Character

The Despicable Non-Crime of Briana Augustenborg

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Alexander Jordan, 2002-2012

In US v. Alvarez, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 9th Circuit’s ruling that the Stolen Valor Act, which made it illegal to claim military honors that one has not in fact received, was unconstitutional. There is, the courts say, a Constitutional, First Amendment right to lie. Fraud—using lies for monetary profit, is already a crime, the courts argue, and so is slander. Making up stories about yourself and others may be unwise, annoying, even hurtful. Still, it is protected speech; so sayeth a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is now the law of the land.

This was a bad ruling, and I was surprised at it. Briana Augustenborg shows why.

One day this year she shared a story with a co-worker about a little 10-year-old boy she knew who was terminally ill with leukemia. The boy, Alex, was a big fan, she said, of Eagle Valley (Colorado) High School’s  football team. The colleague, a woman named Holly Sandoval, had a son that played on the team, and she offered to share the story with her son and get the team to sign a football for Alex. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Mitt Romney

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Mitt, Mitt, Mitt…

Ah, Mitt, Mitt. We know you’re disappointed. We know you don’t like to lose, especially when you feel smeared and misunderstood.We know its got to hurt.

There is only one way to lose a Presidential election, though, and it is to smile, say that the winner ran a tough campaign, that the people have spoken, that Americans are lucky to live in a democracy, and that’s it. Hell, Richard Nixon had this act down in 1960, when he lost to Mayor Daley, the Mob, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr, the Texas machine and JFK. He didn’t challenge the integrity of the process or the wisdom of the voters. He just resolved to fix his own Presidential election as soon as he had the chance.

But Mitt, for you to say, as you did yesterday, Continue reading →

A No Tolerance Rule For Cabinet Members: Don’t Threaten Reporters

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Intolerable.

I’ll make this simple, and get right to the point: any Cabinet member who threatens a reporter with physical violence for doing the job journalists are supposed to do should be fired. No exceptions. Moreover, that should be obvious and beyond debate.

Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, didn’t like a question he was asked by Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Philipps. The investigative reporter had tried to reach Salazar for months through his press secretary seeking a comment on a story Philipps had written about how a Colorado man with business connections to Salazar had been sold hundreds of federally protected wild horses that have subsequently vanished. The man is under investigation, and one of his businesses is slaughtering horses, not that any of this is germane to how Salazar treated Phillipps.  When Philipps began asking Salazar about the program and possible personal ties he had to the wild horse buyer now under investigation, Salazar abruptly ended the interview. He then pushed The Gazette’s camera aside, got nose to nose with the reporter, and said, pointing, “Don’t you ever…you know what, you do that again… I’ll punch you out.” Continue reading →

To The Un-American Secessionists

/ Jack Marshall / 170 Comments

Led by Texans, the White House is being deluged with petitions from all around the nation asking that various states be allowed to secede from the U.S. because the prospect of another four years of President Obama is so heinous. My immediate reaction is that this proves that conservatives are lazier than progressives, whose solution to a similar disappointment with parties reversed in 2004 was to pack up and move to Canada, or at least to make noises about it.  Conservatives apparently want to stay at home and leave the U.S.too. How convenient.

In 2004, when liberals and Democrats were acting like spoiled brats, I posted the following essay entitled “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy.” I think it is instructive to re-publish this post unedited to clarify what is wrong with the conservative tantrum of 2012. Oh, I could have changed “left” to “right,” Canada to Texas and Bush to Obama and Alec Baldwin to Ted Nugent, but it hardly seemed necessary, for my diagnosis and conclusions are exactly the same, just with a different group. It also seems prudent to leave the essay in its original form to remind smug liberals like Jon Stewart, now having a ball mocking Republicans, that Democrats disgraced themselves in a similar manner not that long ago. Being a hysteric, an alarmist, a bad citizen and a poor loser isn’t confined to members of one partisan group—it just seems that way at the moment. Now the conservatives are the silly people who are rejecting the principles of self-government that they were fervently  lecturing us about, because, you see, those principles didn’t work out their way…this time.

