Former Virginia lawmaker Joe Morrissey won the state Senate seat for the 16th District in the Old Dominion last night, defeating Independent Waylin Ross. Morrissey got more than 60% of the votes, showing an enthusiastic electorate. He will now represent parts of Richmond, Chesterfield County, Petersburg, Hopewell, Prince George County, and Dinwiddie County.
Who is Joe Morrissey? Let me refresh your memory using this post, from 2014. The first half of it was about revolting Republican House member Blake Farenthold—the guy wearing the duck pajamas—
who was, thankfully, finally forced out of office in the wake of #MeToo. The second half was about Joe: Continue reading →
An old, old, lament: “Laws are for the little people…”
I am constantly impressed at the perceptive and eloquent comments that issue from such a large number of Ethics Alarms readers. It cushions the blow of the traffic fall-off here that came shortly after the 2016 election, as the rapid Trump-Haters and resistance acolytes fled to secure echo chambers. (Facebook banning EA didn’t help.) I’d like both, sure, but I’ll take quality over quantity every time.
Aaron Pascal is long-time participant on Ethics Alarms, and he has issued many provocative comments, usually with a refreshing edge. This, in reaction to the most recent of AOC’s annoying and ethics-dead tweets, is one of his best.
“Jail the poor to free the rich” smacks of a combination of two extreme positions on two separate valid social dilemmas interacting.
First, there is the moderately unsettling (to me) privately funded and operated prison system. It’s been suggested that inmates are the product that is sold to bring in money. If people stopped being put in prison, then the corporations running the prison would lose money. Ergo, they get the politicians (especially the nasty, racist Republicans) to criminalize more activity, and push for longer sentences for smaller and smaller offenses. Especially if the crimes you tighten up on end up imprisoning a disproportionate number of racial minorities. Not a viewpoint completely without merit, but if you assume it’s the norm it certainly encourages a topsy turvy view of criminal activity vs the justice system. It also requires picturing the police, the justice system, the prison system, and the government as really bad, selfish people. Which is only a problem for leftists once you get to the government, which once you assign the blame to those horrible Republicans, the cognitive dissonance goes away. Continue reading →
My best friend of long standing’s favorite singer is Nat King Cole. He really doesn’t sound like anyone else, does he? I wonder how many millennials have heard his amazing voice, or would have the perspective to appreciate it.
Speaking of listening, I was prompted this morning to reflect on what a vital life-competence skill listening is. It is really an acquired skill: various Facebook discussions make it clear that most of the Facebook Borg warriors are no longer listening (or otherwise paying attention) to any information that doesn’t bolster their confirmation bias.
What made me think about this today was happening upon an early morning showing of “Casablanca” on Turner Movie Classics. I must have seen the classic a hundred or more times since first watched the whole movie in college, and yet today was the first time I heard what “Rick” Blaine’s real first name was. All the other times I watched the movie, this passed by my consciousness without leaving a trace, but his real name is used three times. (Hint: it’s not Richard, though that’s what Ingrid Bergman calls him…)
1. A great President in many ways, but also a terrible human being. Watch the culture and the news media bury this. “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and the Holocaust,” a new book (published in September) reveals new archival evidence that shows FDR’s callous and bigoted treatment of European Jews prior to and during the Holocaust. I know the author, Dr. Rafael Medoff of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, as a result of his assisting The American Century Theater with several productions that involved the Jews and Israel.
The book’s revelations are not shocking to anyone who had looked at the evidence objectively even before this new material, but Roosevelt is a hallowed Democrat Party icon, and it has been, and I assume will continue to be, resistant to any effort to inform the public of this horrific moral and ethical failing, one of many FDR was guilty of inflicting. From a review:Continue reading →
(Bear with me: This video will be relevant by the end, I promise..)
“If you’re going to take people’s guns away, wait until you get elected — then take the guns away. Don’t tell them ahead of time.”
