Here is the obituary…
The glaring ethics problem is that this was not written by Lye as a personal mea culpa and sincere acknowledgement of the deceased’s shortcomings and failures. It was composed by one of his sons, allegedly “based” on various conversations with his father in his final days. Continue reading
It is unknown whether having a child with the tragic “blurry face syndrome” contributed to Mateen’s rampage…
“The Orlando gunman’s wife has told federal agents she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack, NBC News has learned.
Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Zahi Salman, told the FBI she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster, several officials familiar with the case said. She told the FBI that she once drove him to the gay nightclub, Pulse, because he wanted to scope it out…”
Here’s a helpful Ethics Alarms ethics tip: if your husband, who had been talking about how much he hates gays and admires ISIS, cases a club for a possible slaughter and takes you with him as he buys a firearm and ammunition, you have an ethical and legal duty as a citizen and a human being to inform authorities to prevent a likely blood bath.
Glad to be of assistance.
More:
“Authorities are considering filing criminal charges against Noor for failing to tell them what she knew before the brutal attack, law enforcement officials say, but no decision has been made.”
They should throw the book at her.
—–Hillary Clinton, forgetting all sorts of things in her speech in response to the Orlando massacre.
Cowabunga, Hillary!!! Do you think, while I am trying to explain why the only responsible course for an ethical citizen is to vote for a horrible candidate like you in order to stop Donald Trump from becoming President Asshole, you might at least try not to make it harder by talking like an autocratic idiot yourself? Do you think you could do that, please?
Not for the first time, Hillary Clinton just made one of those boomerang assertions that applies to her as much as those she is supposedly criticizing. Her all-time classic, of course, was when she said that the victims of sexual abuse had the right to be believed (unless, of course, the sexual abuser is her husband and meal-ticket, in which case she personally will see that said victim is discredited and destroyed.)
Was the statement in her speech even worse? Hmmm, close one! Here is Hillary, herself under a criminal investigation by the FBI for violating a federal law or five and still running for President because, after all, it’s just an investigation, and in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave one does not lose rights and privileges until one is actually convicted in a court of law. And yet here she is saying that an FBI investigation should suspend a Constitutional right.
Talk about throwing blood in the water. Talk about cynically appealing to low information voters. Talk about pandering. Talk about walking into a buzz-saw.
Talk about stupid…
I would not be the first to ask, fairly and accurately, if Hillary also believes that merely being investigated should suspend other rights, like the right to not to be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to have a lawyer, the right not to have to incriminate oneself, and the right to free speech? Does she know that the right to purchase a gun is also as much of a right as any of these? Or is she really saying that she wants to eliminate that right?
Perhaps she was just speaking carelessly, irresponsibly and in vague generalities–like, oh, just to pick an example out of the air, Donald Trump.
You’re not making it easy for me, Hillary.
Not at all.
“It is true: I am a weenie, and the U.N. can be rolled…”
The United Nations’ 2015 “Children and Armed Conflict” report originally listed the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen under “parties that kill or maim children” and “parties that engage in attacks on schools and/or hospitals.” Based on the work of U.N. researchers in Yemen, the report attributed 60 percent of the 785 children killed and 1,168 injured to the bombing coalition.
But Saudi Arabia threatened to stop its funding of other U.N. projects, so, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted, the U.N. was revising the report to “review jointly the cases and numbers cited in the text,” in order to “reflect the highest standards of accuracy possible” ….and to “temporarily” remove the Saudi-led coalition countries from the report’s annex in the interest of protecting these programs.
Ban said he made a the difficult decision based on the need “to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many U.N. programs.”
“It is unacceptable for member states to exert undue pressure,” Ban said, absurdly. If it is unacceptable, why does the U.N. accept it?
The UN published a factual report, and has now announced that the report will be inaccurate because it yielded to extortion in involving the lives of children.
Corruption. What justification is there to trust an organization that allows a member to do this?
