“bias makes you stupid”

A Poll, More Headline Deceit, And “What’s Going On Here?”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It begins with the prototypical “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” decision by ABC News to bury the lede with a deceptive headline in an effort to minimize Joe Biden’s botching of his White House tenure. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll had resulted in a stunning move away from Biden to Trump, showing the latter with a landslide level 51-42 lead if the 2024 election were held today. ABC’s headline: “Troubles for Biden not just his age in reelection campaign: POLL.”

This is a now common tool of the fake news game for those with the integrity to call it what it is: deceitful headlining to hide news that the media wants as little noticed as possible. The defensive rejoinder is always, “Oh, but that’s just the headline!”, but much of the public only skims the news and thus never sees more than the headlines of most stories. ABC News knows it, and when there have been stories that it (or other MSM propagandists for the Democrats) deems unhelpful to the cause, it uses this trick if not one of the other ones, like not reporting the story at all. Since this was ABC’s own poll, that one wasn’t an option.

Sure, the poll spelled “troubles” for Biden rather than just his age, as if anyone paying attention thought being old was the main problem with President Biden. But that’s not what the poll results indicate: they indicate that the public realizes that Biden has been a disaster as POTUS, and are pulling away from him at an accelerating rate. Bad polls affect party confidence, enthusiasm, morale and donations: that’s why most pollsters, who tend to be biased toward the Left like the media organizations that hire them, tend to skew poll results against Republicans. The honest headline for this poll would have been what was significant about it: “HOLY CRAP, A POLL RUN BY ABA AND THE POST STILL SHOWED TRUMP CLOBBERING BIDEN IN 2024! ARRRGH!!!” except that ABC’s partisan hacks didn’t want that to be the reaction in Trump Derangement Land.

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Saturday Morning Wake-Up (2): A Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck Update

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

1. I’ll introduce this by noting that an American Research Group poll found that public approval of President Biden’s handling of his job has fallen to just 39%.

Of the 39% of Americans saying they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, 65% say they expect the national economy will be better a year from now. (They are whistling past the graveyard.) Of the 56% saying they disapprove of the way Biden his handling his job as president, 71% believe the national economy will be worse a year from now. Why wouldn’t it be?

Of Republicans polled, just 3% approve of the way Biden is handling his job. 34% of Independents approve, but 80% of Democrats actually told another human being that they approve like the way Biden is running his Presidency because every thing is going so well. That’s incompetent citizenship. One can still be a Democrats and be able to honestly assess a disaster when a Democrat is at the helm of the Ship of State, can’t you? Talk about cult-like behavior.

2. Here’s a more encouraging poll, sort of: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey found that nearly three-quarters ,72%, of voters believe that “America is becoming a police state” under Biden. Rasmussen defined “police state” as “a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents.” Targeting of political opponents? Why would anyone think that?

(Yes, I’m going to work that reference to Biden’s ‘anyone who opposes my party and government is a fascist and danger to democracy’ speech every chance I get. Lest we forget.…)

Republicans led the way with 76% expressing fears of totalitarian trends under Biden, but Democrats were not far behind at 67%. Combining the two polls, one can only conclude that a large number of Democrats like the fact that Biden is overseeing a developing police state. And I think that’s a correct impression.

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Unethical Quote, Column And Mind Of The Month: NYT Pundit Michelle Goldberg

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Apparently this is going to be Unethical New York Times Op-ed Columnist Day. First David Brooks proves beyond all question that he’s an asshole, and now Michelle Goldberg pulls ahead in the neck-and-neck race to be the most outrageously left-biased writer in the Times stable (“And as they round the turn, it’s Paul Krugman in front, with Charles Blow coming up fast on the inside…”) by ending her column attacking retiring Fox News creator Rupert Murdoch with this:

“The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault….”

Only a committed and ethics-free leftist propaganda agent who is confident that her readers are Marxists or morons could squeeze out such offal. Oh, I’m sure Goldberg believes this, which is scary in itself: the disgusting thing is that a publication that imagines itself as the flagship of American journalism would deem such a “bias makes you stupid” outburst as worthy of publication.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring, Or Are Busted, Or Something: The Palm Springs AIDS Memorial

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Damn Palm Springs, California: I was about to quit for the day, but I had to return to the blog for this ridiculous story.

The Palm Springs AIDS Memorial Task Force is now backtracking after revealing its preliminary choice for a memorial to the victims of AIDS. The memorial is being funded privately with an expected cost of approximately $500,000. After considerable study, the winning design, planned for erection (Stop it!) in the Downtown Park near the Marilyn Monroe statue is a nine feet tall limestone structure with concentric carved circles, symbolizing, we are told, “the diverse impact of AIDS on the community” and ” intended to evoke feelings of connection, reflection, and hope.”

It also looks a lot like an anus. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

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Ethics Hero: Blogger Ann Althouse, Anti-Trump Derangement And Media Bias Warrior

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I doubt that Ann Althouse would ever vote for Donald Trump; I’m pretty sure she hasn’t yet. But the longtime liberal law prof-blogger from Madison has distinguished herself and enhanced her respect in my eyes by consistently debunking anti-Trump bias from the news media while pronouncing her disgust with its hypocrisy and unfairness. Her reward has been to end up with a commentariat that is much more conservative than she is, but Althouse continues to be a Trump Truthteller (try to say that three times fast). She had a particularly impressive day yesterday.

