Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

One For the Unethical Quote of the Month Hall of Fame…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”

—–Liliya A. Medvedeva, Russian pensioner, quoted by the New York Times in “Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History” about how many Russians regard the brutal dictator as a hero for his role in defeating Germany in World War II.

But Lily, everybody doesn’t make “mistakes” that result in the deaths or executions of between six and nine million people.

You idiot.

For the record, Lily’s rationalization is one of the most obnoxious on the list, #19, The Perfection Diversion, or “Nobody’s Perfect!” and “Everybody makes mistakes!”

The Atlantic’s Editor Tries Another Dishonest Excuse For The Axis News Media Covering Up Biden’s Dementia

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I am reaching my contempt overload limit from the excuses and spin the mainstream media enemies of the people are floating to slime out of their culpability for the Biden dementia cover-up.

Now Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of “The Atlantic,” among the worst of the Trump-Deranged, Democratic Party totalitarianism-enabling Axis media, tried gaslighting us with this one during an interview with CNN Ethics Villain Jake Tapper on PBS’s “Washington Week”: See, allegations that the news media covered for Biden show a “misunderstanding of journalism”! Reporters need “credible sources” to report anything, see, so without “insiders” admitting on the record that the alleged President was a shambling vegetable, reporters couldn’t report it.

Let me get this straight: what everyone could see and hear since 2019 and earlier couldn’t be reported, couldn’t be verified, and couldn’t be investigated even though it was self-evident that the “insiders” were lying, making excuses about “one bad night,” Joe’s “stutter” and “cheap fakes,” and even when a mountain of circumstantial evidence like the avoidance of interviews, Cabinet meetings and unscripted appearances was in plain sight?

Sure. Whatever you say, Jeff. The news media never reports unsubstantiated “facts” without iron-clad “verification.” Like, say, “Hand up, don’t shoot!,” right?

Former Ethics Alarms idol Ken White of Popehat works for this guy. Ken was once a truth-teller, someone whose integrity I admired and tried to emulate. How sad.

Incompetent Elected Official of the Week: Porto Alegre, Brazil City Councilman Ramiro Rosário

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A city in southern Brazil just enacted the country’s first legislation entirely written by AI bot ChatGPT. Normally the misadventures of a Brazilian local pol wouldn’t turn up on the EA radar, but you know—you know—that this story’s eqivilent is coming soon to our shores, if it isn’t here already

The Associated Press reports that Porto Alegre city councilman Ramiro Rosário admitted to having ChatGPT to write a proposed law aimed at preventing the city from forcing locals to pay for replacing stolen water consumption meters. He didn’t make a single change to the AI generated bill, and didn’t even tell the city council that he didn’t write it. “If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosarío told the AP. “It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence.”

It’s unfair to let the public know that they are being governed by machines, or that their elected officials are too lazy or dumb to compose their own bills. Got it.

Porto Alegre’s council president Hamilton Sossmeier extolled the new law on social media and was embarrassed when its true author was revealed. He then called letting bots write legislation a “dangerous precedent.” Ya think? Massachusetts state senator Barry Finegold says that he has used AI to draft bills, but that he wants “work that is ChatGPT generated to be watermarked….I’m in favor of people using ChatGPT to write bills as long as it’s clear.” I think he means “clear that a bot was involved.” It’s ambiguous language like Barry’s sentence that makes it seem like ChatGPT is an improvement over human public servants.

These AI bots continue to make stuff up, cite imaginary sources, and lie…you know, just like real politicians. For his part, Rosario sees nothing wrong with letting a bot do the work he was elected to do. “All the tools we have developed as a civilization can be used for evil and good,” he told the AP. “That’s why we have to show how it can be used for good.”

Secretly employing a machine to do your work and not disclosing that fact is called “cheating.” Somebody explain to the councilman that cheating is not “good.”