The news media should stop quoting United Nations reports on health, climate change, hunger, or anything else. It has admitted that it can be bullied, pressured and bought. It has no credibility, and should not be treated as if it does.
_______________________
Sources: NPR, The Intercept
…and not just any law enforcement matter, but an investigation of a former Secretary of State and presumptive Presidential nominee.
Nice. You see, Barack Obama just doesn’t care. That’s the only possible explanation for this pattern which goes way back to 2009, when he opined on whether his old friend from Harvard, Henry Louis Gates, was the party at fault in an altercation with a Cambridge, Mass, police officer. That was his first year as President, so maybe it’s plausible that this “Constitutional scholar” and allegedly brilliant man didn’t know that the President of the United States warps the justice system and law enforcement when he declares how he thinks they should handle a particular matter, since he is at the tippity top of our rule of law. Obama has done this again and again, however—with Trayvon Martin… in the Big Branch Mine disaster…as Obamacare approached a key challenge in the Supreme Court…in the military sex abuse scandal…regarding Arizona’s illegal immigration laws, and regarding other matters. He has to know by now that it biases the process, but his supporters cheer, the news media makes excuses, only Republicans, the “conservative media” and Ethics Alarms complain, so he keeps doing it anyway. He can get away with it, so he just doesn’t care.
Nice.
This, however, was special. The same day that the White House admitted that the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s intentional mishandling of official e-mails for her own personal needs–she didn’t want citizens to be able to see her business and political machinations using the Freedom of Information Act—was a criminal investigation, he endorsed Clinton for President in glowing terms.
Fox News’ Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen asked White House Paid Liar Josh Earnest about the appropriateness of this—heaven forfend that any non-conservative-biased news outlet would ask such an obvious and necessary question, queried “You have other employees of the executive branch, career prosecutors, FBI agents, working this case who have now just heard how the president wants to see this case resolved, in essence. Isn’t there some conflict there?”
Continue reading
I’d think she’d want to have that fixed…
Today Katie Couric made all of her defenders look just as bad as I said they were.
“I can understand the objection of people who did have an issue about it,” Couric said at TheWrap’s Power Women Breakfast in New York this morning, when asked to address the intentionally deceptive editing in “Under the Gun,‘ the anti-gun documentary she produced. “Having said that, I think we have to focus on the big issue of gun violence. It was my hope that, when I approached this topic, that this would be a conversation starter.”
She then said that the documentary will not be re-edited to fix the lie it contains.
This is signature significance: all by itself, it proves beyond a shadow if a doubt that Katie Couric is a dishonest journalist. No more evidence is needed, for an honest journalist would never make this choice. Not once, not ever.
“The objection of people who did have an issue about it” clearly states that Couric herself had no “issue with it,” meaning that, as I wrote, she only regrets the controversy, not the lie. Continue reading
There are too many stories like this. The Detroit News reports that Davontae Sanford, who spent his teen years and early 20s behind bars for multiple murders he didn’t commit, will be released today after the judge who presided over his 2008 trial vacated his sentence. It seems that he was innocent of the crimes, as a confession by someone else shortly after he was locked up should have suggested. Read the whole tale. I spit out a mouthful of coffee, however, when I got to this part, near the end of the article.
Sharing criticism for this miscarriage of justice, along with police and prosecutors, is Sanford’s original attorney, Robert Slameka. Sanford’s current attorney told reporters,
“One of the really tremendous failures of the system was his defense attorney. There was not one pretrial motion that was brought. Davontae’s confession had all the hallmarks of a false confession; (it was) never challenged. The failures are manifest, but a lot of it falls to the one person who was supposed to protect Davontae in this process, and that was his attorney. And that wasn’t done, and when that’s not done, the system sort of collapses.”
This lawyer didn’t stutter (that is, I don’t think so) but convinced Sanford to plead guilty to second-degree murder, telling him prosecutors had an iron-clad case, and that if he pleaded, he’d get out of prison earlier. While allegedly defending the teen, Slameka waived making an opening statement (maybe he DID stutter!) , and never cross-examined the detective who questioned Sanford. Continue reading
Oh, fine.
