Author: Jack Marshall

How Paul Anka Proved Harry Truman Right…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am not a big fan of Paul Anka or his work, so I considered the new documentary on his career a default choice this morning since ice is on my satellite dish and the channel selection on Direct TV was severely limited. But it’s true: you learn something new and useful almost every day, and often in the least expected places.

I did not know, for example, that Anka wrote “Johnny’s Theme,” the now iconic music that Johnny Carson walked onto the stage to at the start of his version of “The Tonight Show.” But it’s how it ended up as Carson’s entrance music that hammers home an ethics lesson.

When Johnny Carson was preparing to take over from Jack Paar as the host of “The Tonight Show” in October 1962, he ran into Anka, whom he had worked with in a TV special. Carson mentioned to Anka that they needed a new theme, so the pop star composer of “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” “Puppy Love” and the theme to “The Longest Day” repurposed the instrumental arrangement for “It’s Really Love,” a song recorded by his one-time girlfriend Annette Funicello (not one of Annette’s hits) and sent a demo to Carson.

Johnny phoned Paul and thanked him for the offer (and said he and Ed McMahon loved the tune) but said that “Tonight Show” bandleader Skitch Henderson had “his nose out of joint” (does any one use that phrase any more?) because Carson wanted to use a melody written by a “20-year-old kid.”

So Anka suggested that Johnny Carson write new lyrics to his song and that they call it “Johnny’s theme,” which would then be the composition of the “20-year-old kid” and Henderson’s boss. Brilliant! Henderson had to consent to the song’s use every night, and it was Johnny’s walk on music for 30 years until Carson handed over the show to Jay Leno.

Carson’s name on the song meant that he got half the royalties, which averaged $400,000 per year: Carson’s cut was $200,000 a year for lyrics that were never heard or sung. “Johnny’s Theme” had been played more than 1,400,000 times by the end of the Carson’s show’s run. Anka says that Carson admitted he was embarrassed to make all that money for nothing, but the singer shrugs and smiles about it. Johnny got a great theme, and they both made money.

My favorite Harry Truman quote, perhaps my favorite ethics quote by any President and right up there with Winston Churchill’s immortal, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm,” is:

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

I don’t know if Paul Anka was familiar with the quote or even if he knows about it yet, but his solution to the “Tonight Show” dilemma is as good an example of Harry’s wisdom in practice as we are likely to see.

[Still waiting for WordPress, or someone, to tell me how to get page breaks in posts under their new %$^&#@ block system…]

It’s “Unprofessional Nurse Day” on Ethics Alarms! And When You Combine Unprofessional Nurses With Trump Derangement, You Get…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

..this despicable individual, ex-nurse Alexis ‘Lexie’ Lawler.

Lexie was canned by Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital after announcing in a TikTok video, “As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth-degree tear. I hope that you fucking rip from bow to stern and never shit normally again, you cunt.” 

Leavitt, President Trump’s extremely competent paid liar, announced last month that she was expecting her second child. The injury Lawler wished on Leavitt requires immediate surgery and can cause long-term chronic pain.  The vicious and hateful post received many “likes” and “loves,” because these are really irredeemable people.

The Daily Mail says that it “led supporters of President Donald Trump to call for her firing.” Wait: wouldn’t all decent people call for the firing of a “labor and delivery nurse” who made such a statement? This is one of those stories I want to shake in the faces of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends. much like Dickens, my late, great Jack Russell Terrier, killing a rat.

What monsters they consort with! What monsters they have become….

A spokesperson for Baptist Health confirmed to that this unprofessional ethics villain is no longer employed at the Boca Raton hospital.

But she does have a professional hairdo!

“The comments made in a social media video by a nurse at one of our facilities do not reflect our values or the standards we expect of healthcare professionals,” the hospital’s spokesperson said. “Following a prompt review, the individual is no longer employed by our health system.”

Please note: these are the kinds of people who polls say will prevail in this year’s elections. Gina?

But there needs to be a a strong, competent, effective response beyond just being afraid.

[Note: I want to apologize to Gina Davis, whose clip from “The Fly” is one of the most frequently used on Ethics Alarms, yet I somehow hadn’t included it in the Hollywood Ethics Clip archive until just now. The number of clips is up to 45. Check it out here.]

Should It Matter If a Children’s TV Hostess Is a Virulent, Lying Anti-Semite?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is remarkable the things you learn while searching for ethics topics that have nothing to do with President Trump.

