Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Parent Of The Year…And More!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Kendra Licari was arrested this month and faces up to ten years in prison. In December of 2021, Licari informed police that her daughter and her boyfriend were being harassed, bullied and stalked online. Her daughter, she told them, was frightened and traumatized. Kendra and the boyfriend’s mother, she said, were working together to find the person responsible for the cyberbullying.

Police investigated, and discovered who was making Licari’s daughter’s life miserable. It was her own mother.

The investigators found that Kendra Licari had begun harassing her daughter online in early 2021, sending anonymous threats and insulting messages while pretending to be another high school girl. Though Mom tried to conceal her real identity, but FBI cyber-experts traced the messages to Licari’s IP address.

Continue reading →

Representative-Elect Santos Update: George Just Overtook The Field For The 2022 “Most Incompetent Elected Official Of The Year.” Wow.

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) really accomplished something here. At virtually the last moment, he came from nowhere tho snatch the coveted Ethics Alarms Award for 2022’s Most Incompetent Elected Official from an amazingly credentialed group of hacks, liars and fools. There are Joe and Kamala, of course, each with multiple nominations here. All the big city mayors who have fiddled while wokism allowed crime to fester and spread. EA nominees for the honor: Brevard County (Florida) Sheriff Wayne Ivey, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, GOP Reps. Scott Perry and Mario Diaz-Belart, Rep. Swalwell, of course, Senator Dick Durbin (as usual), Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman, Rep. Louise Frankel, the ridiculous Rep. Matt Gaetz, twirking Rhode Island. State Senator Tiara Mack, Rep. Mary Miller, Mass. State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa (who was horrified that the courts would stop unconstitutional uses of federal power), Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Virginia House Of Delegates Member Wren Williams.

But emulating the “Immaculate Reception” that made Franco Harris an NFL legend, the 1968 Harcad -Yale game 29-29 tie (when Harvard scored two touchdowns with less than a minute left) and Bobby Thompson’s home run (“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!), Santos did the imposiible and made every one of his competitors look like Teddy Roosevelt. I posted last week about the emerging (and inexcusably late) discovery that many of the claims he made while running for office this year appeared to be false, concluding that he should resign his freshly won seat in Congress. Then Santos’ statements confirming the scandal, made after three days of thought, or the best he could do to approach thought, proved beyond challenge that he is even more of an ethics-free disgrace and menace to the public welfare than I initially thought.

“I am not a criminal,” Santos said during his interview with the New York Post, thus embracing Marion Barry’s infamous, “It it isn’t illegal, it’s not unethical” rationalization. “My sins here are embellishing my resumé,” he added, in a masterpiece of understatement. Since voters elect representatives based on their qualifications, “embellish” gives Santos too much credit. He HAD no credentials to embellish. He never graduated from college. He didn’t work at the prestigious Wall Street firms he claimed he had.

Continue reading →

An Unethical Quote Of The Month By ABC Clinches The 2022 Ethics Alarms “Most Unethical Profession” Award

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“You talk about open borders, I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, we have an open border come on over, but people I have heard people say it are you, former President Trump, Ron DeSantis, that message reverberates in Mexico and beyond…”

—-ABC’s Martha Raddatz, desperately spinning for Democrats and the Biden Administration

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Martha Raddatz, because she rminded me of Dick Radatz, the greatest relief pitcher in Boston Red Sox history and my favorite reliever of all time, period. I knew Martha spelled her name with an extra “d,” but always held out hope that they were related. She even looks a bit like “The Monster,” don’t you think?

But I gave up on Martha after her disgracefully biased moderating of the 2012 Vice-Presidential candidates debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. The latest is even more disgusting. Raddatz actually made the argument that Republicans and others describing the current policy of the Biden Administration regarding illegal immigration at the southern border as what it is has caused the flood of illegals into the U.S. Continue reading →

Unethical Asshole Of The Month: MSG Entertainment CEO James Dolan

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The Ethics Alarms 2022 Award for Asshole of the Year will be awarded to Donald Trump, natch, later today, and this episode involving the CEO of MSG Entertainment won’t threaten Trump’s honor. I could see Trump doing this. I could see Elon Musk doing it; indeed, he came close.

