Ethics Dunces

CNN’s Outright “It Isn’t What It Is” Propaganda To Support The Democratic Party’s “Affordablity” Scam (Or “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias”)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Hundreds of people sent it in, but nobody sent it to Ethics Alarms. Come one, you guys, I’m depending on you!

That clip above, in which CNN’s supposed stat guru Harry Enten deliberately (or impossibly incompetently) misinterprets a Fox News poll about what proportion of Americans think prices are higher than a year ago for various consumer products as showing how much prices have risen for those products. Nobody in the segment pointed the error out. Nobody screamed from off-camera. There has been no CNN correction or retraction.

Enten, in his usual hyperactive mode, said, “I mean, your costs are up vs a year ago!” and begins underlining to the products and reads the percentages aloud, implying costs are up by that much. Then he says, “The bottom line is this: Americans feel prices are rising in every single part of their lives”—implying that they “feel” it because just look at how much those prices are rising!—“rising ever higher and they just don’t feel like, Kate Balduan, that they can catch a break.” Well, how could they? Just look at those percentages!

Are Americans so clueless that they would believe this nonsense? Apparently the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the news media (“the Axis of Unethical Conduct” ) think so, or they wouldn’t try to get away with it every day, all over the news media. The Biden administration goofs its way into a period of 9% inflation, prices soar, the rate of inflation comes down dramatically in the Trump Administration but the same party responsible for raising the prices uses the inevitable fact that they aren’t coming down (prices as a whole never come down, they just go up more slowly) as proof that the current administration is failing. Yes, Trump shares some blame for this by saying that he would bring prices down during his campaign. He was being his usual careless talk self and meant (I guess) that he would bring some prices down, but as usual his habitual hyperbole got him into trouble. That error does not excuse lies like Enten’s, however.

If CNN was a real practitioner of journalism, which it is not (I don’t think there is a single trustworthy news organization anywhere today), Enten would have used the Fox News poll the way it was explained on Fox: to show the large gap between the reality of U.S. prices and the public perception of it, in part because of Axis lies. To take one obvious example, gasoline is down from a year ago and anyone who drives a car knows it. But Enten implied that the cost of gas is up “54%”!

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Unethical Quote of the Week: “Good Illegal Immigrant”Rahel Negassi

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “The only thing I’ve done is that I am Eritrean.”

—-Illegal Eritrean immigrant Rahel Negassito to her son, in the latest “Feel badly for illegal immigrants who finally get what they deserve” feature by the New York Times.

Rahel looks smug and defiant in the photo, as indeed she is. She did nothing wrong, but the (revoltingly) sympathetic story of her problems relocating to Canada from the U.S., where she has been residing illegally for 20 years, reports that she got into the country by

  • “…paying a smuggler who eventually got her to Britain, where she bought a fake British passport” to get her into the U.S.
  • …getting caught by ICE when the passport was recognized as fake
  • …being released after her application as a refugee was rejected, as a “paroled undocumented migrant.” 
  • ….living with her citizen sister for 20 years, counting on America’s slack and, for most of the period, law-ignoring immigration process to protect her.

Then as the story tells us, cruel Donald Trump was elected and set out to fulfill his campaign promise to clear as many illegal immigrants out of the U.S. as possible. A gift link is here.

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KABOOM! I Never Thought We’d See a U.S. President (Or Senator, or Governor, or Judge) Stoop To This…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Do I really have to explain what’s unethical about this?

I hope not.

It’s something special, all right. Talk about shattering “norms.” Also good taste, the respect for the office, the line between celebrity and public service, and… well, you fill in the rest.

I’ll be in my bathroom, throwing up.

Ethics Dunces: 98 Democratic Party House Members

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One would think that a Congressional resolution calling for the condemnation of communism and socialism would be an easy one to vote for, but one would be wrong. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), the daughter of Cuban refugees, introduced a non-binding resolution to Congress this past week called “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.” Most of the historical villains referenced in the resolution —Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolás Maduro—were Communists. Nevertheless, not only did 100 members of the Democratic Party vote against a statement of principles that flows directly from our founding documents and core values (Jefferson wrote, “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it,” and Madison added that it “is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest…), they were confident enough of the effectiveness their party’s pro-socialist propaganda to go on the record as opposing that statement. All the worst villains are there: the “Squad,” Pelosi, Jaimie Raskin, Maxine Waters.

The number of Democrats unwilling to condemn socialism, and therefore its nasty offspring communism, was even more damning: in addition to the 98 naysayers, two Democrats voted “present” and 47 weenies refuse to vote at all.

Democrats are now telling us exactly who they are and what their agenda is.