The Sequel to “Is It Ethical to Continue to Slam Former President Biden Now That It Has Been Revealed That He Has Metastatic Prostate Cancer?”— Unethical Quote of the Week: David Axelrod

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“I think those kinds of discussions are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s sort of struggling through this.”

—Former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod on CNN, speaking of the reporting on the cover-up of Joe Biden’s dementia for four years by Democrats and the news media

You have to say this for horrible human beings like Axelrod: at least they don’t do a very good job at hiding their cynicism, corruption, and shameless efforts to keep Americans from knowing just how little regard for democracy they have.

Many believe that the news of Biden’s rapidly advancing prostate cancer was released specifically to distract the public from the dawning realization that he was a puppet President and that persons unknown were operating the levers of power Americans thought they had elected Biden President to handle. There is substantial justification for such suspicion, as well as the belief that Democrats also withheld Biden’s cancer diagnosis in the hope that they could get him a second term so Kamala Harris would become President without having to be elected.

So Axelrod comes right out and says, “Please be distracted by the ‘Awww, poor Joe!’ strategy, and stop trying to find out who was really making decisions and policy in the White House!” Thanks, David! It’s good to remove any doubt about just how stupid your party thinks we are.

See How They Spin! One Axis Hack Interviews Another To Try To Rationalize Away The Media’s Complicity in the Biden Dementia Cover-up

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Axis hack #1…

Ezra Klein!

Axis hack #2…

Ethics Villain, CNN’s Jake Tapper!

Almost exactly a year ago, I excoriated the New York Times and Public Enemy Ezra Klein, the infamous “advocacy journalist” responsible for founding uber-Axis propaganda organ Vox, for a wildly unethical Klein disinformation piece titled, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It).” Guess what Klein didn’t see as a reason Biden was behind in the polls. Somehow, the fact that the alleged President was obviously suffering from dementia escaped his notice. (Suuuure it did…). The closest Klein got to that flaming, throbbing, flashing red alarm was “Voters think Biden is too old.” Just voters, mind you! I wrote, “[Biden’s] obviously declining mentally, and any fool can see he’s too old to hold any job, much less the most difficult one in the country.” But Ezra Klein, who was not declining mentally (and couldn’t possibly decline ethically, except into negative numbers), actually argued that Biden should do more debates with Trump, not just two, and that “all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month.” What Klein meant was that all the complicit partisan media hacks—like Klein—had to do was to hide Biden’s incapacity from voters until election day. And that’s what they tried to do, except that Biden couldn’t even get through one debate without making it plain that his brain was mush.

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Ethics Quiz: Trump’s Banners

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This isn’t the quiz question, but are we entering Julie Principle territory here? Should I keep flagging this very Trumpian conduct as ethically dubious, or just resign myself to “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Trump’s gonna troll ’cause he likes to, that’s why”?

Those banners are currently hanging at the Department of Agriculture building in Washington, D.C. Naturally, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends (and certainly the rest of that zombie herd that I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting), is triggered. “This is SHOCKING,” writes one of the TDS inflicted (whose posts I have noted before). “Authoritarian craziness is now on full display. What happened to DOGE? We now have Soviet style banners. POTUS is a very ill man.” A reply asserts, “Unfortunately, the ‘uneducated’ would never see this.”

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CNN Gathers Enemies of the People to Sit Around and Lie Among Themselves To Fool Its Audience..What IS That?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I mean, other than “disgusting?”

From “Real Clear Politics”: Ethics Villain Jake Tapper hosts Lying Racist Van Jones and Obama Propagandist David Axelrod on CNN in a discussion of the “shocking” revelations regarding how Joe Biden was a walking vegetable while he was supposedly the “sharp as a tack” President of the United States….

TAPPER: Van, I remember how emotional you were in the immediate moments after the June 27, 2024, debate because of what you saw on the stage. And with all this new reporting coming out — and I should disclose that I gave both of you copies of the book so you would have a little bit more information. Do you feel like you were duped, Van? Like, how do you feel?