But James Dolan’s conduct is still pretty disgusting. Lawyer Kelly Conlon was accompanying her daughter and her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to a performance of the “Christmas Spectacular” show with the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York City when a facial recognition system identified her in the lobby. After walking into the theater Conlon was flagged by security and told to leave because of she works for Davis, Saperstein & Salomon, a law firm representing clients in litigation against MSG, a large entertainment holding company overseeing live events at venues including Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon Theater and the Hulu Theater. CEO Dolan has a policy of banning attorneys at any law firm that sues an MSG venues from attending MSG events.

Conlan isn’t alone in being harassed; another lawyer, Nicolette Landi, was on her way to Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas To All Show” at Madison Square Garden last week, when she was denied entry too. All the members of her law firm, Burns and Harris, had received letters banning them from events at all of MSG’s properties. Lawyer Larry Hutcher, a Knicks season ticket holder for nearly 50 years, also found himself on the blacklist because his firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, is in litigation against Dolan’s properties.

Continue reading →

The FBI’s Rationalization For Its Twitter Content Manipulation: “We Do This Kind Of Thing All The Time!”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well alrighty then! All is well!

The Federal Bureau of Investigation  issued a supposedly exonerating statement today following the latest “Twitter Files” dump, which disclosed information detailing the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter in October 2020. Substack’sMatt Taibbi revealed that the agency warned the previous management at Twitter of a “hack-and-leak” by “state actors” surrounding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop to influence the 2020 presidential election. The “Twitter Files” also revealed that the FBI and Twitter worked closely in the lead up to the election, with documents published this week showing that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 for  the expenses entailed by complying with the FBI’s demands/requests. The FBI also flagged certain tweets for Twitter to remove from the platform, the documents show, and FBI agents were  even employed at Twitter during this period.

If I were a publicity experts advising the FBI, my recommendation would be that no comment would be preferable to this statement, which is desperate and damning:

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous detailing companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Continue reading →

Riddle Me This: How Is The Republican National Committee Like Black Lives Matters?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Like all good riddles, this one has more than one answer, though none of them are funny. Ironic, perhaps. Infuriating, surely. Nauseating, absolutely.

The first answer is that both misappropriate money donated to them by passionate supporters who foolishly trusted their leadership and staffs to use the funds to accomplish the organizations’ promised mission. Another answer is that the unethical betrayers of trust in both organizations will fall back on Rationalization #13. The Saint’s Excuse: “It’s for a good cause” to try to justify and minimize their betrayal.

The GOP’s resounding flop in the recent mid-term election despite conditions that historically have guaranteed a large number of Senate and House victories to the advantage of the party not holding the White House has donors asking questions and pointing fingers. The conservative website RedState acquired a report dated October 7, 2022 that examined the RNC’s 2021-22 spending up to that time. What it shows is an unethical, incompetent, unprofessional untrustworthy non-profit organization that took millions in donations it solicited with promises of turning them into national policy and regime change and wasted millions on the whims and comfort of its managers instead.

The report calculated expenditures of more than $500,000 in private jet expenses, $64,000 at clothing retailers, and $321,000 in floral arrangements, among other details. Here is the full list—remember, this is only for the 2021-2022 cycle:

Continue reading →

Oregon’s Governor Spares 17 Murderers Who Deserve To Die

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

It is clear the the 2022 Ethics Alarms Award for the Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Year is going to come down to the wire. Oregon Governor Kate Brown, already a strong contender (as she was in 2021 and 2020), just delivered a pure grandstanding exhibition that insulted multiple juries, undermined the rule of law, and in effect lowered the penalty for vicious murder to that of far less heinous crimes.