“The View’s” panelist Joy Behar, commenting on Beto O’Rourke’s exit from the Democratic presidential nomination race after announcing that he advocated the confiscation of semi-automatic weapons.
I don’t even watch “The View,” and Joy Behar’s ignorant and strident vocal abuses of law, ethics and logic have still made it into many Ethics Alarms posts. Imagine if I actually watched the show regularly. The woman is astoundingly ignorant, and celebrates it, issuing loud and emphatic opinions that would be argued down in a competent 7th grade class (if there are such things), yet ABC gives her a public platform that is only responsibly reserved for, if not brilliant and knowledgeable pundits, at least ones that could win a game of Scrabble with a Dachshund puppy.
You know what her last featured howler was on Ethics Alarms? This: she asked, in reference to a President Trump tweet mocking Rep. Omar, “Why can’t he be brought up on charges of hate speech?Why can’t he be sued by the ACLU for hate speech? I don’t get it. How does he get away with this?”
Why? WHY, you incredibly ill-informed woman? Because there is no such crime as “hate speech.” Because the ACLU defends free speech, it doesn’t sue people for what they say. You don’t get it because you’re the most illiterate, ignorant pundit on television, maybe on television since its inception. He gets away with this because it’s the United States, and we have a Bill of Rights. Or as the late Sam Kinison would say,
This latest must be my favorite Joy cretinism. See, she’s a typical progressive totalitarian as well as a dolt. The way to get your agenda enacted is to lie to the public so they vote you into office based on false pretenses! Sure, that’s the ticket! And not just any agenda, either—this isn’t like Barack Obama promising to be a unifying President who favored neither black not white. No, Joy wants candidates who plan on gutting individual rights to lie about their plans so citizens will go to the polls like lambs to the slaughter. Usually it’s villains that TV shows trying this trick, monsters like Hitler and Sideshow Bob. The View has a permanent panelist who endorses that route to power, openly, proudly.
She better watch out: Democrats don’t want her spilling the beans like that,
Of course, the strategy is impossible. To begin with it’s unconstitutional, but naturally Joy, having slept through school, doesn’t know this. Second, eventually people would find out that Beto’s Brownshirts were going door to door, and the results would not be pretty. These are just details, however: Joy just says whatever flotsam and jetsom flots into her cranium, and does her level best to make View viewers as brick-stupid as she is. Here are some other Joy highlights from past posts:
Speaking of Joe Biden’s habitual groping: “It’s a long way from smelling your hair to grabbing your hoo-ha… I don’t think it rises to the point we’ve been listening to like Harvey Weinstein and the rest of these people”
Justifying Democrats manufacturing imaginary offenses by the President: “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. That’s why.”
Explaining how the GOP can control the Senate when more votes were cast for Democrats in the House: “Because of gerrymandering!”
On the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Kavanaugh hearings: “These white men, old by the way, are not protecting women… They’re protecting a man who is probably guilty.”
Responding to Alan Dershowitz’s criticism of Mitch Mconnell blocking the Merrick Garland nomination: “Well then how come Mitch McConnell is not in jail? That’s what I want to know.”
There are many more. Now, Joy has a right to be stupid, but she does not have a right to have a major network facilitating her making the public stupid. As I wrote here, I don’t advocate her being forced off the air by boycotts, in the manner that so-called liberals have tried to silence Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. That’s censorship; that’s the Left’s MO in 2019. However, it is irresponsible for any network to package the clueless opinions of a woman with the intellect of a Pet Rock for public consumption. It’s like selling tainted food, or a car that keeps breaking down.
It is broadcast malpractice. She should be fired. She should have been fired years ago.
I even wrote a song about it. Sing the words to the music of “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”(from “The Sound of Music”) in the video above. I skipped the intro: it starts with the main theme.
Can’t The View Fire an Idiot Like Joy Behar?
Can’t the View fire an idiot like Joy Behar?
Why can’t they put that loudmouth in her place?
The View should protect the public from her nonsense
And wipe that smug expression off her face.