And This Is Supposed To Be A Rising Leader of the Democrat Party…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Unbelievable. Or at least it should be unbelievable that an elected member of Congress would behave like this. That the party such an indefensible hack belongs to—and who is regarded as a leader of???— wouldn’t collectively disclaim any responsibility for said hack and wear paper bags over their heads in penance. That…oh, never mind. Why do I bother?

Diving in to try to defend Virginia Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D) after the Epstein files revealed that she had been reading texts from the convicted sex-trafficker during a House hearing, Crockett got up and accused Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sarah Palin and Trump official Lee Zeldin among other Republicans officials of receiving political contributions from “someone named Jeffrey Epstein” as she claimed that Republicans were exacting a double standard—you know, like Democrats do routinely. But the Jeffrey Epstein she was tying to Romney et al. was a completely different person.

Was the ethically-inert Texas Congresswomen shooting off her mouth using false information because she is irresponsible and incompetent, or was she engaging in despicable deceit (that is, lying) to mislead the public? Who knows, and I don’t care: her declaration was a bright-line ethics breach and sanctionable in either case, as well as signature significance both for an untrustworthy member of Congress and a hyper-partisan asshole.

Ah, but this in-your-face blot on the U.S. Legislative Branch wasn’t done. When her false innuendos were raised in a CNN interview, Crockett exploded in double-talk to try to weasel out of her indefensible conduct:

“Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein. Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there. And because they decided to spring this on us in real time, I wanted the Republicans to think about what could potentially happen because I knew that they didn’t even try to go through the FEC,” this awful woman humina-humina-ed. “So my team, what they did is they Googled. And that is specifically why I said, ‘a Jeffrey Epstein’. Unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies.”

Somebody pleas explain to Crockett what a lie is.

” Because it was not the same one, that’s fine,” she continued, spinning like Dorothy’s cyclone. “But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was it was a different Jeffrey Epstein. He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein. So at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is? I have not. So I will trust and take what he says is that it wasn’t that Jeffrey Epstein, but I was not attempting to mislead anybody. I literally had maybe 20 minutes before I had to do that debate.”

Right. Of course she was trying to mislead.

Kaitlin Collins responded (more equivocally than she should have): “Yeah, but people might see that say, well, you’re trying to make it sound like he took money from a literal sex offender.”

“But I literally did not know,” Crockett answered.

Jasmine Crockett is a walking, jive-talking insult to the nation.

Incompetent Elected Official and Ethics Dunce (But You Knew That, I Hope): Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene amazed Washington, D.C last night when she announced that she will resign from Congress after the first of the year, refusing to meet her obligations to the (dumb) voters who elected her and leaving them without a voice in Congress—an obnoxious and foolish voice, true, but still—for months.

As is often the case with the ethically-challenged, Taylor-Greene has managed to exceed the worst expectations of her. She has been a disgrace; now she is further disgracing herself and doing so with the vacant stare of the IQ-deficient and the phony smile of the bad liar. Like other recently departed creeps (George Santos, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Matt Gaetz) elected by exactly the kinds of voters the Founders were worried about when they decided to try the republic thingy, Taylor-Greene (henceforth just “Green” because I resent having to spend any more time typing her name that I have to) will leave Congress and our government a better place by leaving them.

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No, Rachel Maddow Did Not Demonstrate a Sudden Attack of Decency and Bi-Partisanship By Attending Dick Cheney’s Funeral

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Oh come on. Does anyone really believe this? Seriously?

Dishonest and frighteningly biased like the paper he works for, New York Times pundit Peter Baker actually had the gall to post this on “X”:

To which Sidney Wang quickly responded,

“Changed” since when? Maddow has been allied with the Trump-hating Cheneys and Bushes since at least 2015.

Maddow was invited to Chaney’s funeral, a gathering one wag described as a meeting of the “I Hate Trump” club, by Liz Cheney, who became a favorite of MSNBC’s talking heads once she voted for the second of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan impeachments against President Trump and was complicit in the rigged Star Chamber hearings on the so-called J-6 riots. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is an ancient proverb that has turned up in many cultures and in the mouths of many philosophers since the dawn of speech. It is simple Cognitive Dissonance Scale reality. Glenn Greenwald gets it, but then do Elmo and the cast of “Jackass!”, I bet:

It isn’t Maddow’s presence at the funeral but the absence of President Trump and Vice-President Vance that shows the collapse of professionalism, mutual respect, decency and decorum in today’s politics. Neither were invited to attend. Trump recklessly (and, as I have written before, stupidly) insulted the Bush-Cheney political machine when he was running for President in 2016, and it wreaked its revenge by abandoning the supposed conservative principles its members stood for to become bitter and fanatic NeverTrumpers. Dick Cheney and his daughter endorsed Kamala Harris, proving that personal vendettas were more important to them than the welfare of the nation. 

