“bias makes you stupid”

On Qatar, Air Force One, And the Lying News Media

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Another week, another fake news story designed to undermine President Trump.

I must say, I admire the New York Times headline: “Trump is said to be planning to accept a luxury 747 from Qatar for use as Air Force One.” You see, “Trump” isn’t getting a 747 from the Middle Eastern Arab nation at all. The United States is. But, see, “Trump” is said to be getting the gift by Democrats and slimy journalists, so that’s the news. But people lying about what the President does isn’t news, it’s SOP, so why would this be worth a story? In fact, the headline only tells us someone or someones are saying that Trump is planning to accept the gift. That’s another one of my favorite kinds of fake news: psychic fake news, with the sources being unknown “sayers.”

ABC’s Jonathan Karl tweeted out a perfect example of how the news media distorts the news by manipulating the context. He tweeted yesterday,

“ABC EXCLUSIVE: President Trump is poised to accept a luxury jet as a gift from Qatar. It’s to be used as Air Force One and then transferred to the Trump library by January 2029. Perhaps the biggest foreign gift ever. DOJ insists it’s legal, not bribery, not violation of emoluments clause.”

Let’s see: the President will be accepting the jet on behalf of the nation, as Presidents do. The DOJ doesn’t have to “insist” that it’s not bribery, not illegal and not a violation of the [dead, inapplicable and never enforced] Emoluments Clause, because gifts to the U.S. are not personal gifts to the President, are legal, are not bribery, and the Emoluments Clause, one of the Axis’s Big Lie impeachment theories [Plan C], “has nothing to do with the price of beans,” as my father liked to say. Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8 of the Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from receiving any gift, payment, or other thing of value from a foreign state or its rulers, officers, or representatives without Congressional approval. Again, Trump personally isn’t being given anything.

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Yes, My Conservative Facebook Friends Can Be Just As Irrational As the Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A usually wise and measured conservative Facebook friend posted with approval a tweet by conservative pundit Matt Walsh, complaining about the father of a 15-year-old school shooter who killed two people and injured six others being charged after the tragedy. The killings (the girl shot herself as well, and died) occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December.

“Let’s just be honest about the pattern here,” Walsh wrote. “This is the third time that a parent has been charged for violence committed by their child. In every case, the parent has been white. There is violence committed in the streets of every major city every single day. You could blame the crappy, neglectful parents in literally all of those cases. And yet none of them have ever been charged.”

Wow, talk about the wrong hill to die on! Both of those other cases involved criminally negligent parents, and the father of the late shooter in Wisconsin may have been the worst of the three.

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So….the Cardinals Couldn’t Find a Pope Who WASN’T Part of the Predator Priest Scandal? [UPDATED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Good to know, don’t you think?

I’m stunned that Robert Prevost, who just became became the American pontiff, had been accused by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) of failing to act upon allegations of abuse in the U.S. and Peru. The group says that Prevost ignored allegations of sexual abuse by predator priests in Chicago after Augustinian priest Father James Ray was allowed to live at the St. John Stone Friary in Hyde Park despite being removed from ministering to the public over credible evidence that he had sexually abusing children. SNAP says Provost didn’t notify the heads of St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic school, an elementary school half a block from the friary on the grounds that Ray was being “closely monitored.”

You know, like the Church closely monitored all of its priests to make sure they weren’t molesting altar boys.

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Yes, Actors Who Refuse to Perform With Trump In The Audience Should Be Blacklisted

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Grennell is absolutely, 100% correct. For actors to withhold their talents and services from an entire audience because they may have ideological differences with a member of that audience (or many) is unforgivably unprofessional and a breach of ethics deserving punishment, condemantion and shunning.

Howard Sherman, an author and critic whose existence I had been blissfully unaware of before this day, issued an insufferable essay on Facebook that naturally my many show biz friends, Trump Deranged all, rushed to share and applaud. The post is as nauseating as it is overlong and unethical: I read it so you don’t have to, but here are some lowlights to “How the Blacklisting Starts.”

