Author: Jack Marshall

The Horror! President Trump Picks Kennedy Honors Honorees That Are No More or Less Deserving Than All of the Others

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Typical of the “If Trump does it, it’s bad” mania has been the attacks on his choices for the Kennedy Center Honors program this year. The list includes the band Kiss, “Phantom of the Opera” star Michael Crawford, country music legend George Strait, actor Sylvester Stallone and disco legend Gloria Gaynor. I have had insider intelligence regarding these choices in the past (it’s sausage-making), and I’ve also reviewed the history of the honors. The only major departure from tradition this time is that there are no “high culture” awardees on the list, no classical composers, opera singers, ballet dancers or serious novelists. But past honorees have included such legends as “The Flying Nun” star Sally Field, Neil Diamond and Big Bird: if the list had come from the typical progressive cabal that has run the Kennedy Center since its inception, nobody would have blinked. It’s a little like baseball Hall of Fame choices: it is easy to find past honorees who were equally or less deserving.

Is Trump deliberately poking progressive culture in the eye with his takeover of Kennedy Honors? Sure he is, and I’m glad. The honorees and the previous regime insulted him and his office by cutting Trump and Melania out of the gala in his very first year of his Presidency. I condemned this at the time, writing that the threatened boycott of the ceremony by some of the awardees in 2017 should have been responded to by a curt “Fine, we’ll give the honor to someone else, then. Good luck in your future endeavors.”

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Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Three weeks after I inflicted a giant hematoma on (in?) my leg, I’m still having trouble getting past the two-post-a-day barrier, in great part because I’m hopeless on a laptop, and sitting at my desk in the office is still painful. I’m sorry: I’m missing a lot; the EA runway looks like a Reagan National flight stop due to high winds and thunderstorms.

A needed observation on the Trump Presidency so far: wow. That wow isn’t about what Trump and his team are doing, but the fact that they are doing it. I’ve compared Trump II to Andrew Jackson, but I now believe he is channeling my favorite President of all (again, in terms of Oval Office conduct, not policy), Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy, like Trump, was a Presidential activist and believed in using the power he had to do things, fix things, and project American power abroad. He also believed fervently in American exceptionalism, as all Presidents (and citizens) should. Like TR, Trump is trying to stop international conflicts that don’t directly involve the United States: Roosevelt was the first U.S. President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Trump has already exceeded his accomplishments in that sphere.

You would think he could get some praise from the Axis for this. Nah. The news media is still relentlessly attacking him and everything he does, and there are enough Stage 5 Trump Derangement victims and gullible, manipulated fools among the public to keep Trump’s polling numbers under water.

To his great credit, President Trump doesn’t seem to care. Among the many ways his second term is breaking with conventional wisdom, he has turned his lame duck status into a weapon. Fascinating. There is so much to see and learn from going on. Those who refused to pay attention are missing a great show and a transformational Presidency, as Trump joins the lofty company of Washington, Andy, Honest Abe, Teddy, FDR and the Gipper.

Over to you…

Virtue-Signaling Saps Of The Decade: The NFL

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The NFL, which maims its players for profit, presumes that its fans are cretins whose attitudes and conduct will be influenced by fatuous messages in stadium end zones. How insulting.

All 32 teams will feature an inspiring (gag!) end zone message of at each home game. The options are “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love” and “Inspire Change.” “It Takes All of Us” will be stenciled in the opposite end zone for all games.

This is so cynical and transparently insincere that I don’t know how to characterize it. I thought the kneeling was stupid, but these messages are beyond belief. All these years trying to conquer hate and racism, when the solution was so simple! Just put messages in football stadium end zones! Problem solved.

Gerrymandering Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The hypocritical back and forth about Texas’s planned redistricting to get more Republican reps is just silly. As many have pointed out, Illinois, where the protesting Texas Democratic Senators fled, has one of the most blatant gerrymandering in the nation. California, Maryland, New York and Massachusetts have similarly used long-held Democrat majorities in the state legislatures to ensure that Republicans are under-represented. No, two wrongs don’t make a right, but the Donkeys are estopped from pulling a Captain Dreyfus tantrum. They are shocked—shocked!—that Republican majorities would use redistricting to maximize GOP gains in the House.