If Maddow’s smirking presence at the funeral showed how “politics have changed in America,”it only demonstrated that they have become more petty and and vicious, with its institutions being weakened and the public trust in its motives justly reduced to vapors.

Now THIS Is An Unethical Judge (Or Just A Nut Case…)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Matthew E.P. Thornhill was the longest-serving circuit judge in St. Charles County, Missouri. A judicial conduct commission recently demanded that he be suspended and then resign, and Thornhill has agreed to retire pending the approval of the Missouri Supreme Court. Why is he leaving? Well…

1. He promoted his election campaigns by asking litigants, witnesses and lawyers if they had seen his “Thornhill for Judge” signs.

2. He gave a personal reference on behalf of the petitioner in an adoption case that was pending before another judge. A judge can’t be a character witness without a subpoena.

3….and then there was the judge’s obsession with Elvis Presley:

  • According to his biography page on the St. Charles County Circuit Court website, he “loves Elvis.” So much so that he would refer to the dates of Presley’s birth or death “when such statements were irrelevant to the proceedings before the court.”
  • He frequently recited Elvis’s song lyrics in court.
  • He asked litigants and witnesses if they wanted Elvis’s songs played as they were being sworn in.
  • He indeed sometimes played Elvis recordings in the courtroom and (Drumroll!)…
  • Dressed up as Elvis during trials, sometimes wearing an Elvis wig.

The state’s Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline of Judges found that Judge Thornhill had “engaged in a course of conduct in which he failed to maintain order and decorum in the courtroom, in his chambers and in the courthouse, and further failed to maintain the dignity appropriate of judicial office.”

In a letter to the Missouri Supreme Court, Thornhill wrote that wearing an Elvis wig and playing Elvis songs in court had been to “add levity at times when I thought it would help relax litigants….I now recognize that this could affect the integrity and solemnity of the proceedings.” The Commission on Retirement, Removal and Discipline of Judges has announced that Judge Thornhill had “admitted to the truth and substantial accuracy” of the allegations against him and would be retiring after his suspension.

In a local television interview last year, Thornhill said that he had visited Graceland 13 times. “Burning Love” is one of his favorite Elvis songs.

Me too!

So here it is….

Regarding That “Seditious” Democrat Video…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Who’s kidding whom?

You know that six former members of the military who by chance happened to be Democrats didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to “remind” members of the military that they are not supposed to obey “illegal orders.” They know that: every member of the military is taught the principle, though few have the fortitude to actually defy a superior officer on that basis. (My father did it at least three times during World War II while in the infantry.) This fake public service message or whatever you’d like to call it was a cheap, deceitful, underhanded way of advancing the Democratic Party’s “autocrat”/”threat to democracy”/”end elections” narrative to smear President Trump while exacerbating the brain fever of Trump Derangement Victims. Oh, it’s clever in the same diabolical way the “It’s OK to be white!” signs were, or the whole Black Lives Matter scam, or “Let’s Go Brandon!” Wink-wink. nudge-nudge, you get what we really mean, don’t you?

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University Presidents Say That Higher Ed Has “Lost The Trust” of the Public—Gee, Ya THINK?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

When it takes universities and colleges this long to figure out what was already obvious for years, no wonder the public has lost trust in them.

“We Lost Our Mission’: Three University Leaders on the Future of Higher Ed” is the latest “Breaking: Water is Wet!” media headline, this one at the New York Times[gift link]. Sian Beilock, president of Dartmouth College, Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, and Jennifer Mnookin, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spoke with Times’ opinion editor Ariel Kaminer. Despite the headline, it is not an encouraging discussion.

The gist of the three presidents’ “confession” is the same as that of the Biden Administration’s response to the public’s gradual realization that its policies were a disaster. “We need better messaging!” Translation: “We need to get better at fooling people into thinking we are doing what we are not.”

The three university presidents criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to reform higher education’s conversion from educating to indoctrinating while saying they must work to regain the trust of the American people and emphasize viewpoint diversity. “I don’t believe a compact with a Republican or Democratic-led White House is the right way to effect change in higher ed,” Beilock said. Funny though: the three wouldn’t be making having this discussion if the Trump administration wasn’t throwing a spotlight on their bias and failure. “The Trump administration is cracking down, artificial intelligence is ramping up, varsity athletes are getting paid and a college education is losing its status as the presumptive choice of ambitious high school seniors,” the article begins. Yes, that’s a fair summary of where higher education is right now, with no improvement in sight.

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