Many a thing you know they’d like to tell her
There is so much she doesn’t understand
But how can they make her read
Or research before a screed
You might as well try to lift a baby grand…
Oh, how do you fix an idiot like Joy Behar?
When will this moron finally be canned?
She is constantly confused
Ill-informed and so bemused
Hasn’t read the Constitution even once…
She’s predictable I guess
Since her values are a mess
She’s not clever! She’s not funny! She’s a dunce!
But Joy’s certain she is smart
And with gusto plays the part
Of the brave progressive warrior at work
Confrontational and loud,
She’s intolerant and proud
She’s embarrassing…let’s face it,
She’s a jerk.
Can’t the View fire an idiot like Joy Behar?
Why do they want to make their viewers dumb?
It’s so perverse inflicting her like they are…
Her opinions are like a drug that makes brains numb.
1. So now we know…The mysterious “whistleblower” is almost certainly Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst, former National Security Council staffer, and a career intelligence officer.who has served in both the Obama and Trump administrations. It would have been nice and reassuring if he were not so strongly tied to the Dark Side, meaning the Democrats and various “resistance” figures, but he is. That doesn’t mean he had an agenda, but somehow all of the leakers and rebels who have been instrumental in keeping the Left’s coup fires burning have aspects of their backgrounds that justify skepticism.
From the generally useful and fair article about in Heavy:
Ciaramella has worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for several years and was assigned to the White House during the end of the Obama administration. He worked closely with Biden in his role as an expert on Ukraine. Ciaramella also has ties to Sean Misko, a former NSC co-worker who now works for Representative Adam Schiff and the Intelligence Committee. According to The New York Times, the whistleblower first went to a CIA lawyer and then to an unnamed Schiff aide before filing the whistleblower complaint. The aide told the whistleblower to follow the formal process, but conveyed some of the information he learned from him to Schiff, without revealing his name, The Times reported.
“Like other whistle-blowers have done before and since under Republican and Democratic-controlled committees, the whistle-blower contacted the committee for guidance on how to report possible wrongdoing within the jurisdiction of the intelligence community,” said Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Schiff, told The Times.
The whistleblower’s ties to Democrats, including Biden, Schiff, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, have created controversy, with Trump and Republicans using his past work with them in an attempt to discredit him.
I did say generally fair. The fact that this guy who created the path to the latest impeachment excuse just happens to be a Democrat with connections to a veritable nest of anti-Trump zealots does and should discredit his objectivity to some extent. An “attempt” shouldn’t be necessary.
A study published today in JAMA Pediatrics warns that kids’ literacy and language skills suffer with screen use, and MRI scans of their brains appear to back up the findings…. Forty-seven 3- to 5-year-olds took a test to measure their cognitive abilities, and their parents were asked to answer a detailed survey about screen time habits. …The scans revealed that kids who spent more time in front of screens had what the authors call lower “white matter integrity.” White matter can be roughly thought of as the brain’s internal communications network—its long nerve fibers are sheathed in fatty insulation that allows electrical signals to move from one area of the brain to another without interruption. The integrity of that structure—how well organized the nerve fibers are, and how well developed the myelin sheath is—is associated with cognitive function, and it develops as kids learn language. …Lead author John Hutton of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital told MIT Technology Review there’s a clear link between higher screen use and lower white matter integrity in the children his team studied. That structural change appears to be reflected in the results of the cognitive test the kids took as well, which showed high screen time associated with lower levels of language and literacy skills. “The effect size is substantial, as these findings also rigorously controlled for multiple comparisons across the brain,” Hutton says.
One easy and ethical remedy would be for parents to make sure their kids don’t see them constantly staring at their phone.