For example, I had never heard of Ms. Rachel, perhaps because my ‘kid’ is 31. Ms. Rachel is the professional moniker of educator, YouTuber, and singer-songwriter Rachel Accurso. She created the YouTube series “Ms. Rachel” (originally known as “Songs for Littles”), a children’s music series that focuses on language development for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

That’s nice! Unfortunately, she can’t resist exposing the fact on social media that she hates Jews . Last week, she “liked” a post by one of her followers on Instagram that said “Free America from the Jews.” Oh-oh. Then she posted a video in which she wept pitifully and claimed that she had meant to delete the thing but inadvertently “loved” it.

Oh. Well, anyone can make a mistake, though I don’t see how someone could make that one. The problem is that this kiddie educator has been ranting on social media about Israel “genocide” in Gaza for quite a while now. Earlier, she posted on Instagram, ‘”Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Iran.” Last year she filmed a ‘Letter of the Day’ video with Palestinian journalist, Motaz Azaiza. Azaiza has praised Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, in which infants and children were massacred among other victims. He once posted online, “May God curse the Jews themselves.”

Call me judgmental, but hosting an anti-Semite like this guy seems like an ominous sign for a child educator. Yet Ms. Rachel appears to be uncancellable. Over at “Unspiked,” Brendan O’Neill speculates why. He writes in part,

“The Damocles sword of cancellation dangles precariously over all of us for such trifling speechcrimes as wondering if the Koran is bollocks (Islamophobia) or thinking immigration should be curtailed (racism). And yet you can openly rub shoulders with anti-Semitic people or anti-Semitic posts and the cancellers will look the other way.

“Be honest: what fate would befall a kids’ entertainer if they hosted on their show a man who had once said ‘Fuck all black people’? And if they then liked a post on Instagram that said ‘Get all blacks out of America’? We know exactly what would happen. They would be savagely cancelled. The only time we’d ever see them again would be in a Netflix documentary 20 years hence about the much-loved kids’ clown who lost it all by chumming about with racist scum.

“…The exact opposite has happened with Ms Rachel. She may have exposed the kids who follow her to a man who once said ‘Curse the Jews’, and she may have liked a post calling for the mass expulsion of Jews from the US, but she will survive. And thrive. Cancel culture will lay not one finger on her. And we all know why: because Jews enjoy none of the protections of ‘political correctness’. Jews have not been granted access to the kingdom of liberal concern. Offending Jews is seen as a lesser crime than offending any other group. Ms Rachel will suffer no consequences so long as her blunders only touch on the lives and feelings of Jews.

“The real problem is not Ms Rachel, who’s fundamentally just another celeb building a virtuous self-image from the rubble of Gaza. It’s the politics of identity. It’s that ideology’s ruthless demotion of Jews to the bottom of the league of identities. Scuff a page of the Koran and you’ll be had up for Islamophobia. Film a kids’ video with a man who said ‘Curse the Jews’ and you’re grand. There it is: the merciless neo-racialism of the woke era….”

This is another Cognitive Dissonance Scale issue at heart. Maybe a competent online children’s educator can still be regarded as effective and trustworthy as long as she keeps her vile political and social views out of her videos, songs and books. On the other hand, as Captain Hook would say, I’d rather have someone who isn’t a lying anti-Semite entertaining my children if I have a choice.

You?

Another Day in Minnesota, Another I.C.E. Shooting, Another Freak-Out and Battle of Narratives…

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

Here is how the New York Times is framing the incident right now:

The authorities in Minnesota on Sunday were investigating the killing of a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident by federal agents, despite resistance from Trump administration officials who sought to cast blame on the victim and local Democratic lawmakers.

The victim, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was an intensive-care nurse and a U.S. citizen with no criminal record who held a legal permit to carry a firearm, local officials said. Federal officials, without presenting evidence for the claims, sought to portray Mr. Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” who was armed and wanted to “massacre” law enforcement officers…Mr. Pretti was shot dead on Saturday during protests against the federal immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Videos analyzed by The New York Times show no sign that Mr. Pretti pulled his weapon during the encounter with federal agents in which he was killed, or that they knew he had one until he was already pinned on the ground…

Federal authorities said the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and Border Patrol, would lead the federal shooting investigation. But senior Homeland Security and Justice Department officials claimed it was already clear that Mr. Pretti and local officials were to blame for the shooting.

The killing of Mr. Pretti in Minneapolis’s Whittier neighborhood prompted a new round of protests in the city, where tensions have reached a breaking point after weeks of aggressive federal immigration action. Increasingly, U.S. citizens have taken to the streets to protest what many have described as a military-style occupation of an American city. At least 1,000 people gathered for a vigil for Mr. Pretti in Whittier Park on Saturday night despite subzero temperatures.