Yes, incredible as it seems, even lower than Marco Rubio implying that Donald Trump has a small penis.
It’s a long, unprofessional, roller coaster of valid arguments, unethical contentions and muddled reasoning that U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, (D-Brownsville) stuffed into his open letter to Donald Trump. He calls Trump a racist, he implies that anyone who illegally crosses the border should be welcomed with open arms unless he’s a criminal; he incorrectly calls Trump’s suspicions about his Hispanic judge’s biases bigoted, when they are merely expressions of Trump’s ignorance regarding what constitutes a judicial conflict of interests. Time to showboat for the district constituency, I guess: you can read the whole letter here.
Like Rubio, however, Vela debased his office, Congress, his district and himself by attacking Trump in a vulgar and undignified manner, saying in his grand finale:
“I will not presume to speak on behalf of every American of Mexican descent, for every undocumented worker born in Mexico who is contributing to our country every day or, for that matter, every decent citizen in Mexico. But, I am sure that many of these individuals would agree with me when I say…
‘Mr. Trump, you’re a racist and you can take your border wall and shove it up your ass.’”
How nice. Continue reading
This may be the editor of this web site. The evidence points that way…
NBCPolitics.org is a special variety of fake site. Its stories appear to be genuine—but since the site is unethical and a lie, you can’t assume every one is—and it does not appear to be attempting satire or to fool mainstream news sources. To be frank, I don’t know what the hell the site’s operators think they are doing.
Nonetheless, it is a fake site, an unethical one, and especially nasty. It is, to start with, stealing NBC’s logo and name, as well as the new stories it posts, which come from other sources, at least until the site posts its own fake story with the real ones. Don’t put it past them. You cannot trust a fake site.
NBCPolitics.Org is also written by illiterate morons. Here is a description of the site from one of the links:
This is a representing website for nbcnews.com only posting about politics from and outside the United States.All the article are used from big websites based on politics.Source information is included in every post.
Unless NBC has declined even beyond what watching MSNBC would have one believe, this is a smoking gun. So is the “About” page: Continue reading
Preface: I believe that it is existentially essential and an ethical duty of citizenship to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. I also believe that the news media is obligated to report the campaign objectively and fairly, admittedly something they have increasingly appeared both unwilling and unable to do. For the mews media to elect the President by allying itself to one party is a far more dangerous threat to democracy than, for example, organizations of citizens being allowed to make whatever political statements they choose during the course of a campaign. Democrats like Bernie Sanders don’t see the news media placing its weighty foot on the scale as a problem, because they know where that foot will go: on their side of the scale, hard, like it did in 2008 and 2012.
All signs point to the news media planning to metaphorically stomp on the scale in the coming campaign and justifying it because of Trump. This is also known as “the ends justify the means.”
Today’s Ethics Quiz continues the Ethics Alarms ongoing inquiry into what ethical journalism standards should be during the 2016 Presidential race.
Late last week, I was somewhat stunned to see the Washington Post Style Section dominated by a feature of the sort the Post usually reserves for holidays, like News Years or Valentines day. Almost the entire front page of the section was devoted to the single topic of ridiculing Donald Trump’s appearance, specifically his hair. Titled “The 100 greatest descriptions of Donald Trump’s hair ever written,” it began in part,
“Here, in the most comprehensive and highly scientific endeavor of its kind, culled from 30 years of news articles, we present the top 100 unique descriptors of the Trump mane, written by journalists or pontificators who secretly fancy themselves poets.”
Among the entries…
9. An ambitious corn dog that escaped from the concession stand at a rural Alabama fairground, stole an unattended wig, hopped a freight train to Atlantic City and never looked back
15. A mullet that died in some horrific accident
62. A dead skunk
70. A dishrag that on closer inspection is alive with maggots
Stipulating that this article appears in the Style Section, along with the comics, movie reviews and human interest stories, your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Ethics Alarms 