“bias makes you stupid”

Trump Derangement and Professional Ethics Rot Update: The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

As the American Bar Association amply demonstrates, the American legal profession is overwhelmingly left-leaning and left-biased, not because lawyers are especially informed or intelligent, but because they overwhelmingly graduate from law schools devoted to progressive indoctrination, with law journals that actively discriminate based on viewpoint bias. State and local bar associations are governed and staffed by similarly aligned individuals; reading these organizations’ flagship magazines is an exercise in wading through progressive propaganda. Fighting for the rights of “migrants.” Celebrations of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” White men are a minority among bar association presidents.

I belong to association of legal ethics lawyers, including ethics partners, professors, CLE ethics trainers, those who defend other lawyers accused of malpractice or professional misconduct. Most of the time, the topics discussed on the group’s listserv are interesting and pertinent to my practice (legal ethics experts don’t agree on much). Since 2016, however, the Democratic Party bias of the group and its attendant Trump derangement has increasingly raised its ugly metaphorical head. The conservatives on the list as well as those who realize the inappropriateness of political topics generally stay silent (those ethics referrals are lucrative, after all) until the screaming at the sky gets ridiculous, and the moderator steps in to remind everyone that the discussion is supposed to be confined to legal ethics.

I just renewed my membership, and almost immediately a topic titled “Desperate Times” popped up, launched by (of course) the California lawyers in the group. After waking up to another long post about how “we lawyers” needed to organize to fight all of these terrible policies, I replied,

“This topic has nothing to do with legal ethics, and reinforces my conclusion that the legal ethics profession, like so many others, has deteriorated into a partisan, biased, bubble-dwelling  cabal increasingly incapable of objective and trustworthy analysis. The furious effort to spin Fani Willis’s flagrantly unethical conduct was one of many dead canaries in the mine. Is this listserv moderated, or not?”

If you can’t trust ethicists to be objective and unbiased, who can you trust?

On Free Speech, The Supreme Court, and “Conversion Therapy”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of many Woke World freak-outs going on now is one over the strong signals the Supreme Court gave off during oral argument that it was going to overturn Colorado’s law banning so-called “conversion therapy” as unconstitutional. Naturally the progressive bloc on the court thinks the law is hunky-dory. Why would anyone not want to be gay?

One of the issue that came up in oral argument was whether there is any evidence that trying to talk someone out of being gay is harmful. There isn’t, but Court Dunce Sonia Sotamayor opined that “I don’t think the state has to provide a study to show that the advice is not sound,” comparing conversion therapy to a dietitian or counselor telling a client to do something that would harm their body. In other words, the banned therapy is just bad, and every right-thinking person knows it. This is consistent with Patton Oswalt’s certainty that whatever progressives favor must represent progress, hence opposing it is per se a problem. Progressives believe that being gay is just wonderful. That’s good enough for Sonia: treating someone for it is automatically harmful.

What an ongoing embarrassment she is.

Intelligent arguments came from, among others…

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Update on the Jay Jones Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

As related here, Jay Jones is the (black, so he can do no wrong and accusing him of such is racism) Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General who through texts made it clear to a colleague that he believed that his adversaries deserved to be killed, and worse, that their children (“little fascists”) deserved to be killed as well.

To those who, like his desperate defenders, claim this was “just a mistake”—you know, like Joe Biden’s debate meltdown was “just a bad night”—I reply that Jones’ rants were signature significance. He wasn’t joking (compared to Jones’ “jokes,” Jimmy Kimmel’s Charley Kirk comments were comedy gold) and a normal, decent, trustworthy human being never even thinks about wanting his adversaries’ family members dead, much less communicates them to others. No, not even once.

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Ethics Test For Progressives and Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I had four ethics stories all lined up last night, and then this ugly episode forced its way to the front of the line. I hate that. Still, attention must be paid.

Zohran Mamdani, the presumed next New York City mayor based on polls and the fact that his only viable competition for the job had to resign as New York governor in disgrace, posted a statement on the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. You can see it above.

To his credit, the “Democratic-Socialist” (that is, communist) was crystal clear about who and what he is, and honest observers from both sides of the partisan divide have not been reluctant to react with appropriate disgust. (The statement should not come as any surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Mamdani, the latest example of a charismatic politician emulating Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957).

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Fact: The Axis Media Is Straight-Up Lying About The Justifications For Trump’s National Guard Use

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

They are doing it, in great part, because their favorite party is lying about it too.

Professor Turley was making the rounds this morning on news stations trying to explain that the Insurrection Act is ambiguous enough to support a President’s judgment that an “insurrection” is occurring in a state when the governor or a state legislature refuses to request such support, and send in the Guard on his own authority. The professor also pointed out that even if Trump were blocked from doing so in a state, he clearly has the power to use other states’ National Guard units in the state that is resisting, if the other states agree. The description of the sanctuary cities and states as engaging in neo-Confederate nullification is quite accurate.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, leading its fellow travelers in Orwellian spin, is doing its damnedest to back the incipient Stars and Bars. Here (gift link), a biased lawyer writes that “No, Trump Can’t Deploy Troops to Wherever He Wants.” How is that for a false framing? But the Times published it anyway. Unethical quote: “Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based on facts that they contrive?” Yeah, that scene above, where the Chicago police deliberately stood down, was “contrived.”