Here is “Escape to Canada and the Ethics of Democracy,” from The Ethics Scoreboard on November 17, 2004: Continue reading →

Gen. Allen, Lockheed, John Edwards, Restraint Bias,and Further Musings on the Petraeus-Broadwell Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

Run away!

In no particular order:

  • In a tack that is being duplicated by other commentators on the left, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow essentially pronounced the scandal as much ado about nothing (Columnist E.J. Dionne dismissively referred to Petraeus’s affair as his “little secret”). See, as long as an incident involves sex, the Left’s default position is that it can’t be that bad. Maddow mocked the actions of Jill Kelley, the woman who Broadwell threatened and who alerted the FBI, saying, “Who contacts the FBI because of threatening e-mails? If I did that, they would have to set up a special division just for me.” Ha ha.  How many of your threatening e-mails credibly suggested that the head of an intelligence agency was having an illicit affair with an unstable wacko, Rachel? Kelley did the responsible, intelligent thing given the possible national security implications. But it’s certainly good to know that you wouldn’t…because it’s only sex, of course.
  • Other pundits are complaining that the FBI became involved when what Petraeus did “wasn’t a crime.”  Yes,  it’s the “It’s legal” rationalization. Why people who can’t comprehend that dangerous, destructive, serious misconduct can occur without breaking any laws are allowed to write newspaper columns, I’ll never understand. Petraeus’s affair was a violation of the ethics rules, in an intelligence agency with major responsibilities in national security. That is serious, inherently dangerous, and easily could have led to security breaches that were illegal. If a leader materially, knowingly and publicly violates an ethics rule, he cannot lead. This is why Petraeus, who understands this, resigned, despite the certainty that the Rachel Maddows of the media would have been happy to shrug off his actions as “no big deal.” …because it’s only sex, and “it’s legal.”
  • Kelley still boarded the ethics train wreck, not because of her actions in response to Broadwell’s threat, but in light of the revelation that she was maintaining a hot e-mail relationship with Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The FBI has uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of primarily e-mails containing “potentially inappropriate” communication between Allen and Kelley. Wait, what? Between 20,000 and 30,000 pages? What the hell is going on with our generals? This is obsessive, unhealthy behavior, even if he’s just writing her limericks and recipes. Something is serious amiss in the ethical culture of the U.S. military leadership Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting “comments of the day” of late; it is not a reflection on comment quality, which has been excellent, but rather on my own distractions. Here is a new one at last, from new commenter Kathryn. It appeals to me because it nails the subtext of the original post, and like most Comments of the Day, takes the original topic to the next stage of analysis. I hope we hear more from her. Here is Kathryn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “The Idiot, the Ex, and the Consequences.”

“I am waiting, perhaps overly optimistically, for culture to catch up with information availability and develop new ways of handling privacy outside of responding to information when it is made public, regardless of the source or context for that information. Everyone says/does something particularly unwise/unwell/without grace during their life. Technology is getting to the point that these moments, rather than being forgotten or a story told among friends, are fairly permanently in the public record. (The Internet is public, whatever Facebook settings attempt to convince you.) Continue reading →

Be Careful What You Wish For Dept.: “Occupy” May Finally Have a Plan, and Sure Enough, It’s Ethically Bats

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh, yes,THIS is bound to work out well…

The core of my objection to Occupy Wall Street and its progeny was and is that it never had the discipline, cohesion or communications skills to make it clear what the “movement” really wanted to accomplish, other than generally blaming all the world’s ills on the wealthy and successful. This was the reason for its failure, though Occupy fans like to say that it “succeeded” by starting a national dialogue about corporate executive salaries and the growing disparity in income levels between the richest and the poorest Americans—as if that dialogue hadn’t been ongoing long  before the first sign went up in Zuccotti Park.