See, he’s saying that an industry deciding that members who are unethical and refuse to do their jobs is the same as an industry putting members on a blacklist for their political beliefs, as Hollywood did to Communist sympathizers during the McCarthy era, and asd Hollywood does now to conservatives (like, say, James Woods). That’s bonkers, and exactly backwards. It is the misguided artists linking their art to political views who are emulating those blacklisters of yore. I’ll pick out some of the more pernicious misrepresentations in Sherman’s post… Continue reading →

I Think It’s Admirable That the Pulitzers Are So Transparent About Their Blatant Partisan Bias, Don’t You?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The announcement of the Pulitzer prizes were broadcast live on the organization’s website, and what everyone should be able to agree was the photo of the year was snubbed. That, of course, is the second photo above, shot by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press and generally appreciated as a masterpiece of composition, story-telling and drama. But, of course, the photo is alao widely believed to have helped Donald Trump get elected President, so by definition the photo is bad, and must not be honored. Another photo related to the assassination attempt, the first one above taken by Doug Mills, won the prize instead. After all, that one had the good people thinking ruefully, “Damn. Missed him by that much!”

The snubbed photo will be in history books and regarded as one of the most memorable moments captured on film, along with the GI kissing the nurse in Times Square, Harry Truman holding up the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, the naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, and the Frenchman weeping as Hitler’s army swept down a Paris street. An angry Monica Showalter writes at American Thinker,

The picture turned up on t-shirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it….But it was hardly propaganda — it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding….I have no inside line on why this photo didn’t win the Pulitzer, despite being so deserving of it. Did the AP not promote it, or did the Pulitzer board shun it, on what could only be political grounds? Either way, it’s a disgrace. The photo had Pulitzer written all over it, and the judges could only view the thing through wokester-impaired eyes.

As for me, I an neither disappointed nor surprised, not after this now thoroughly corrupt organization awarded a Pulitzer prize for the racist, fake history lesson of “The 1619 Project.” In truth I am impressed: the deliberate decision to ignore such a deserving photo says to all, “Yes, the Pulitzers are partisan and politically biased. We don’t care. In fact, we’re proud. Suck it!”

Thanks for your candor. We get the message.

The Latest Evidence That However Much Contempt You Have For Harvard, It’s Not Enough….

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:

The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.

Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.

The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.

“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.

Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.

Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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Yecchh! Pooey! Instant Ethics Train Wreck In Minnesota…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Nothing but dunces, villains and fools in this tale….

1.Unethical catalyst: In Rochester, Minnesota, a state that has gone certifiably nuts, home of the George Floyd Freakout and a government headed by Knucklehead Tim Walz while voters send anti-Semitic Rep.”Fuck you!”Omar to Congress, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix was at the playground at Soldiers Field Park when she found a young black child looking through her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag. The kid is a nascent thief and needs more attentive parenting.

2. First identifiable unethical adult: Hendrix, who upon discovering the invasion of her personal property called the child a “nigger.” That’s signature significance in 2025—indeed at least since the 19th Century. She’s a low-life racist, a blight on society, and deserves to be shunned and reviled. To Hell with her.

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NYT Stockholm Syndrome Pundit David Brooks Finally Wrote Something Astute and Fair Regarding Trump, So Naturally My Trump-Deranged Friend Condemns Him For It

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Imagine the late James Earl Jones’ resonant bass intoning, “THIS is Trump Derangement!” and you have the perfect backdrop for my depressing story.

A retired lawyer of great accomplishments and gravitas has recently erupted into repeated anti-Trump/anti-Republican rants on Facebook. I consider him a good freind and generally a wise one—and he’s a passionate baseball fan!—so it pains me to read this sad evidence of mental and ethical deterioration. His most recent screed began with a declaration that he now detests David Brooks. As the Ethics Alarms Brooks dossier vividly shows, there are plenty of reasons to detest Brooks, an obnoxious and arrogant conservative in his Daily Standard days, and now a sell-out who accepted the dishonest role as a token non-progressive propagandist on the New York Times opinion page and quickly “cut the cloth of his conscience to fit the fashion of the Times,” (to quote Lillian Hellman at the McCarthy hearings, except that when she said it, she used a small “t.”)