First, Ann threw a flag on Washington Post pundit Aaron Rupar’s “How not to interview Trump/Kristen Welker’s tenure as ‘Meet the Press’ moderator got off to an inauspicious start. I only maintain a Post subscription to read articles others send me too: essentially I’ve boycotted the rag as too biased and obviously partisan to trust. His thesis is emboied in the excerpt Ann selected:

“The first thing to understand about Trump is that he’s not a normal politician. He doesn’t give a rip about policy. What he cares about is saying and doing whatever it takes to fulfill his desires and thirst for power, including destroying democracy if necessary. Treating him as anything other than a depraved authoritarian is not only wrongheaded, but helps his cause by legitimizing him as a reasonable choice for voters. And that’s exactly what Welker did.”

Boy, do I hate that attitude toward anyone. I’ve detested it regarding Trump since he was elected, and I resented other people treated that same way my entire life. It is bigotry and bias plain and unvarnished: someone chooses to decide, without genuine evidence, that an individual is just bad to the bone, with evil motives, and anything he or she does is thereafter interpreted in that context. This is how Trump was judged guilty until proven innocent in the Russian collusion hoax. It is the exact mindset that led people to back his first impeachment for doing exactly what many Presidents had doubtlessly done before him; it was the reasoning behind the second impeachment as well: Yeah, nothing he said indicating he was telling his wacko followers to state a violent “insurrection,” but you know that’s what he wanted them to do, because that’s the kind of person he is.

Althouse strikes back,

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Comment Of The Day: “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m pretty sure EA has touched on the topic of anti-male student discrimination by teachers in grade school, but not recently and not often enough, because it is a serious cultural and societal problem. The Atlantic wrote about “The War Against Boys” in 2000 before it became a complete propaganda vehicle for radical wokism—I wonder if such an essay would get published today?

2000—let’s see, that was right around the time my wife and I started becoming aware of how normal little boys were being expected to act like good little girls in school, as our authority-resisting, intrepid and energetic son was being routinely abused by boy-hating teachers to such an extent that he was permanently alienated from formal education. The finger gun nonsense is symptomatic of the trend, and crella makes the connection in this, the Comment of the Day on the post, “That Bomb ‘Finger Gun’ Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??”

Here it is….

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Is It Unethical To Laugh, Mock And Applaud As “Sanctuary Cities” Define The Bard’s Phrase “Hoist With His Own Petard”?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

No, of course not. In fact, it’s mandatory, necessary, and appropriate. Everyone knew, or should have know, that the progressive, woke, Democratic grandstanders who undermined U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law by announcing that their cities would not cooperate in the enforcement of immigration laws were irresponsible fool, indeed (sorry) destructive assholes all along. (Anyone who voted for such officials are also irresponsible assholes, just to get the accountability aligned,) Now, however, we know that they know they are assholes, and have to behave in a manner that exposes to all what assholes they are. This is great.

The utter hypocrisy of mayors and governors declaring their love for illegal immigrants as long as most of them arrived and stayed in cities along the Southern borders was exposed when governors of states overrun by what the news media calls “migrants” to hide their problematic and illegal features have sent busloads and plane-loads of the them to cities like New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Suddenly, the “sanctuaries,” which were so compassionate and welcoming as long as there were few negative consequences of their facile lip-service were not so understanding.

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Addendum To The Democratic Porn-For-Pay Virginia House Candidate Story

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Several news media sources have now reported that the Associated Press was informed about Susanna Gibson and her husband selling sexual perversions-on-demand via videos on the public porn site Chaturbate. A candidate for a state legislature seeking compensation for letting an audience see her urinate, perhaps on said husband (just to pick one possible videoed activity) is obviously both newsworthy and of legitimate interest to voters (despite the absurd line of defense now taken by Gibson, her defenders and her party), but the AP’s editors deliberately refused to report on it. Instead, the AP alerted Gibson that the secret of the videos was out, so she could take them down, which she did. This was on September 5.

The outlet then waited until September 12, after the scandal had been reported by others, including the Washington Post, to report it as news. Nice.

Observations:

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Don’t Kid Yourself: This Unethical Quote Of The Month From MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah Is More Indicative Of Where The Left Is Headed That You’d Like To Think…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“I think Donald Trump MUST die in prison…because either we’re going to protect the Democratic Republic or we’re going to allow people, in this case Trump to chip away at our democracy and chip away at what we believe in these institutions.”

That was Dean Obeidallah, long an extreme deranged leftist featured on the air and on the web by MSNBC (because extreme deranged leftists are the only alleged journalists and pundits that MSNBC deems worthy of a public platform), confirming again the totalitarian impulses of Democrats and the progressives of 2023. In an interview with Mediaite’s most left-biased reporter, Obeidallah ranted in part,

Trump MUST die in prison because I don’t care if he was 45 years old, you should get life in prison if you attempt a coup, and there should be no chance of parole. I don’t care who it is….That’s why I’m so passionate about, like with every fiber of my being, that Donald Trump has to live out his natural days, his last days of natural life in a prison cell…….And people accuse me like, oh, you say things that get people riled up like, nope, I or get what you said. I get organically riled up about this because I believe in this system. And, and if you don’t believe in it, so be it. But if you believe in it, I don’t think there’s any conclusion could bring that. Donald Trump has to end up in a prison cell and live his last days out in that prison cell.

In those three dots, Obeidallah claimed that the riot at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” which is legal, factual and linguistical nonsense, and that’s what he thinks Donald Trump should be locked up for without a chance of parole. I’ve instructed my family that if I ever say anything that stupid in private they should bash in my head with a brick, and Obeidallah is paid by MSNBC for to give that level of ignorant, hysterical, inflammatory and irresponsible commentary over the air. I guess I owe Tucker Carlson a mea culpa: I thought he was too much of a demagogue to be allowed on TV. Continue reading →

That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With “Finger Gun 4”??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,

The NBC story concentrates on  “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”

But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,

The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.

I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.

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