Bob Dylan recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind” on this date in 1962. It’s one of my favorite ethics songs, and I have written several parody versions of it focusing on legal ethics issue that the legal profession has not quite figured out yet.

Which reminds me: I heard a wretched Dylan imitation in the background of a movie last night. The increasingly common cheap-out of using a fake version of a famous recording to fool inattentive or ignorant audiences while avoiding paying for the original version is, I feel, both insulting and annoying as well as unethical. Even shows that use oldies as a unifying theme do it, like the “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” fake the records; the closed caption will read “Bob Dylan sings “Blowin’ in the Wind” when it obviously isn’t Bob. Kudos to the directors like Martin Scorsese, who have the integrity and the respect for both their audiences and the original artists to shell out the extra bucks and get rights to play the real thing.

1. President Biden’s failure to urge Americans not to harass officials and judges at their homes or when they are in public as private citizens shows his hypocrisy, lack of integrity, and failure as an ethical leader. ..or it shows that he’s a puppet and his puppeteers are anti-democratic thugs. Note:

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Unfortunately, no word but the A-word will do, once again.

It’s disturbing and ominous that one half of the U.S. political culture has embraced vigorous assholery as part of its ideology, but yesterday’s exchange of positions regarding the right to enjoy one’s life shows that no other conclusion is plausible.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh attempted to dine in the Washington DC Morton’s Steak House earlier this week, and assholes calling themselves  protesters (they were gathered by the “ShutDown DC” activist group) showed up outside the restaurant after receiving a tip from other assholes that Kavanaugh was there.

“While the badasses @OurRightsDC and his own neighbors are gathered outside #Kavanaugh’s home, the justice seems to have snuck out for a swanky DC dinner,” the group posted on Twitter. “We got a tip from someone who spotted him around 7:40. DM us if you want to join him…we’re sure he can pull up a seat!” Student loan forgiveness activist Melissa Byrne (now there is another political position devoid of ethics alarms)  tweeted out the restaurant’s phone number, writing, “Folks should call Mortons [sic] at +1 (202) 955-5997 and tell them it’s gross they welcomed Brett Kavanaugh as a diner tonight. Men who take away women’s  rights should be shunned.”

Justice Kavanaugh left the establishment through a back exit after having his fill of being harassed and as well as causing his fellow diners to be disturbed.  ShutDown DC tweeted: “We hear Kavanaugh snuck out the back with his security detail. @mortons should be ashamed for welcoming a man who so clearly hates women.”

Of course. ‘Our victims should be ashamed.’ The Mark of Asshole!

Morton’s issued the following assessment of the incident:

“Honorable Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and all of our other patrons at the restaurant were unduly harassed by unruly protestors while eating dinner at our Morton’s restaurant. Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner. There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”

Exactly. This is also a neat and handy ethics test: if one of your friends or relatives doesn’t agree with this basic statement, he or she may be assholes. Or well on their way to becoming one.

But numerous personages and commentators on the Left leaped at the chance to side with the protesters, whose response to Morton’s was to tweet, “No rights for us, no peace for you. Get f–ked @mortons.”

As the chorus would have sung if Disney’s delightful Fifties TV series “Zorro” had been called “Assholes”…

Out of the night, when the full moon is bright
Comes a mob that’s filled with Assholes!
Its justice charade is of fallacies made…
In turn it makes them assholes.
Assholes! They make the sign of the A!
Assholes! If only they’d go away!

Assholes!
Assholes!
Assholes!

I’m sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

Speaking for the White House, and thus President Biden and his party, paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre responded to a question about the incident (from guess who) by babbling, “People have the right, this is what Democracy is. Of course people have a right to privacy but people also have the right to protest peacefully, peacefully, it’s the intimidation and the violence that we condemn.”

Ethics Fool. The right to protest doesn’t make all protests right, and exacting revenge on a SCOTUS justice for doing his job, which is to interpret the law, while disrupting a business and its patrons is dead wrong and indefensible in any ethical system. This “protest” is really intimidation. The threat is clear: if you don’t do what the mob wants, you and your family will never have a moment’s peace. Continue reading →

I can’t believe it. MLB did something right for a change. I thought I might never see the day.

Today is the announcement of the starters for the 2022 All-Star Game, based on fan voting. The hype is sort of sad, as the game itself, once considered a major sporting event that attracted huge TV ratings, is a bit of a dinosaur thanks to interleague play and the fact that the players make so much money that it isn’t worth it to them to play hard or care about which league’s all-stars win. But never mind: it’ still be far the most entertaining of the various all-star games with by far the richest history.

But I digress. For literally decades I and many others have complained about the repeated situation where one of the game’s greatest players, in his last season, is left off the team because his mid-season statistics are no longer stellar. Thus baseball fans were regularly robbed of the chance to see a guaranteed Hall of Famer one last time in the “Mid-Summer Classic,” despite his status as a career “All-Star.” The game is for the fans, after all, and survives on legends, memories and nostalgia.

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Some people have the rare gift of being able to look at every problem with fresh, unbiased eyes, avoiding the biases, assumptions and conventional wisdom that blinds the rest of us. Ethics Alarms is extremely fortunate to have several regular commentators who fit that description. One of them is Extradimensional Cephalopod.

Here is its Comment of the Day on the post about “urgency” being called a value of white supremacy.

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Beset with self-doubt, anxiety, frustration, despair and futility today. I apologize in advance in case it colors my prose…

1. Again, making the public stupid. I heard a news-reader this morning read directly from a White House press release stating that President Biden was going to announce to the nation that he was signing an executive order “guaranteeing” women’s “reproductive health” and access to abortions. This combination of official deception and journalism negligence is why so many members of the public think the President is a king. Whatever the announcement is, it can’t trump state laws. It can’t make federal law. Those of us who actually pay attention know what this is: pro-abortion activists and Democratic donors told the White House that they are furious that Biden isn’t prominently “fighting” for abortion. This is the result: grandstanding. Continue reading →

Gallup has released its annual poll of Americans asking about their trust in 16 major U.S. institutions. You can see the horrible results above. Ethics Alarms has covered this poll for many years, because trust is both a prime ethics value and also the most important one for a democracy. I wrote years ago on the old Ethics Scoreboard about how Democrats were playing with fire by seeding distrust in our elections and the Supreme Court by hammering on the too-close 2000 Presidential election as a “stolen” while claiming the Gore “won.” I called the strategy “pulling at the fabric of democracy,” if I recall, noting that our system uniquely requires public trust in our processes, institutions, leaders and fellow members of the public. Since then, the level of distrust has both fallen and widened.

Even applying the obligatory distrust of polls themselves, Gallup’s conclusions are frightening, in part because they feel accurate. Not only is the public less confident in major U.S. institutions than it was a year ago, it is the worst it has been across the board since Gallup started checking. There were significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any. The Supreme Court fell lower than it ever has been, not surprising since two of the institutions regarded correctly as less trustworthy have been cynically and irresponsibly deriding it for purely ideological motives. The Presidency has dropped in trust even more than SCOTUS, which shows that the public is paying attention. Congress hasn’t fallen as far in percentage points, but only because it had fallen so far already. The five points it lost in trust almost cuts its previous low in half.

Thus it is not, perhaps, coincidental that less than two weeks ago,the Presidency and the news media were further exposed by the discovery of a 2018 voicemail from President Biden that proved his repeated denials about speaking with crooked Number Two Son Hunter Biden about his foreign business dealings were outright lies.

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