Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Unethical Quote of the Week: Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“I think it’s important to indict the Russians, just as Muller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.”

—-Ethics Villain Hillary Clinton, on MSNBC (of course) this week, as Rachel Maddow nodded in agreement.

The irony and hypocrisy in Hillary’s statement are striking. After all, it it was her campaign that funded the infamous Steele dossier and spread false stories of Russian collusion during her failed 2016 Presidential run, culminating in the investigation Democrats used to cripple and delegitimize the Trump Presidency. Meanwhile, Hillary remains an icon to the same party that claims Donald Trump is a threat to American liberty, and much of the insane hate the Axis has been focusing on Trump since 2016 was inspired by his “crime” of stopping Clinton from becoming President.

__________

Pointer: Jonathan Turley

Kamala Harris, the “Integrity? What’s Integrity?” Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As an ethicist, I don’t have to agree with a Presidential candaidtes policies to find him or her ethical, unless a policy are per se unethical (like validating terrorism by forcing a ceasefire on Israel before it has destroyed Hamas), involves not enforcing laws (like at the Southern border) or violates the Constitution (as with Gov. Walz’s declarion that “hate speech” should be illegal). However, as an ethicist, it is explicitly my business when a Presidential candidate demonstrates a cynical contempt for integrity as an ethical value, for integrity is one of the most important of ethical values. An individual without integrity cannot be trusted.

Harris’s whole campaign is an effort to pretend integrity is a myth. Bernie Sanders issued a damning verdict on Harris (and himself) when he told NBC’s “Meet the Press “ that despite her efforts to moderate her positions since taking over from Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, such as purporting to support fracking and opposing “Medicare for All,” Harris was just being “pragmatic” and “doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

In other words, lying.

Continue reading →

‘OK, Maybe He Beats His Kid, But What Matters Is That He’s A Great Mayor’

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I’m paraphrasing there, just to be clear. The actual statement, from Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small’s lawyer referring to his client and his client’s wife being charged with child abuse, was this head-blower:

“In fact, since elected mayor, Mayor Small has faithfully discharged all the duties, responsibilities and obligations of his office. So there is no public element to this indictment. It is all about private family affairs within the Small household.”

You are wrong, Zealous Representation Breath, but nice try anyway. Small’s lawyer, Edwin Jacobs, was stressing that the indictment did not accuse Small of official misconduct in his role as mayor, as he tried to assist his client in avoiding the political backlash from the charges (which Small denies, of course). This is arguably justifiable nit-picking in defense of a client, but it is also the kind of technical lawyer-speak that makes the whole profession look slimy.

Continue reading →

Everything Is Seemingly Spinning Out Of Control: Meet GOP Candidate For North Carolina Governor and Incompetent Elected Official of the Month Mark Robinson

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, either went nuts, is nuts, or has been nuts all along. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that Robinson called himself a “black NAZI” and a “perv” online, boasted about sneaking looks at nude women in public showers, loving pornography (“I like watching tranny-on-girl porn! That’s fucking hot!”) and reinstituting slavery. “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” the black politician wrote. All of this was on Nude Africa, a message board for sharing porn.

Naturally, Robinson is denying everything, says he won’t be forced out of the race, yada-yada. He’s an idiot. Be proud, Republicans! How do utter jerks like Robinson—although he does appear to be a very special kind of jerk— keep getting nominated and elected? The parties don’t vet them, the media doesn’t vet them, and the public doesn’t check on what it is voting for either until the damage is done.

May I also suggest that Donald Trump try to have someone on staff perform a little due diligence on such characters before he endorses them?

We’re saving democracy for this?

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The tweet above exemplifies one of the lessons of today’s sordid, multi-level ethics scandal (as in “the people involved have none”), andwhich is too rich to ignore. Let me comment briefly and then you write about any ethics issues that interest you, as usual.

New York magazine’s high-profile Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi is on leave—she’d better be fired, but in today’s journalism, conflicts of interest are no big deal— after admitting to a romantic relationship with (married) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while covering his campaign. RFK Jr.’s Wife #3 isto Hollywood actress Cheryl Hines; Nuzzi was engaged to Politico reporter and collaborator Ryan Lizza until recently. 

What an incestuous and untrustworthy cabal our political, media and entertainment elites have! But you knew that already, I hope…

Conservative pundit Stephen Miller couldn’t resist tweeting, “I know a lot of people are dunking on @Olivianuzzi right now over the whole Kennedy thing, but as a friend, I’m just thankful that she’s not drowning in the backseat of a car right now.”

Mean. But funny!

Carry on….

Ethics Dunces: Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson and the Hacks Who Wrote Their Material For The Emmys

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I usually ignore the Emmys unless something especially egregious happens on this perpetually unexciting and predictable awards show. Even the current topic, the rude and unfunny jibes of two C-list show-biz types at the expense of Meryl Streep during the latest installment, isn’t a big deal, just a provocative one prompting several ethics musings on the state of American culture and society.

Presenting the award for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series ( Streep was a nominee) Rob McElhenney and wife Kaitlin Olson engaged in this scripted banter:

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Sympathy For Really Stupid Accident Victims

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

That’s a scene above from Quentin Tarntino’s “Death Proof,” and a dumber movie you are never likely to encounter. The clip is there not to celebrate the movie, originally half of a misconceived bomb called “Grind House,” but to illustrate the real and incredibly stupid phenomenon called “car surfing,” which has had a recent resurgence among teens thanks to social media.

15-year-old Cyprus High School (Utah) sophomore Ava Broadhead is now in a coma after she fell off the top of a moving car. She was car-surfing, and “unfortunately, pavement isn’t as forgiving and the victim hit their head,” a police officer told the news media. Ava suffered massive head injuries and faces a long recovery, with the chances of regaining her previous level of brain function slim.