Come on.

I have never been sure what is the fairest and most democratic way to draw districts. The original controversies arose when Southern states carefully drew districts to split up black neighborhoods. I get it, but I’m also not sure that it benefits the nation or a state to have districts dominated by anti-American, un-assimilated immigrant populations, like the Somali district that gave us Rep. Omar, the Palestinian district that inflicts Rep. Tlaib on Congress, or the district that features the Congresswoman, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), who says she is loyal to Guatamala first, and the U.S. second.

District construction is a zero sum game: if minorities gain more power, it is at the expense of diversity of viewpoints and dissenting voices in other districts. One more thing I am unsure of: whether there is any fair and just way to draw Congressional districts.

I might favor a system that imposes a random grid on a state, and communities and neighborhoods be damned. Have them redrawn before every election.

On the Adam Schiff Leaking Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Once again, we have the conservative news media hammering at what it believes is a damning story while the mainstream media hasn’t reported on it at all.

Recently declassified documents have raised legitimate questions about whether the Trump-Russia collusion “Get Trump!” project was a deliberate, Barack Obama-approved plot in coordination with Clinton’s 2016 campaign and engineered by the “Deep State” intelligence community. This is being investigated, and it will be interesting to see if the Axis of Unethical Conduct can protect its heroes from the legal accountability they deserve. I thought it was pretty clear that this was what transpired long before Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard got involved, but of course, this makes me vulnerable to confirmation bias.

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Serious Question: Has US News Media Ever Treated Another President or Vice-President This Way Before?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

And why is it acceptable now?

A completely made-up “scandal” began when The Guardian reported  on “Canoe-Gate.” “JD Vance’s team had water level of the river raised for family’s boating trip,” the outlet claimed. Though the same article said that “one source with knowledge of the matter who communicated with the Guardian anonymously alleged that the outflow request for the Caesar Creek Lake was not just to support the vice-president’s Secret Service detail, but also to create ‘ideal kayaking conditions” and that “The Guardian could not independently confirm this specific claim,” the story was reported anyway. Got that? An unnamed source claimed that Vance had ordered that a river’s water level be raised to create better kayak conditions, the news organization couldn’t substantiate the claim, yet they printed it as fact.

Then the usual suspects jumped into the fray. The New Republic’s  headline was “JD Vance Abused Power to Raise River Levels for Family Kayaking Trip.” Huffington Post declared: “JD Vance Had A River’s Water Level Raised For His Family Vacation.” The Daily Beast: “JD Vance Ordered a River’s Water Level Raised for His Family Boat Trip.” Stephen Colbert called the story an “insane spoiled baby emperor move.” (What an asshole he is. But I digress.)

There was no truth to the story whatsoever. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi explained that the they conducted a routine trip to the Ohio area ahead of the Veep’s planned trip and one of their vessels actually ran aground. The Secret Service the increase: “It’s very normal, it’s very routine.” He said that the decision was made without input or involvement from the Vice President’s office.

Never mind, though. Vance is Donald Trump’s #2, so whatever damning stories and rumors people make up about him must be true, and must be broadcast to the world as fact. None of the news outlets noted above have retracted or taken down the false story. Of course they haven’t.

I’ll answer my own question: no, there have never been a President and Vice President who have been slandered, libeled, slimed and unfairly denigrated like Trump and Vance. By any objective measure, the first seven months of the second Trump administration has been spectacularly productive on an impressive number of fronts, yet the President’s popularity is still in negative numbers. The barrage of deliberately misleading negative propaganda is why. It hurts the government, it hurts society, it scars democracy. “Enemy of the people.” Trump coined that phrase in relation to the news media, and he was never more accurate. Journalists screamed, “How dare he!,” but Trump nailed their corrupt profession as deftly as Ronald Reagan did when he called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” That’s what we have as our “journalism” now: a malign, unethical, dastardly institution determined to mislead rather than inform.