Her decision to commute the death sentences of 17 convicted killers who have forfeited the right to live in civilized society is legal, and the power she has to make it is necessary. There has to be some safety valve for the justice system, which is bound to fail as all systems do, and making the executive the final arbiter of extreme and unusual cases is the best of several flawed options. However, many governors abuse this power, and, like Brown, use it to pander to a political base. Here, from Oregon Live, is the list of the seventeen men on Death Row that Brown feels deserve to continue to live at taxpayers’ expense: Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet(s) Of The Month And Ethics Dunce, Res Ipsa Loquitur Division: Jessica Valenti

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

What more needs to be said about a) a woman who would tweet this ethically-deranged nonsense, and b) a society in which substantial numbers of people think she’s worth paying attention to? Continue reading →

Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Quote Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There were more unethical quotes this year than I recall reading and hearing in a long time, and that’s just the ones Ethics Alarms chose to highlight. Winners in the category included The New York Times (twice) and the Washington Post, CNN’s finally dismissed hack Chris Cuomo, Joy Behar (I just picked one; there were about a hundred or so), Georgetown Law Center’s Dean, William Trainor, Donald Trump (twice!), Chris’s corrupt and disgraced brother, former NY governor Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Lindsay Graham, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Dr. Fauci, Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, a federal court nominee who “explained” in her confirmation hearing that she lied in an address to Princeton students to “make a rhetorical point”; Joe Biden (again, for one of about a hundred 2022 quotes that would qualify); Kamala Harris of course, Nancy Pelosi, Rep Eric Swalwell, Barack Obama, Golden State Warriors owner Chamath Palihapitiya, CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer, and Van Jones (today!), Ann Hathaway, Media Matters chief Angelo Carusone, Herschel Walker (again, take your pick), AOC (ditto), NY Governor Kathy Hochul, Liz Cheney, GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, GOP Rep. Mary Miller, Democratic Senator Chris Coons, Kim Sill, founder of the Shelter Hope Pet Shop, and Stacey Abrams.

Many of these could have easily been winners in a more temperate year, but President Biden lapped them all with his September, televised “Soul of the Nation” speech that was “wildly unethical…irresponsible, disrespectful, unfair, and un-American, as well as hypocritical, indeed a betrayal, from a leader who promised on his Inauguration Day, “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.”

Biden gave a fascist speech to accuse his political opponents of being fascists

No American President has ever delivered such a despicable addess. It debased his office, and damaged the Republic. But, to be fair, it may have influenced enough fools to keep Democrats from the mid-term wipe-out they deserved. So there’s that.

Most Unethical Quote of the Year: President Joe Biden

No contest.

Worst of Ethics Award 2022: Most Unethical Trend Of The Year

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Winner: Totalitarianism.

In truth, there was one more Ethics Alarms post featuring references to nascent totalitarianism in 2021 than this year, but I neglected to publish the Awards last year. Before that, the word  hardly had to be used here at all: ironic, since according one of the primary Big Lies weaponized by “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media was that the previous President was an “autocrat” and seeking to end democracy.

Over the past two years we have seen direct and open defiance of the Constitution, with a President deliberately making edicts that he previously acknowledged were beyond his power. We are seeing political show trials, partisan witch hunts (the democratic norm defying Jan. 6 Commission), attempts to install truth commissions in a federal agency, efforts to cripple the Supreme Court, efforts to prevent Republicans from running for office, Justice Department intimidation of parents who oppose racist course material and the promotion of LGBTQ sexual relationships and practices, evidence of rogue law enforcement agencies with political agendas, government-encouraged suppression of speech and dissent and corporations willing to be agents of such suppression, the artificial extension of national “emergencies” to expand executive power, and punishment of dissent in the schools, universities and even law firms…all while the majority of the mainstream media rejects integrity and objectivity to issuing propaganda “for the greater good.”

Perhaps most disturbing of all, a U.S. President gave a nationally televised speech in which he directed citizens to fear the opposition party as “clear and present dangers” to the nation, while doing the most striking imitation of a fascist demagogue ever to be seen coast-to-coast. And the impression was widely praised.

Where this stops, nobody knows.