JONES: First, this book is extraordinary. I don’t care who you are, left, right, or otherwise. Anybody who cares about this country and about just the dynamics of power, this is “the emperor’s new clothes” playing itself out in real time. Everybody knew, but everyone was afraid to say — except for David Axelrod, for two years — that something was wrong here. I was shocked. I love Joe Biden. I don’t like him. I love him. I got a chance to work with him when I was a part of the Obama administration and loved him more every day. I was shocked to see his condition when he came out. And so was the world. And that wasn’t the first time he was in that condition. The book makes it very, very clear. There are people who knew and said nothing. And that is a crime against this republic. And I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.

Here, let me fix that for you, asshole: “….for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up” in which all of us were complicit. I’m sure that’s what you meant to say, you shameless totalitarian hack.

Conservative pundit Stephen Green adds, “Biden’s decline was obvious in 2020 — for those with eyes — and yet Democrat insiders still thought that Biden was better than any of the alternatives in 2020.” And I’ll add to that: last February I wrote, regarding President Trump’s attendance at the (yecchh) Super Bowl,

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Ethics Dunce: James Comey and Anyone Who Defends Him

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

James Comey, the partisan, dishonest, unethical former FBI Director whom Trump was right to fire (but he should have fired him earlier) posted on Instagram, with approval, a message that consisted of the numbers 8647, meaning “rub out the 47th President,” Donald Trump, delineated with sea shells. …

 Nice! It didn’t take long for Comey to realize that this was, to say the least, a tactical error, and he took down the post. In doing so, Comey proved what a mendacious creep he is again by claiming that it never occurred to him that 8647 might be interpreted as a call to have the President of the United States eradicated, offed, murdered, killed…you know assassinated. Never mind that there have been two near misses by the “Kill Trump” club already, that some Democrats and “the resistance” have openly advocated violence, and that for a former head of the FBI to join their ranks is, to put it mildly, unseemly. Comey said he was sorry.

Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. A former high law enforcement official calling for the assassination of the sitting President is a big deal, attention should be paid, and Comey should suffer more than the indignity of having to channel Emily Litella (“Never mind!”)

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X on Friday evening that the Secret Service had “interviewed disgraced former FBI Director Comey regarding a social media post calling for the assassination of President Trump.” Good. There is no valid justification for taking criminal action against Comey (who wrote coyly under his shells photo, “Cool shell formation”), but there also is no good reason not to thoroughly humiliate this Ethics Villain either.

Naturally, because they are the enemy of the people, most journalists reporting on the incident adopted the reflex “Republican pounce” approach rather than the well-earned “Can you believe that Trump was attacked for firing this guy in his first term?” framing.

Ethics Dunces: “More Than 150 Former State and Federal Judges”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

One aspect of the legal community that has become (disturbingly) clear to me since I entered the weird field of legal ethics full time about 25 years ago is that judges stick together even when it is obviously unethical to do so. I don’t know why this is so—lawyers certainly don’t have this proclivity—but it doesn’t matter why judges close ranks and circle their metaphorical wagons any time one of them is being held accountable for unethical conduct. It matters that it is unethical, and they know it. But in these situations they are like cops erecting the “blue line.”

I have written about the case of a lawyer in Seattle, Washington whose client revealed to him that a state judge was accepting bribes. The lawyer felt it was his duty to report the judge to authorities (especially after the judge ruled against another client after one such bribe), and indeed the judge, who was corrupt, ended up being removed from the bench and prosecuted. But the colleagues of that judge made sure that the lawyer was disbarred, because the evidence he had acted upon was a client confidence. The message sent by the action, however, was clear: don’t mess with judges, even the crooked ones.

I recalled that ugly episode when I read that “More than 150 former state and federal judges have signed a letter to Pam Bondi, the attorney general, condemning the Trump administration’s escalating battles with the judiciary and calling the recent arrest of a sitting state court judge in Milwaukee an attempt to intimidate.” That was the Times version; most news sources just emphasized the last part: How dare the Trump administration arrest a judge?

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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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