[Yikes! I just looked over my own collection of Brooks posts, and he’s even worse than I remembered. In October of 2023, for example, I nailed him for writing that President Biden was still sharp and capable though it was obvious then, a year before Biden’s debate babble-fest, that Joe was demented.]

But my learned, once rational friend wasn’t critical of Brooks for any of his lies and hypocrisy; he now detests Brooks because of this column, in which the pundit gives President Trump credit for something. It is a trait that I have also noted: Trump has amazing energy and drive, to the point of being indomitable. Brooks begins his column this way:

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The Significant Thing About The SCOTUS Oral Argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor Is That The Three Liberal Justices Were Too Biased To Recognize The Obvious…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…Which is that there are no good reasons at all to expose elementary-school-aged children to LGTBQ literature and propaganda. This is depressing. While the Supreme Court conservative Justices have shown themselves capable of ruling against extreme right-wing agenda items when the law dictates, the Three Progressive Sisters on the Court increasingly seem incapable of anything but lockstep wokism.

During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments last week regarding the case of a group of Maryland parents who sued Montgomery County (Maryland) to be able to pull their elementary-school-aged children out of instruction that includes LGBTQ themes, a clear majority of the Justices indicated that they had the better argument. That is that the local school board’s refusal to give them an opt-out violates the family’s religious beliefs and therefore their constitutional right to freely exercise their religion.

I find it annoying that the case has to rest on Freedom of Religion at all: why shouldn’t any parents be able to decide that they don’t want their children introduced to these topics before puberty, or exposed to indoctrination on subjects that only parents should handle, within the family?

The parents in the case include Tamer Mahmoud and Enas Barakat, who are Muslim, Melissa and Chris Persak, who are Roman Catholic, and Svitlana and Jeff Roman, who are Ukrainian Orthodox and Roman Catholic. (Having some Scientologists and Evangelical Christians would have been nice…)

In 2023, the Montgomery County School Board in one of the most Democratic counties in the nation was flushed with the Democratic Party’s totalitarian vigor, and announced that it would no longer allow parents to excuse their children from instruction using LGBTQ-themed books. The parents argued in federal court that the board’s refusal to allow them to opt their children out violated their rights under the First Amendment to freely exercise their religion, since it stripped them of their ability to instruct their children on gender and sexuality and to control how and when their children are exposed to these issues. How radical of them!

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Oh-Oh! President Trump Violated Another Norm!

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Setting a new low in seeking reasons to criticize the President it and its readers love to hate, the New York Times devoted a full article (“Trump’s Blue Suit at Pope’s Funeral Draws Attention”) to President Trump’s choice of suit to wear to the Pope’s funeral. Get this:

President Trump, it seems, is fully committed to going his own way when it comes to international relations — even during the funeral of a pope. On Saturday, as he joined other world leaders to pay his respects to Pope Francis, he stood in St. Peter’s Square among President Emmanuel Macron of France (who was wearing black), Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain (in black), President Javier Milei of Argentina (in black) and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy (in black). Mr. Trump? He was wearing blue.
And not even dark, midnight blue, but a clear, sapphire-like blue, with matching tie. Amid all the black and Cardinal red, it popped out like a sign.
The choice did not grossly violate the dress code for the event (which reportedly called for a dark suit with a black tie for men). Prince William also appeared to be wearing blue, though a shade closer to navy, and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. wore a blue tie. But Mr. Trump’s look certainly skirted the edges.

Oh, bite me. Skirted what “edges?” This rates a Kaufman on Ethics Alarms. That is a situation where my concern about the controversy at hand equals George S. Kaufman’s famous description of how interested he was in the complaint by aging crooner Eddie Fisher (father of Carrie) that he was having trouble meeting and dating young women. The famous wit and playwright said (on a live panel TV show),

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