Ethics Dunces

A “Great Stupid” Court Case SO Stupid That It Makes “The Great Stupid” Look Almost Smart…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That crude, ambiguous drawing above got a first grader—we’re talking six-years-old here—suspended. That’s almost all you have to know for your head to explode if it is properly wired.

The Ethics Villains and Dunces are so thick in this fiasco you could use it to lay bricks. I’m almost embarrassed to tell the story, which I first saw at Reason…

In March of 2021, a first grader referred to as “B.B.” ” drew a picture we are told was intended to show people of different races, representing “three classmates and herself holding hands.” (I’d save the money the family was planning on spending on art school for B.B., if that was their intent.) Above the drawing, B.B. wrote “Black Lives Mater” (Latin!) with the words “any life” stuck in-between the slogan and the jelly beans, or whatever they were. B.B. then gave the drawing to a black classmate, as what B.B. testified was intended as a friendly gesture. But the classmate either ratted out B.B. or the principal was told about it by the teacher, or something (because school administrators don’t have anything better to do than to police the political correctness of kids’ drawings).

The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, admonished B.B., saying that the drawing was “inappropriate.” B.B. was ordered to apologize to her classmate, prohibited from drawing any more pictures in school, and prevented from going to recess for two weeks.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Gov. Walz Doesn’t Believe in the First Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There is no context that can make that clip anything but vivid evidence of the totalitarian mindset of Harris’s VP pick and the Democratic Party.

Many, many Democrats have made equivalent statements, recently and years ago. So have many of their media allies, though the only one I can think of right now is Chris Cuomo, and to be fair, he’s an idiot.

There is no genuine controversy, not doubt, no question: “hate speech” and “misinformation” are protected under the Bill of Rights. For a Vice-Presidential candidate to think otherwise is disqualifying. Heck, it is disqualifying for a governor, even of a state as ethically addled as Minnesota. It’s disqualifying for a mail carrier. A third grade teacher.

Ironically, Walz’s statement itself is misinformation (Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time?). By his own deluded and anti-American values, Walz shouldn’t be allowed to make it.

As If Any More Evidence Was Needed That NBC Has Dead Ethics Alarms…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

NBC Olympics announcer Leigh Diffey got his call of the 100-meter dash gold medal win for Noah Lyles wrong. Lyles edged out Kishane Thompson of Jamaica by a 0.005 seconds to claim the USA’s first gold in the event since 2004. He incorrectly declared Thompson the winner on the live broadcast, which is understandable, since the two runners were also confused about who had won. Reportedly NBC planned to replay the full race again “with added context,” meaning that Diffey’s call will be “corrected.”

I’m hoping that some rogue staffer with functioning ethics alarms talked them out of it: so far, I can’t find the video of the replay or any commentary confirming that NBC went through with its plan as reported.

The fact that NBC Sports even considered doing it is ominous enough, however. An announcer’s call is part of the sporting event itself. Many calls that were later assessed as unprofessional (“THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THEY’RE GOING CRAZY! WWWEEEAAAHHHOOOOO!”) or incorrect nonetheless entered the Memorable Broadcasting Hall of Fame, or would have if there were such a place. The fact that Diffey reported the wrong runner as the victor just shows how close the finish was.

Does it not register on these people that the more they are caught covering up their own errors and mistakes, the less reason the public has to trust anything they show or say? Apparently not.

_____________________

Pointer: Curmie

Just In Case You’ve Forgotten, April Ryan is Still an Ethics Dunce, the News Media Is Still Biased, and Trump is Still Not a Weenie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I guess there is still some hope that race-baiting, anti-white racist, Trump-Deranged, dumb-as-a-shoehorn journalist April Ryan is slowly sliding into oblivion where she belongs. Once she was a CNN correspondent, which admittedly is nothing to be proud of, but now she toils for the Grio, a racist, race-baiting, American television network and website that says its area is “black news.” Funny, I thought news was news for everyone! Oh well, live and learn. Next on Ryan’s career freefall? Oh, maybe Hip Hop Weekly? But never mind.

