Character

Rachel Maddow’s Self-Indicting Message on MSNBC’s Firing Joy Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Maddow told us all we should need to know…. about Maddow…with this outburst:

“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”

All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.

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The YouGov. Poll: Maybe Americans Are Just Too Stupid and Unethical For Democracy to Survive After All…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

All research indicates that the majority of Americans, not having the IQ’s of Pet Rocks, recognize that our bloated government is corrupt, inept and wasteful. Pew Research polling concluded that 56% of Americans felt that way last year. “Nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials, stated another survey. In January, A.P.-NORC researchers found that 70% of Americans believe corruption in the federal government is a serious problem.

Despite these beliefs, only 39 % of Americans polled gave DOGE a “favorable” rating in the latest The Economist/YouGov poll, with”unfavorable” at 36%, and the human slugs who chose “don’t know” came in at a whopping 25%. Another poll this month found only 49% approving DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts.

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Musk’s Email

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

There are many others, but two tells the Trump Deranged on my Facebook feed are displaying symptomatic of their malady are the ridiculous obsession with the name change to “Gulf of America,” and most recently, Elon Musk’s email to the Federal workforce.

Yesterday Musk tweeted out, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” And as night follows day, this email from Allan Smith was delivered as promised:

“Subject: What did you do last week?” “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”

Echoing my bizarre Facebook friends, Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent out a ludicrous statement that read: “It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life. Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”

This should go into the “Methinks he doth protest too much!” Hall of Fame. As has become all-too familiar, the lazy resorting to ad hominem insults, the certifiably ignorant emphasis on an agent of the President being “unelected,” and the juvenile working class hero smear of a man who has strengthened and benefited his country and its citizens by his industry, boldness and public mindedness are all throbbing evidence of desperation. But throwing a fit because workers are asked to list five things they accomplished on the job in a week?

I doubt that I have ever had a week in my spectacularly varied, eccentric and often failed career when I couldn’t do that. Today is a Sunday. I can list three substantive work-related accomplishments on this single day, and I feel like I didn’t meet my self-identified goals.

If there is a principled, reasonable, logical reason to find that email threatening, demeaning or unfair, I’d love to know what it is.

Municipal Government Ethics Follies [Clarified]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you think the Federal and state governments have major ethics culture problems? Municipal governments say “Hold my beer!”

1. The city with the deadest ethics alarms in the U.S.? It might be Quincy, Florida…

Quincy hired Robert Nixon as its city manager. Now Quincy Commissioner Beverly Nash has called on the city commission to terminate Nixon, alleging the city violated its own guidelines and possibly state law by hiring him. Why, you well may ask?

Nixon had pleaded guilty to charges of embezzling government funds and served 21 months in prison. The 2010 criminal case was brought after Nixon and an accomplice schemed to pocket $134,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development grant money meant for Tallahassee-area small businesses. Nixon was the director of Florida A&M University’s urban policy institute when he stole from a grant fund-holding account at Florida A&M Federal Credit Union, where his co-defendant was president. The two tried to disguise withdrawals as consulting and administrative fees. They got caught red-handed.

Quincy has a population of about 8,000 and is located at the center of Gadsden County. “Technically we have gone astray and violated our own policies and procedures,” Nash said during a city commission meeting. “When adherence to policy slowly erodes, what is left? Wrong becomes right. The lines and boundaries are missing and blurred.”

The controversy is bogged down in a technical debate over whether or not it is illegal for Quincy to hire a convicted felon who has not had his right to hold official office restored. You can read the details of that irrelevancy here. It doesn’t matter whether Quincy can hire someone who had embezzled government fund as its city manager. Whether the city can or not, it is incompetent, irresponsible and stupid to do so. This is signature significance on metaphorical steroids. Nixon, predictably, is full of talk about redemption and second chances. “I had a debt to society and I paid it. I think it’s important that there is a pathway forward for people with felonies who want a second chance,” Nixon says. Sure there is a pathway: that path begins somewhere the felon does not have opportunities to steal his employer’s money.

The reality is this: nobody who is trustworthy embezzles government funds once or ever. Maybe a city could justify hiring a contrite former embezzler as its city manager after every candidate in the country who has not embezzled cash perishes from some China-planted ethics plague. Absent that unlikely scenario, the hiring is indefensible.

Here’s my favorite part of this astounding story: The Quincy city attorney was one of Nixon’s defense lawyers in the embezzlement case.

2. Oh no, flags again…

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I LOVE This Unethical Quote of the Eon From LA Mayor Karen Bass!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“No one said you shouldn’t have gone on a trip.”

—Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in a local TV interview, explaining why she  flew to Ghana as the disastrous wildfires in her city had already started.