Mr. Trump and administration officials cast blame on local lawmakers, who are Democrats, for the unrest. Attorney General Pam Bondi accused Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and other lawmakers of allowing “lawlessness” to spread and made a series of demands, including for state officials to turn over voting records to the Justice Department. In response, Mr. Walz’s office said that federal agents had “brought chaos and destruction to our state.”

Observations:

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Ethics Quiz: the Narcissist Nurse

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The woman above, a nurse at a Georgia hospital, was told to go home and not to come back to work until she got rid of her flamboyant (I’m being nice) hair style. The woman—I don’t care what her name is—claims that the ‘do is culturally significant, whatever that’s supposed to mean. She also claims that it doesn’t interfere with her job, which I would dispute, and that the hospital is discriminating against her race by telling her that is isn’t professional to dress up like an exotic bird …

…to care for sick people.

I think the lawsuit is a loser: I’m sure the administrators will say convincingly that no one, male or female, black, white or puce, would be allowed to work with that on their head. The woman is an exhibitionist. Personally, I would be wary of trusting any hospital that allowed someone with such dubious judgment and misaligned values to be charged with patient care.

Also, as someone whose week long stay in a hospital last summer featured being awakened out of a deep sleep to have some nurse’s head four inches from my face, the sight of that hat hair could spark a cardiac episode.

But hey! I can be convinced otherwise. So that’s why…

Today’s Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is…

Is a nurse who wears her hair like that meeting minimal professional standards?

Stupid Lawyer Tricks…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This really happened, based on the reliability of the lawyer who reported it to me.

In one of those petty organizational battles over control of a book club or something of similar weight, one faction tried to kick a member of the other faction off the organization’s board without any authority to do so. The other faction quickly insisted that the member be put back on the board, and is trying to oust the offending faction from the group entirely. The fight has erupted on social media, mostly on the club’s Facebook page, in angry and ugly posts.

The ejected faction has hired a lawyer who sent a Cease and Desist and Demand letter to the rest of the membership, threatening a defamation suit. The Demand Letter ended with the following:

THIS LETTER IS A CONFIDENTIAL LEGAL COMMUNICATION AND IS NOT FOR PUBLICATION. ANY PUBLICATION, DISSEMINATION OR BROADCAST OF THIS LETTER OR ANY PORTION OF IT THEREOF, WILL CONSTITUTE, INTER ALIA, A VIOLATION OF THE COPYRIGHT ACT. YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO PUBLISH THE LETTER IN WHOLE OR IN PART.

Well..

1. The letter is obviously not confidential client communication as it has been communicated to non-clients.

2. Sure it’s technically copyrighted like anything you write is, but fair use of such a letter makes the implied threat deceitful. The recipients don’t need authorization to re-publish the letter, and neither do I.

3. Where do lawyers like this get their law degrees from, Bazooka gum comics? “Draw Skippy” ads?

4. My immediate suspicion upon receiving a demand letter like this would be that someone is engaging in the unauthorized practice law or using a dumb AI bot.

Port script: I’m trying to find a standard graphic for this topic. I’m considering using Michael Cohen, Trump’s perjurous, disbarred former fixer. You know, this guy…

What do you think?

A Trump Derangement Test: Show This Story To Your Friends and Relatives and Note Which Ones Believe The President’s Secret “Daughter”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Necla Ozmen, 55, who lives in Ankara, Turkey, has filed a paternity lawsuit claiming the President is her biological father and is demanding a DNA test to prove it. Her filing was immediately dismissed by the Turkish court, and she’s appealing.

Necla says she was born in 1970 and is officially registered as the daughter of Sati and Dursun Ozmen, the couple who raised her.  However, she claims she later learned she had been adopted. Her mother told her that she gave birth to a stillborn baby and that another woman giving birth at the same time, a US citizen Necla identifies only as Sophia, handed over her newborn to be raised and registered by the Ozmen family.

This resembles the plot of “The Omen.” Was Sophia a jackal, by any chance? If so, that means Necla is the Anti-Christ and Trump is The Beast! I knew it!

“Sophia,” Necla says, said that she was the result of an elicit relationship with Trump. The President’s alleged “daughter” wants the judges to establish her paternity and order genetic testing.  Necla has no idea how Trump and Sophia met. “I don’t want to cause him any trouble. I just want to know the truth,” she tells interviewers. “I just want to know whether he is my father. I would like him to speak with me. I can prove through a DNA test that he is my father, if he agrees. I believe he is a good father. I believe he will not turn me away either.” She has also sent petitions to the U.S. Embassy and to courts in the US.

Several of the news reports I have read say that the woman has an “uncanny” resemblance to Trump. Wow. They’re almost twins.