A GoFundMe page seeks donations for Anna, stating, “Your generous donations will go directly toward her medical care and the resources needed to support her recovery. Any amount, no matter how small, will make a huge difference in Ava’s journey. If you are unable to contribute financially, we ask that you keep Ava in your prayers and share her story to raise awareness about the real dangers of car surfing.”

Who has have explained to them the dangers of riding on the outside of a moving car?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

How much compassion and sympathy, if any, is appropriate in response to someone harming themselves by engaging in such reckless behavior?

This kind of story always puts me in a quandary; I think I have posted about my dilemma before. My son nearly got himself killed or crippled a few times, although never doing anything quite as stupid as car-surfing. I note that the Go-Fund-Me page has raised only $6,000 so far, and I strongly suspect the weak response is because many have the same reflex reaction I do, which is that I’d rather give money to the victims of misfortunes they didn’t almost literally ask for. Anna’s story reminded me of the July Fourth accident this year when an idiot put fireworks on his head and set them off.

Of course Anna gets some points off her Darwin Awards score by virtue of her tender age…but how many? She devastated her own life while immersing her family in tragedy and the crushing burden of caring for her. It wasn’t intentional, but a drunk getting behind the wheel of a car isn’t intentionally trying to kill anyone, either.

I know that this self-inflicted tragedy will naturally cause many to blame social media. The suspicion lingers, however, that anyone foolish enough to try car-surfing is going to be disaster-prone one way or another.

Our Objective News Media: ‘Trump May Have Caused His Own Assassination Attempt’

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

That was USA Today’s reporting of the Trump assassination attempt yesterday. (I haven’t checked to see if it has been changed.)

The sub-head is a non-sequitur unless the reader is supposed to conclude that there is a causal connection between Trump’s Truth Social post, Vance’s provocative comments on Sunday Morning TV, and the later assassination attempt.

There is no defending such blatant partisan hackery from a news source. The fact that this nonsense could make it to the USA Today site without a sane professional putting a stop to it is damning. Are we supposed to conclude that the shooter was an offended Taylor Swift fan? USA Today might as well have written, “The incident occurred that same day that Trump had hush puppies for breakfast.”

Again, this is how you try rig an election, at least if you’re aiming at the moron vote—which is, sadly, considerable.

_______________

Pointer: Willem Reese

Accountability, Please. If or When Trump Loses the 2024 Election And Says It Was Rigged, Ethics Villain ABC Will Join In The Chorus That His Claim Is “Baseless” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

During the (one hopes) final 2024 Presidential Debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump stated that “Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.” Since Democratic appointee Kamala Harris was indicating disagreement, ABC moderator David Muir rushed to her aid, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

As you know, Muir believed his role in the debate was to”factcheck” Trump while letting Harris declare outright falsehood if she chose to. This time, Trump tried to rebut Muir, saying “…the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”

Well, as usual Trump misused the word “fraud,”the FBI didn’t issue the jobs report, and if you think he is Satan, or Hitler, or Godzilla, you are not inclined to believe anything he says, but Trump was right and Muir was wrong in addition to being a biased and unethical debate moderator. Newly released data from the Dept. of Justice this week backed Trump. Okay, the crime didn’t literally break through any roofs, so I’m sure that characterization by Trump goes into the Washington Post’s Trump lies database, but still… This was DOJ’s survey from Bureau of Justice statistics  that includes crimes that may not have been reported to police. The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.

The highest recent rate of violent crime during the Biden years was in 2022, when the survey counted 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12 being victims, Rape increased from 1.2 incidents per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023. Robbery rose from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023. Aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023. As Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott tried to explain in a piece published after Muir’s deliberately misleading “factcheck,”

Here’s the full report, and like so many statistics, one can spin and arrange the numbers to make various points, some contradictory. What you can’t do with them, at least ethically, if you are an alleged journalist is interrupt a Presidential debate to make one candidate look dishonest in front of a national audience because you and your employers want his opponent to win the election.

Muir and ABC should suffer serious consequences for their conduct, but they won’t. At very least, both should correct the false impression left by Muir and apologize to the public, and not just in a quiet tweet. That won’t happen either.

ABC is biased, corrupt and untrustworthy.

______________________

Source: Legal Insurrection

More Evidence That Winston Churchill’s Misquoted Statement About Democracy Is Right Even If He Didn’t Say It….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Winston Churchill is often quoted as as observing that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all others.” In truth he was not so cynical: what he really said in a speech to the House of Commons in 1947 was that “it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”

If he were around today and watching recent developments in our depressing Presidential race, however, I think Winston might go with the misquoted version.

Item: MoveOn, a progressive public policy advocacy group that has been much-derided on Ethics Alarms over the years, is partnering with Ben & Jerry’s radical Left co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to release a special Kamala Harris-inspired ice cream flavor. (Send in related joke suggestions, by all means.) Limited edition pints of “Kamala’s Coconut Jubilee”are being released in a limited edition; it is a coconut flavored ice cream layered with caramel and topped with red, white and blue star sprinkles. Why coconut? This, apparently. (Winston is starting to roll already.)

The new flavor will be the center of the “Scoop the Vote” free ice cream truck tour that kicks off next week. Cohen and Greenfield will be on board while the truck makes 20 stops in the so-called battleground states as part of a push to register voters. Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, told USA TODAY that the tour aims to inspire voters to register and cast their votes for Harris in the 2024 presidential election, noting that even non-political activities like getting free ice cream have an impact on the election.

Continue reading →