In addition to being a spectacularly desperate excuse for irresponsible and incompetent conduct, Mayor Bass’s statement is such a poor use of the English language that it is almost undecipherable. What she was trying to say is that nobody told her not to leave the city she is supposedly in charge of running to go on a junket to Africa as a life-and-death threat loomed.

Still, isn’t that statement great? First, it’s an easy Unethical Quote of—what, the month? The year? The millennium? Second, it is the equivalent of wearing a blinking neon sign that reads, “I am an incompetent!” as if the residents of her city that have two brain cells to rub together haven’t figured that out yet. Third, it’s a rationalization so desperate, impotent and moronic that one has to be about six to try it. (And yes, I must add “Bass’s Lament” to the list.) Let’s see:

Ken Lay, asked why he oversaw the Enron scam: “Nobody told me not to!”

Lance Armstrong, asked why he used banned doping techniques to win all those races: “Nobody told me not to!”

Richard Nixon, asked why he allowed the Watergate cover-up: “Nobody told me not to!”

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, asked why he organized the attack on Pearl Harbor: “Nobody told me not to!”

Bass’s excuse works for serial killers, rapists, cheating spouses, arsonists, and playground bullies. It’s so versatile!

The context of Bass’s instant classic was a recent interview on LA’s Fox 11 in which she explained Bass explained that the Biden administration asked her to go to the Ghana to represent the U.S. “It was going to be a very short trip – over a weekend and two business days.” Now, she told the outlet, she is mounting an investigation into why she was MIA when the city needed leadership most. We need to look at everything about the preparation and all of that for the fires… I think when we evaluate that, we will find that although there were warnings – that I frankly wasn’t aware of.” “I think our preparation wasn’t what it typically is,” the mayor continued, apparently unaware of the axiom, “When you are in a hole, stop digging.”  “That level of preparation really didn’t happen. If it had, I wouldn’t even have gone to San Diego, let alone leave the country…it didn’t reach that level to me.”

If you are wondering whether there is any chance that voters in single-party California will reconsider their knee-jerk political affiliations after the horrible performance of Bass, considered a star on the Democratic Party’s representatives of-color Congressional team (she was on Biden’s short list to be Vice-President), the answer is probably not, in part because Bass’s apparent unawareness of the concept of “accountability” is barely being publicized. I had to learn of it from the British tabloid “The Daily Mail.”

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Pointer: Old Bill

Tough Call: Who Is the Greater Ethics Dunce, David Hogg or the Democrats Who Elected Him Vice-Chair of the DNC? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

David Hogg, had he not been a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a mass shooting occurred, might have grown up to be a useful, ethical, productive and emotionally healthy human being. Unfortunately, he is likely to be a lifetime victim of the shooting, for it propelled him into the career path of being a professional single-issue fanatic, America’s Greta Thunberg but on the issue of gun control rather than climate change. In an example of the chaos PTSD can wreak on the vulnerable, Hogg has been transformed into a cynical grifter by a mass-murderer’s bullets. It’s tragic, but that doesn’t mean his unethical conduct should be tolerated, much less rewarded.

Barely two weeks after his election as a Democratic National Committee official, Hogg began using DNC contact lists to solicit donations to his own political action committee, “Leaders We Deserve.” That PAC pays his salary of more than $100,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission records. “David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one the texts he sent out to the DNC’s vast database. The texts include a link to his PAC.

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A “Don’t Trust China, China Is Asshole” Classic!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Chengdu Snow Village project in the Sichuan province in southwestern sought to attract tourists over the Lunar New Year holiday by promoting its property as a “winter wonderland,” showing photos of thick, gleaming white snow covering the grounds and the roofs of its cabins. When the tourists arrived, however, the “snow” they saw was obviously puffs of cotton, plastic, beds sheets and other white camouflage. One structure was covered in what looked like bedding material with visible staples.

The Snow Village issued an apology on social media blaming warm weather in the region. No, the warm weather wasn’t the problem. The problem was and is the complete breakdown in societal and cultural ethics in China, a direct result of Mao’s “cultural revolution” that induced the nation’s full embrace of Orwellian government alternate realities in the 20th Century. In 2020, as political correctness censors sought tp protect China from its accountability for the world pandemic, a Hong Kong protester summed up the ethical status of China with the memorable quote, “Don’t trust China….China is asshole! ”

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Unethical Tweet of the Month: CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Could we possibly have more irresponsible, untrustworthy, detestable broadcast journalists than we have now?

CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins supported the assassin of UnitedHealthCEO Brian Thompson in the “Twitter/X” post above, directing readers to a site set up by the shooter’s lawyer that featured a prominent link to a GoFundMe for the murderer’s defense. Luigi Mangione, who strains the use of the term “alleged” as he was caught on camera shooting the victim in the back and arrested with incriminating evidence on his person has become the darling of the sickest of the sick among progressives. Leftists ranging from Elizabeth Warren to the most unhinged of my Facebook friends have rationalized Mangione’s cowardly crime as “understandable.” “You can only push people so far. And then they start to take matters into their own hands,” slimed Warren (BOY she’s horrible!) Mangione faces charges of first-degree murder in furtherance of an act of terrorism.

After the disgusting tweet attracted appropriate criticism ( “This is @CNN — pimping the GoFundMe for a left wing assassin,” tweeted Ace of Spades, completely accurately) Collins took it down–this is known as “subsequent repairs” in negligence law—and then employed manifest deceit to defend herself. “In no way did I share a fundraising link for him,” she protested.

No, she posted a link to a website that had the fundraising link displayed at the top of its page. Her claim that the fact the website existed was “newsworthy” does not explain or excuse her promoting it on social media. Jorge Bonilla on Newsbusters rightly asks what the reaction would have been to a Fox News journalist who posted the address of a site that linked to a GoFundMe for J-6 rioters.

The Trump White House has opened the long overdue debate over whether openly biased, partisan, unprofessional and untrustworthy journalists should continue to have press credentials at White House briefings. I would expand that discussion to whether people like Kaitlan Collins should be recognized as journalists at all.

In the Rear-View Mirror: “Reflections On President’s Day, 2012: A United States Diminished in Power, Influence and Ideals”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On President’s Day in 2012, I wrote a dispirited assessment of where the United States stood regarding spreading American ideals and values to other nations. This was in the context of Barack Obama’s feckless foreign policy, which, as with his puppet stand-in later, Joe Biden, consisted of threats and warnings (remember Obama’s “red line” in Syria?) without credibility of resolve. I thought about the post as I was contemplating how J.D. Vance was getting mockery and criticism from the Axis because he exhorted our allies in Europe to begin a new commitment to freedom of speech.

The main thrust of the essay was the question of whether the United States should be “the world’s policeman,” a situation that now has fallen into ethics zugzwang: it is irresponsible for the U.S. not to accept the role of world policeman, and irresponsible for us to accept it either.

“Quite simply, we can’t afford it,” I wrote. “Not with a Congress and an Administration that appear unwilling and unable to confront rising budget deficits and crushing debt with sensible tax reform and unavoidable entitlement reductions.” I found the 13-year old post useful and thought provoking for perspective purposes. It raised many questions. Is the U.S. better off today than in 2012, when I was so depressed about its prospects and integrity? What does it mean to “make Amerca great again” in 2025?

I’ll have some more 2025 thoughts at the end. Here is the rest of that post:

***

Yesterday Congress and the President passed yet another government hand-out of money it doesn’t have and refuses to raise elsewhere, among other things continuing to turn unemployment insurance, once a short-term cushion for job-seekers, into long-term government compensation for the unemployed. Part of the reckless debt escalation was caused by the last President [George W. Bush] unconscionably engaging in overseas combat in multiple theaters without having the courage or sense  to insist that the public pay for it. The current administration [the Obama Administration] is incapable of grasping that real money, not just borrowed funds, needs to pay for anything. The needle is well into the red zone on debt; we don’t have the resources for any discretionary military action.

Ron Paul thinks that’s a good thing, as do his libertarian supporters. President Obama, it seems, thinks similarly. They are tragically wrong. Though it is a popular position likely to be supported by the fantasists who think war can just be wished away, the narrowly selfish who think the U.S. should be an island fortress, and those to whom any expenditure that isn’t used to expand  cradle-to-grave government care is a betrayal of human rights, the abandonment of America’s long-standing world leadership in fighting totalitarianism, oppression, murder and genocide is a catastrophe for both the world and us. Continue reading →

So Apparently “Dick” Is The Newly Approved Axis Term For Trump Allies. Interesting!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Democrats are apparently seeking the youth vote by talking like vulgar teenagers. Hey, it might work!

I noted that Anderson Cooper, without any serious objection from his employers, CNN, called guest Chris Sununu a “dick” on live TV. Now Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Ca.) has escalated by calling Elon Musk a “dick” during a House hearing on DOGE, aka. the Department of Government Efficiency. Then he went on CNN to smugly defend his uncivil conduct with a string of rationalizations. (Incidentally: talk about “punchable faces!”)

During the hearing, Garcia noted that the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had displayed Hunter Biden’s “dick pics” at a July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing: “I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Greene, is in charge of running this committee. Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well.”

Garcia showed a photo of Musk in a tuxedo. Musk is a dick, get it? Then he launched into the current ad hominem talking points the Axis is using to denigrate Trump’s waste, fraud and abuse delegate.

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