Now there are signs that the Occupy bitter-enders are hard at work launching a real, substantive effort with a specific goal, albeit and insane one: to bring down the financial system with a “debt strike.” ( In These Times headlined its story about this “You Are Not A Loan.” Pretty clever!) The idea is to refuse to pay back the interest or principal on outstanding debt, and to insist that all loans and interest  be forgiven, since the debt system is inherently corrupt and rigged to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.

We shouldn’t have to expend a lot of argument on why this is unethical. People, companies and nations in serious debt reach that point because they spend more money than they have. They borrow money promising to repay, agreeing to pay an additional fee, interest, for the privilege of using money that doesn’t belong to them. The vast majority of debt is not amassed by desperate debtors who have to deal with the equivalent of Loan Shark Larry and risk broken legs or death unless they pay unconscionable fees. Most debt comes from wanting something before you can pay for it. While laws are in place to minimize predatory lending and to provide a safety net (in the form of bankruptcy) so people and companies don’t end up destitute and in debtor’s prison, essentially the system, like society itself, exists on trust, the cornerstone of all ethics.  Lenders give their money to trustworthy loan-seekers, and charge higher interest rates to those who they deem less trustworthy. That is fair. Continue reading →

Ten More Hollywood Ethics Cures For A Post-Election Hangover (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Here are the final five ethics movies, making 25 on the Ethics Alarms list so far. Except for the last, they are a sober batch. I think I now understand why they are at the back end of my list of 25; this group is darker than the first 15 and more tinged with defeat than hope. Their ethics lessons, however, remain inspiring, or if not quite that, thought-provoking:

6. The Insider (1999)

Another true story, one that explores the murky area of whistleblowing and whistleblowers as well as the conflict between the business of journalism and the profession of journalism.

Ethical issues highlighted: confidentiality, whistleblowing, law vs. ethics, sacrifice, courage, media ethics, integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, betrayal

Favorite quote: “You’re in a state of conflict. Here’s how it lays out. If you have vital insider stuff that the American people for their welfare need to know and you feel compelled to disclose it and this violates the agreement – that’s one thing. On the other hand, if you want to honor the agreement, it’s simple. Say nothing. Do nothing. The only guy who can figure this out is you, and that’s you all by yourself.” Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Watch: The Petraeus-Broadwell Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

There is too much information awaiting disclosure to do a thorough ethical analysis at this point, but it is already clear beyond question that the David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell scandal is an ethics train wreck, with many more individuals and perhaps institutions involved than the direct participants. Today’s news reports that the adulterous affair prompting the much-respected CIA Director’s sudden resignation was triggered by Broadwell’s  threatening e-mails to another women she suspected of vying for the General’s affections clinches train wreck status. This thing is still rolling.

Other features of the wreck-in-progress: Continue reading →

Ethical Quote of the Month: Gen. David Petraeus

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA. After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation.”

—-Gen. David H. Petraeus, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in a public statement announcing his resignation from that position.

How quaint.

Democrats and Republicans must have felt that they had stumbled into the Way-Back Machine and delivered into England circa. 1904. A high government official resigning over adultery, sex,…”personal misconduct?” How bizarre! Naturally, Sen. Diane Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee,  announced that she would have supported Petraeus if he had chosen to stay. “I wish President Obama had not accepted this resignation, but I understand and respect the decision,” she said in a statement, and described Petraeus’s resignation as an “enormous loss for our nation’s intelligence community and for our country.”

The right way to leave after an affair, apparently, is to try to cover it up, submit to extortion, corrupt others in the process, and only quit when the hideout is surrounded, the hounds are clawing at the door and someone is yelling at you through a bullhorn—you know, like former GOP Sen. John Ensign, who waited two years to resign while his colleagues, like Feinstein, looked the other way. Nobody gets it in Washington—“it” being the ironclad principle that leadership must set the highest example, not the lowest level it can get away with, or the whole system rots below. Nobody, apparently, except the man who just resigned. Continue reading →