Then we have this consequentialist argument: “In 2020, Trump Intervened in Portland’s Protests. They Got Even Worse.” First, how do “protests” get “worse”? They were riots. Second, the mess in Portland didn’t involve attacks on Federal law enforcement and defiance of Federal law. Third, the Mongo Principle (No, don’t use force, it will only make him mad) is not a valid approach to law enforcement.

CBS Staff Freaks Out Over An Exiled NYT Moderate Being Placed in Charge of CBS

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

CBS’s new owners have bought The Free Press and are putting its founder, rebel New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, in charge of the news division. Weiss fled the Times with a manifesto condemning her former employer for unethical progressive bias, which, of course, was an accurate assessment. If you have read or listened to Weiss you know that she is a Democrat and a liberal/progressive, just one who does try to keep her biases from tainting her reporting (though not always succeeding).

She is the best that any reasonable person can expect from today’s rotting journalism; it is a field that has disproportionately attracted those from the left end of the political spectrum for more than a century. Journalism ethics demanded that practitioners concentrate on objectivity, but that goal has been almost entirely jettisoned by “advocacy journalism,” which is a euphemism for “Leftist propaganda.” To her credit, Weiss strives to be what journalists are supposed to be: honest, fair and trustworthy.

The fact that CBS staffers are reportedly furious and frightened that a real journalist like Weiss will be their new boss should tell you all you need to know about CBS, and, by extension, broadcast news generally.

Here’s the funniest section of the Independent’s report on the matter:

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Incident at a Law School Reunion or “The Disturbing Arrogance of the Political Left”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is one of the big reunion years for my law school class, and I just returned from a very nice luncheon featuring members of my class and older. The new Dean spoke, and during a question and answer period, a strident woman, an alumna, stood up and asked the dean what the school and its alumni association were planning to do to “stand up for the rule of law” and “democratic principles” during the current “crisis.” As usual, the “current crisis” is an elected President who does not approve of or want to continue policies near and dear to leftist hearts.

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Zohran Mamdani Isn’t Necessarily Wrong About Everything: NYC’s Gifted and Talented Program

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Zohran Mamdani, the”Democratic-Socialist” (aka. Communist) who will be the next mayor of New York City, says he will end the gifted and talented program in elementary schools, and conservatives “pounced” on the news, arguing that this is a frontal attack on Asian-Americans who voted for him in the primary.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, not quite a Communist but married to one, announced his intentions in 2021 to phase out the gifted program for elementary schools, which has been accused of exacerbating segregation. The students qualifying for the program are substantially made up of Asians and whites, with Hispanics and black “under-represented” according to their percentage of the demographics. But unless you are a DEI nut case, it makes no sense to assign seats in an academically-gifted program by race, color or creed.

Under Mamdani’s plan, students who are in gifted classes now would remain in the program, but there would be no gifted program for kindergartners next fall, effectively terminating the program for the future.

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A Popeye: A Trump Derangement Note That I Have to Mention…[Corrected and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several readers have sent me this insane, hysterical post by a guy who claims to be “middle of the road” and it caused me to pledge not to keep posting on Trump Deranged outbursts: there are too many of them, they are embarrassing, and it doesn’t change anything. Then I see a post by an old freind, a tenured history professor at a major U.S. university, in which he writes, “106 years ago today (i.e., 02 Oct 1919), President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke. His wife Edith essentially took over running the White House for the rest of is term. The 25th Amendment was still 48 years away in the future. No particular reason for mentioning the 25th Amendment right now…”

You mean now as opposed to during the previous four years, when this same scholar saw no reason to make a comparison with Wilson when it was screamingly obvious that the President really was cognitively disabled and needed to be removed?

Of course this objective, trustworthy “expert” detected no parallels with Wilson while POTUS shambled around, got disoriented and had his wife handling him like a member of Visiting Angels, but now, as his successor displays staggering amounts of energy and purpose not just for a man his age but for anyone of any age (the correct parallel isn’t Wilson but Teddy Roosevelt), a credentialed historian thinks he can’t do the job, and that an elected President should be removed from office as “disabled.”

Translation: “Disabled”= “Not a Democrat.”

Trump won’t do the job the way that the batty American Left wants him to do it. That’s all.

I need some spinach…

Ethics Hero: Animal Care Centers of New York City

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Finding its facilities with a surplus of pit bull breeds and pit bull mixes to find homes for, the Animal Care Centers of New York City hit on a creative solution. It released a video that opens with “We’ve never seen this many doodles at our shelter before.” What follows is a series of photos and video clips of “doodles” that are really obvious pit bull mixes wearing curly wigs.

“Doodles,” for the dog-challenged, refers to the popular designer breeds and other mixes of non-poodle dog breeds with poodles, usually creating digs with hypoallergenic coats. Labradoodles are poodles crossed with Labrador Retrievers, Sheepadoodles are English Sheep Dog-poodle mixes, and Golden Doodles, the most popular of all, are poodles bred with Golden Retrievers.

The video mocks the “doodles” craze while also placing their much maligned (and unjustly so) pit bulls and pit bull mixes in a benign light. And mirabale dictu, it worked! Families who never would have considered adopting a pit bull type dogs came to the shelter and did so, and the staff at the shelters believe that the video is being widely circulated, helping to dispel the wide-spread fear of and bias against these loving, sweet tempered dogs perpetuated by ignorant anti-pit bigots.

Spuds approves.