3. A terrific, ethical, extemporaneous speech from Richard Dreyfus. No, Richard Dreyfus is not, and has never been, a typical Hollywood knee-jerk leftist. Glenn Beck’s conservative website “The Blaze” was “astonished” when actor/educator Richard Dreyfus recently told Fox News host Tucker Carlson,
“You were talking about the speakers on university campuses. And I am totally, incontrovertibly on your side about this. I think any intrusion into freedom of speech is an intrusion into freedom of speech. And when one of the presidents of one of the colleges said, ‘this is a school, not a battlefield,’ I said, no, it is a battlefield of ideas and we must have dissonant, dissenting opinions on campuses and I think it’s political correctness taken to a nightmarish point of view
I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral. What’s most important for me is what you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have. And that is a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and respected for so long, it gives us our national identity, it tells the world who we are and why we are who we are, and without a frame that gives us values that stand behind the bill of rights, we’re just floating in the air and our sectors of society are not connected.
What’s really important is that the assumptions of the left and the right are all skewed wrong. We have to find areas of agreement and areas that we share. And we do share the notion that education accomplishes certain things. One, it turns students into citizens. And, two, it teaches students how to run the country before it’s their turn to run the country. And, three, it teaches the values of this nation.
People come from all over the world or are born into this nation without the values that we have here. That’s why they came here, to get them. And what are they? You can put them in opportunity, rise by merit, mobility, and freedom. That’s what we sell. And if you don’t want that, you’ve chosen the wrong place. And you don’t get a pass by being born here, you have to learn it. Even the Ten Commandments are not known at birth. You must learn them. And we must learn our values and if we don’t, we are fatally, fatally wounding ourselves. We will not have any way to really combat the ideas behind ISIS because we won’t know our own. And we have to.
The one thing I can admire in activists, even those whose agendas I find wrong-headed and irresponsible, is integrity. Are they genuinely passionate about what they advocate? Do they really believe the arguments they put forth? Will they adhere to their stated principles even when it becomes profitable or convenient to reject them? I may think an activist is ill-informed, addicted to demagoguery and not very bright (Rep. Octavia-Cortez comes immediately to mind), but I will always, perhaps grudgingly, appreciate his or her passion, dedication, and persistence, if they are accompanied by integrity.
And then we have activists like Ashley Auzenne, 39, a Texas mother who fought for stricter gun control laws and an end to gun violence until last week, when she used a gun to kill herself and her three young children, Parrish, 11, Eleanor, 9, and Lincoln, 7.
I think it’s fair to call someone who says she wants to to end violence (Auzenne’s Facebook profile pictures were accompanied with the hashtags #Enough and #EndGunViolence) and then engages in it herself a hypocrite, a liar who publicly pretended to hold one view while personally being capable of engaging in the exact conduct she condemned when it suited her own perceived needs.
Perhaps, on the other hand, we should regard her as the real life equivalent of the villains in various TV shows and movies like 2007’s “Live Free or Die Hard,” the third installment of the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” franchise. In that movie, a tech whiz who had failed in his efforts to persuade the government that crucial systems were vulnerable to hacker attacks sets out to prove his point by becoming a cyber-terrorist who takes control of government and commercial computers across the United States to launch a “fire sale” disabling the nation’s infrastructure. Continue reading →
Call it demagoguery, grandstanding, ignorance, rabble-rousing or whatever you choose, an elected representative of the government tweeting such nonsense to those foolish enough to follow her is irresponsible in the extreme.
Hundreds of protesters hit the streets Friday and Saturday in Brooklyn to protest police brutality by the NYPD and its crackdown on subway fare evaders. Naturally the demonstrators chanted “No justice, no peace,” the current content free, no thought required slogan of choice by those who couldn’t articulate what they consider justice if they had a teleprompter. Continue reading →
McDonald’s has either fired CEO Steve Easterbrook or forced him to resign (it’s unclear which) after it was determined that he had a sexual relationship with an employee, and thus a subordinate. The relationship was determined to be “consensual,” to the extent a non-workplace, intimate relationship with a superior who controls your livelihood and professional advancement can ever be regarded as truly consensual. The position of Ethics Alarms is that it can not be; this was once the official position of the National Organization for Women until the principle threatened the tenure of Bill Clinton in the White House, whereupon Gloria Steinem suddenly declared that such relationships were swell.