Hey…you know one of you reading out there might be Trump’s kid too. Can’t hurt to check it out! And if he’s not the father, why would Trump oppose a blood test?

I’m guessing that at least 30% of your Trump Deranged acquaintances will instantly accept this Turkish woman’s account as plausible, with a similar number calling it hypocrisy if you don’t after criticizing Hunter Biden’s denial of paternity of one of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.

What are the odds, now, of some Trump-hating judge in the U.S. granting Necla’s request? I’d say strong, and that’s why her lawyers are not unethical to press her claims.

As the wicket Witch of the West memorably said, “What a world, what a world…”

From Maryland, A “When Ethics Fails, The Law Steps In” Verdict

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I recently re-watched “Runaway Jury,” the ethically and legally repugnant film adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller. It’s one of the most unethical movies extant, and before the last couple of years I would have said such egregious lawyer conduct as depicted in the film was unlikely to the point of impossible (as in most of Grisham’s books). The novel and movie involved a high-profile civil suit: the widow of a man murdered when a fired employee “goes postal” seeks to hold the manufacturer of the gun used by the killer liable for millions in damages. A pair of anti-gun zealots conspire to both rig the jury verdict and ruin the evil jury consultant (Gene Hackman) who helped defeat their home town in a similar case years before. In the end the “good guys” win (that is, Hollywood’s idea of “good”); I have mentioned the film before in the context irresponsible films and TV shows that actively misinform the public about a lawyer’s ethical responsibilities. Now comes a jury verdict from Maryland where a jury delivered a multi-million dollar verdict against Walmart for allowing an employee to buy a shotgun before he used it to blow his head off.

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Ethics (and Blogging) Hero: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My late wife might say of this post, “If you like Ann Althouse so much, why don’t you marry her?” (Ann-like tangent: my favorite use of that line was when Homer Simpson was in a TV debate with Rev. Lovejoy over gay marriage, and after the Springfield cleric cited the Bible, Homer retorted, “If you like the Bible so much, why don’t you marry it? Here, I’ll do it for you…”)

Ann is the all-time Ethics Alarms leader in “Ethics Quotes” of the month and week; she’s also been an Ethics Dunce here several times. I even suspended her from any mention in my posts after a particularly miserable performance. Her fascinating EA dosser is here.

I know I just posted about Ann’s recent four slam-bang post run, but her defenestration of Anti-Trump New Yorker hack Susan B. Glasser was masterful, and I bow down in awe and wonder. When the ex-University of Wisconsin law professor is on her game, nobody is better, and attention must be paid.

Glasser issued “It’s Time to Talk About Donald Trump’s Logorrhea/How many polite ways are there to ask whether the President of the United States is losing it?” , jumping on the “Let’s try the 25th Amendment!” Trump removal plan a Golden Oldie among the many that the Axis was pushing in his first term. That any journalist who sat idly by refusing to point out that Joe Biden’s brain was falling out of his ears in chunks has the gall now to make such a claim about Trump (literally all of my Trump-Deranged Facebook Friends keep returning to it) is disqualifying, but Ann doesn’t even need that low-hanging fruit to show us how Glasser cheated to please the Atlantic’s biased readers.

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Pre-Blizzard Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This weekend will be a good time to work on those guest posts you’ve been meaning to write for Ethics Alarms while you’re snowed in. Or, if you don’t live in the storm zone, or are not snow-phobic like everyone in the D.C. area but me, it will still a good time to work on those guest posts you’ve been meaning to write for Ethics Alarms.

I have to go to a funeral of a good friend at Arlington this morning, and don’t know when I’ll return. It’s a bad day for that, as I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, but as Yogi Berra sagely said, “You gotta go to your friends’ funerals. If you don’t go to theirs, they won’t come to yours.”

One more note on the previous post: while drinking my first cup of coffee, I saw the Two Guys on the Couch with a Blonde in the Middle on Fox News talking about one reporter at the Australian Open who was asking the American tennis players, “How does it feel representing the United States right now?’ If the athlete answered with an obviously pre-set, “I am always proud to represent my country,” the guy pressed on with, “I mean, you know, considering everything that’s happening,” fishing for an anti-Trump statement.

The Blonde in the Middle made the right point: it’s too bad one of the tennis pros wasn’t prepared to answer, “Oh, you mean Trump’s first year? Yeah, wasn’t that awesome? He finally got rid of public funding for NPR and PBS, the Education Department is toast, so maybe our kids will be educated instead of indoctrinated, inflation is down, the White House really needed a ballroom, we’re getting illegals off the streets, and even the tariffs are working!”

OK, gotta go. I’m going to visit Mom and Dad while I’m at the cemetery. It’s been a while.