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Pointer: Res Ipsa Loquitur

Ethics Quiz: Mets Dog

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Fans coming off the subway for a Mets game at Citi Field for 16 years have encountered Mets Dog, a canine decked in orange and blue gear, a cowboy hat, bandana, a pipe in his mouth and sunglasses. The current version, Sushi, will shake your hand in exchange for dollars. Fans line up to take photos of the dog. Her owner, Norberto Fernandez, stands nearby. Sushi doesn’t pant, and hardly moves for hours at a time, with no apparent access to food or water.

“The fact that that dog hasn’t died is kind of amazing,” said Christina Shusterich, an NYC-based dog behavior specialist, who reviewed numerous images and videos of the dog. Protests over Mets Dog are proliferating in social media. “Dogs don’t just sit still, especially in the hot sun with no shade, no water, no food,” says Belkis Cardona-Rivera, who works in the pet industry and founded a Facebook group that claims Sushi is being abused. “This is animal cruelty. This is not normal. For me, that’s not cute at all. That’s not normal dog behavior.”

Yet the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), among other agencies, has investigated and found no grounds to remove Mets Dog from her owner’s care. Meanwhile, the Mets wash their metaphorical hands of the issue. “The New York Mets organization is in no way affiliated with this individual and their dog and do not condone their behavior,” the team said in a statement.

Controversies abound. Many are certain that Fernandez, who claims to be a dog trainer, must use an electric collar to get the dog to stay so still and keep a pipe in his mouth. Yet Sushi appears to be in good health and loved, and she undoubtedly better off than many dogs that are neglected by their owners. She has a job. She has friends.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this:

Is Mets Dog being cruelly treated? Should Fernandez be prevented from presenting his canine panhandling spectacle? Or is this “Ick!” rather than unethical?

On Trump’s D.C. Law Enforcement Takeover

/ Jack Marshall / 78 Comments

Invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, President Trump has deployed National Guard troops to D.C. and is taking over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to “help reestablish law, order and public safety” in the city. The President has the power to do this for 30 days; anyone calling it a frightening use of autocratic power is in the revolting camp of those who believe that any legitimate exercise Presidential power is fascistic and dangerous if this President is the one exercising it.

Naturally, Trump being Trump, he has been exaggerating the extent of D.C.’s problem. PBS, which, to its enduring shame, used phony factchecking site PolitiFact to challenge Trump’s hyperboles, noted that Trump’s stats were from 2023 and that “at least 49 other cities in the world had higher homicide rates” in that year. Oh! Then what’s all the fuss about? Here’s one: none of those cities is the capital of the United States of America. D.C.’s crime and murder rate are above the national average. The nation’s capital should be a model of safety, public civility and fealty to the law, not a city that’s “not as bad as it used to be and you can find others that are even worse.”

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Harvard Is An Ethics Villain. The Trump Administration Is Finally Holding It Accountable.

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

This is excellent.

The letter is hard to read, but a quick summary would be this: The Trump Administration is threatening to seize Harvard’s patents for discoveries and inventions developed with federal funds because Harvard failed to disclose them as required by law, commercialized them abroad before doing so in the U.S., or in other cases failed to convert them into practical use. The university, which has metastasized into an weapon of Leftist indoctrination and pursued the corruption and politicization of higher education for decades while using its aura of virtue and superiority as a shield against accountability, has been relying on the Axis of Unethical Conduct, notably the news media and its manipulation of public opinion, to insulate it from the Administration’s long-overdue intervention.

It chose…poorly.

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Ethics Hero: Maluma

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here I am, with almost a dozen important ethics issues languishing thanks to my (I hope) temporary incapacity, picking the least consequential of them all to begin EA’s blogging day. Go figure.

Colombian rapper Maluma (whom I had never heard of before) halted his Mexico City concert to admonish an audience member who had brought a baby, presumably hers, to the event. He was in the middle of a song, in fact, when he noticed the infant in the audience and called out the woman.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to bring a 1-year-old baby to a concert where the decibels are this fucking high?” he asked. “That baby doesn’t even know what it’s doing here! Next time, protect their ears or something. For real. It’s heavy. It’s your responsibility.”

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