“Mickey D’s” Board of Directors found Easterbrook had “demonstrated poor judgement,” the company announced today, and had violated written company policy. Easterbrook, 52 years old, had seen the company’s shares nearly double in value since he became chief executive in March 2015. The board therefore definitively rejected the King’s Pass, sending an unequivocal message to other managers that treating the workplace as their personal dating bar wouldn’t be tolerated no matter how important they were or how effective they were at their jobs.
1. Not exactly a shock, but we now know Ruth Bader Ginsburg lied in her 1993 Senate confirmation hearings. At a Georgetown Law Center event last week featuring both Clintons and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bill Clinton told the audience that he queried the Justice-to- be about Roe v. Wade before nominating her to the Supreme Court in 1993:
[Ginsburg] knew this perfectly well, that I was under a lot of pressure to make sure I appointed someone who was simon-pure, which I had said I thought was important. But I was fascinated by a—either an article I had read or something I had read on Justice Ginsburg saying that she supported the result in Roe v. Wade but thought Justice Blackmun should have decided the case on the equal protection clause not the right to privacy. And I asked her the question and she talked about it just as if it was any other issue, no affect: “This is what I think, this is why I think it,” and she made a heck of a case.
That’s odd, because one of the written questions she responded to in the process was…
Has anyone involved in the process of selecting you as a judicial nominee (including but not limited to a member of the White House staff, the Justice Department, or the Senate or its staff) discussed with you any specific case, legal issue or question in a manner that could reasonably be interpreted as seeking any express or implied assurances concerning your position on such case, issue, or question? If so, please explain fully.
It is inappropriate, in my judgment, to seek from any nominee for judicial office assurance on how that individual would rule in a future case. That judgment was shared by those involved in the process of selecting me. No such person discussed with me any specific case, legal issue or question in a manner that could reasonably be interpreted as seeking any express or implied assurances concerning my position on such case, issue, or question.
Apparently about six weeks ago, the U.S. Navy finally publicly admitted that the government is aware of so-far unexplained aircraft that operate beyond mankind’s presumed technological limits, at least in this country. On September 18th, it publicly acknowledged that the advanced aircraft depicted in several recently declassified gun-camera videos are what have been referred to for decades as UFOs, though just to be contrary, the Navy prefers to use the term “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” or UAPs.I guess this is so they can keep saying that various conspiracy theorists and “They’re out there!” kooks have been wrong about UFOs, as in, ‘UFO’s are all fiction and swamp gas. UAP’s, however, are another story!’
The vehicles observed and recorded by U.S. Navy fighter pilots seem impervious to altitude or the elements; they are able to maneuver above 80,000 feet; they can hover and then instantly accelerate to supersonic and even hypersonic speeds; they have very low radar cross-sections and use a means of propulsion and control that does not appear to involve combustion, exhaust, rotors, wings or flaps.Since the Navy asserts these are not U.S. aircraft, we are confronted by the daunting prospect that a potential adversary of the United States has achieved the ability to render our most sophisticated aircraft and air defense systems obsolete.
The Hill article raised some of the questions I have about this: Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 
An old, old, lament: “Laws are for the little people…”
I am constantly impressed at the perceptive and eloquent comments that issue from such a large number of Ethics Alarms readers. It cushions the blow of the traffic fall-off here that came shortly after the 2016 election, as the rapid Trump-Haters and resistance acolytes fled to secure echo chambers. (Facebook banning EA didn’t help.) I’d like both, sure, but I’ll take quality over quantity every time.
Aaron Pascal is long-time participant on Ethics Alarms, and he has issued many provocative comments, usually with a refreshing edge. This, in reaction to the most recent of AOC’s annoying and ethics-dead tweets, is one of his best.
Here is Aaron Pascal’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)”….