak: A Memoir of Trust and Trauma”revelas that she succumbed to the alluring pick-up line “Let’s have sex in Michelle Obama’s bathroom!” and travelled to Hawaii with a Secret Service agent she calls“Dale.” “No one will know. If anything, I’m the one who could get in trouble,” she quotes Dale in her memoir. “Like a mile-high club!” he allegedly told her.

And she did have sex in the former First Lady’s bathroom. The story has been confirmed by the Secret Service, according to ABC News. (“Dale” is now otherwise employed.) Meanwhile, Dwanyen says she submitted to his bathroom fantasy because she was in love with the agent. She discovered later that he was married.

Imagine that! Someone assigned to protect a former First Lady and who secretly uses her bathroom as a secret love den would lie. What is the world coming to?

After “Dale” came clean about his marital status, bathroom buddy Koryeah became patriotic and reported the agent to his superiors. He also had revealed classified information to her.

I think Trump should appoint Stormy Daniels to run the Secret Service.

Fact: Matt Gaetz Really Is the Worst Nomination For Attorney General In U.S. History [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

For once, the over-the-top criticism of a Trump decision is completely justified, and maybe even understated. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), just nominated by the President-Elect to be his Attorney General, has no legitimate qualifications for the job at all, which requires managing a 115,000-person agency. He has no management experience. He has no prosecutorial experience. He is a licensed lawyer, but has very little legal practice experience. No previous Attorney General, going back to Edmund Randolph, Washington’s first AG, had such a sparse legal resume. Randolph had been governor of Virginia.

I am more qualified to be the Attorney General than Matt Gaetz, and I can think of many personal friends and colleagues who are more qualified for the job than I am. If I threw a rock into a cocktail reception at the D.C. Bar, I would hit a more qualified lawyer.

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Two Stupid Questions and One Damning Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If there areany lingering doubt about why the news media has no credibility with the American people and its influence is diminishing like an ice cube left of the sidewalk on a hot summer’s day, ponder these two questions at yesterday’s White House press briefing.

#1. TIME’s correspondent Brian Bennett asked the President’s incompetent paid liar, “President Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation in American history when he becomes president. Are there steps that President Biden is taking in the next 70 days to try to protect certain populations in the United States from deportation? Does he want to extend parole or take other steps that would protect people from that deportation?”

Good one, Brian. “What steps is the President taking to prevent President Trump from enforcing laws that his administration has refused to enforce?” To members of our woke journalistic cabal, this makes perfect sense.

#2. Bloomberg’s Skylar Woodhouse asked, “President-elect Trump — there’s reports that Elon Musk is having a lot of sway in terms of his decisions, in terms of who President-elect Trump is, you know, having come into his administration, sitting in on meetings with — with foreign leaders, and Elon Musk has said, you know, there’s parts that he wants to sort of reshape maybe the government. Is President Biden concerned at all over Elon Musk’s influence over President-elect Trump and potentially what that could look like for our country?”

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Ethics Dunce: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Nominee To Be Defense Secretary

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

This will not end well.

Oh, I get it. Trump ran through six Defense Secretaries in four years (a record) and had an adversary relationship with the Pentagon. As with so many other Departments, entrenched resistance to Trump’s leadership flourishes there, and there are cultural issues as well.

The sort-of new President has learned a hard lesson, and wants a loyal outsider to tackle the Defense Department. Harry Truman once described the department as a feather bed where you punched a problem in one part of the bed and another problem would pop right up.

DOD is huge, a labyrinth of interlocking bureaucracies, and managing it requires superb leadership skills, diplomacy, organization and more. There is no reason to believe that Pete Hegseth possesses any of these.

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Ethics Hero: Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

He didn’t have to be gracious. Few would have blamed him if he was not. He could have followed through with the obligatory meeting between an outgoing POTUS and an incoming one from the other party stiffly, coldly and as formally as possible. After all, Donald Trump had refused to extend the courtesy of such a meeting to him, when Biden won the election in 2020.

But instead of tit-for-tat, payback, bitterness or resentment, President Biden said, “Welcome back.” Never mind that this is an odd thing to say to man whom his party (and Biden himself) had pronounced a fascist and an existentialist threat to democracy. Trump, himself addicted to outrageous hyperbole as a lifestyle, knows more than most that this was just a campaign ploy, albeit a particularly divisive and unfair one. “Welcome back” is as close as President Biden could come to saying, “It’s over, you won, and no hard feelings,” even if the hard feelings are there, for how could they not be?

It is supremely ironic that Joe Biden’s most remembered quote as President will be this one, uttered as he his administration is going out not with a bang, but a whimper. (George Washington also had a famous quote acknowledging his successor: “I am fairly out and you fairly in! George said to John Adams. “See which of us will be happiest!”)

At the end of ” MacBeth”Malcolm says of vanquished Thane of Cawdor, “Nothing dignified him in this life more than his leaving it.” It may be said of Joe Biden that “Nothing so dignified his Presidency as his leaving it.” I suspect that it will be.

“Shrinkflation” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In my latest trip to the supermarket, I picked up a couple of products that I hadn’t bought for a couple of months, maybe four, but no more than that. I was stunned to see how much these products had shrunk in such a short period of time. The Pepperidge Fram Milano Cookies were much smaller, maybe 20%. The Leggo toaster waffles weren’t even waffle size any more.

I had already noticed how frozen pizzas had become smaller. A year ago, maybe a little more, I didn’t have a pan big enough to hold a DiGiorno pizza, which unlike some other brands that you can put right on the oven rack, requires a pan for cooking. The pizza that didn’t fit in my pan once now does with room to spare, and I’m pretty sure that the pan hasn’t grown.

I’m sure there are many other items that have experienced the same shrinkage, even as the prices for them have gone up. For the three food items above, none of the packaging says “Now, smaller and less for your money!” Oh, maybe its buried in fine print somewhere, but that’s not acceptable. I remember the TV ads that proclaimed that familiar products were better than ever; I expect the same transparency when they are worse.

Shrinkflation without transparency is unethical: false packaging, a bait and switch. I know the counter-argument: the package has serving amounts and total weight, but it doesn’t doesn’t say “Now, cookies 25% smaller!” That’s what consumers have a right to know.

Ethics Dunce: Nils Von Kalm, Whoever The Hell He Is…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

For the second time in two days, Medium, to which I apparently have a minimal subscription to that allows me to read “public” articles, has sent me a “What are we going to do? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO??” piece in response to Trump’s election. It was titled, “Responding To The Reality Of Another Trump Presidency.”

As with the other one, I just got the beginning and was informed that “The author made this story available to Medium members only. Upgrade to instantly unlock this story plus other member-only benefits.” Yeah, bite me. As I did in this post, I tried to see if the article was available elsewhere. It began,

Well, it’s happened again. This time though, Trump’s election victory wasn’t the stunning upset it was in 2016. It’s still caused incredible shockwaves across America and the world though as we all ponder what it might mean.

So, strap yourselves in folks; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

As the world comes to terms with how the next Trump Presidency might impact us all, much has already been written about the best way to respond. I have to confess to probably going a bit over the top with some of my emotional responses. When someone as divisive as Trump comes along, emotions can be pretty overwhelming.

Whatever our reactions and thoughts though, now is a time of great opportunity, an opportunity to bear witness to the Gospel loud and clear. Not the dualistic gospel that says you can get to heaven when you die if you just believe the right things; nor the same gospel that says you’re going to hell if you don’t believe those things.

I’m talking about the actual good news of Jesus, the one who came to inaugurate God’s reign of love, justice, peace and compassion right here on earth as it is in heaven. I’m talking about the good news that another world is possible and another…

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