April has a long Ethics Alarms dossier, the most recent entry in 2020, when she reprimanded reporters for writing about a leaked recording of Joe Biden making unpalatable comments about the “defund the police” movement. As Jonathan Turley said at the time, “[W]e are moving dangerously close to a de facto state media with the cooperation of Big Tech companies.  Ryan believes that it is outrageous to rely on unapproved material if it is critical of Joe Biden (despite her use of such material for the last four years against Trump).”

Indeed she does. My favorite Ryan episode was in 2017, when she hectored Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the end of a press briefing in which Sanders confirmed the administration’s position that toppling statues of historical figures is both bad history and bad civics by shouting, “Sarah, is slavery wrong? Sarah, is slavery wrong? Does this administration think that slavery was wrong? Sarah, does this administration believe slavery was wrong?”

A class act, to be sure.

The latest April Ryan sighting came as Donald Trump bravely and appropriately agreed to take questions in Chicago today from members of the National Association of Black Journalists. Ryan, of course, was in the camp of the members who have pledged to follow the “Trump is a racist” narrative, contrived though it is. “The reports of attacks on Black women White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or conjecture, but fact,” Ryan tweeted, or Xed. The group’s co-chairwoman of the convention, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, resigned in protest: after all, why give a Presidential candidate a chance to change minds that have already been made up? Yeah, this is the perfect group for April Ryan.

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Ethics Dunce: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I have resolved to be more vigilant in calling ethics fouls on the various repeat ethical transgressions that proliferate in our society and political discourse. I wrote about some of them here; I just encountered another in an alleged legal ethics news letter. An alleged legal ethics newsletter that I have to pay for. Uh-uh, I’m not letting that pass. I was already triggered because I saw another TV commercial where two people were playing chess and the board was set up wrong. As soon as I see it again and note the product, I will out the company here. For so I have sworn.

Renee (Newman) Knake Jefferson is, she tells us, a law professor and an award-winning author. She “regularly consults on matters related to lawyer/judicial ethics and the first amendment and lawyer speech.” Jefferson holds the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center where she teaches ethics, constitutional law, and a writing seminar on gender, power, law, and leadership. Based on these credentials and the fact that a lot of the legal ethics blogs have been going defunct lately, I decided to subscribe to her weekly Legal Ethics Roundup at substack which promised to keep me up to date on significant developments in the field.

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Ethics Villain: Ex-J.D. Vance Friend Sofia Nelson

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Villain” is the best I can muster right now. I really can’t find the right word for someone who would do what Sofia Nelson did, or who would be able to look at themselves in the mirror after she did it.

Nelson, a close friend of J.D. Vance’s in law school and for many years thereafter, sent about 90 of the emails and text messages they exchanged from 2014 through 2017 to The New York Times. Nelson is gay or a trans-male or a trans-female, or something, I couldn’t possibly care less. Nor will I read the Times’ article about what its partisan “Slime Trump and Vance!” posse found in the emails thus far. All that matters from an ethics perspective is the throbbing betrayal of trust represented by anyone the sharing past private communications with a media outlet without obtaining consent and permission from the other party to the exchanges. It’s revolting that the Times would accept such stuff: this is a National Enquirer level story. Trump’s running mate once wrote “Love you” to a guy who is now a chick! Ew! Does that mean Vance is gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that?

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Great: Trump Makes Another Stupidly Phrased Comment That The News Media Will Use To Dishonestly Claim He’s Planning On Being a Dictator

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Boy, I’m sick of Trump being so reckless in his ad-libs and of the mainstream media’s deceit and disgusting double standards. The second I read Trump’s quote to a gathering of religious conservatives at The Believers’ Summit, an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach —“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians!”—I knew exactly how the Axis would spin it, and I was right. Harris pounced, the Times pounced (then they changed the heading to provide the context after the initial story ran), CNN pounced, they all pounced. See? There will never be another election if Trump wins! He just admitted it!

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Incompetent Elected Official and Ethics Dunce: VP Kamala Harris (Surprise!)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This shouldn’t be hard to grasp: incompetence really does matter in a President, as does trust.

Kamala Harris had a private discussion with Benjamin Netanyahu, a head of state. Diplomacy 101 dictates that when sensitive matters are discussed, neither party to such discussion reveals the details of what is said, nor does either party make statements after the meeting that undermine either the relationship between the two individuals, nor their respective nations, nor the interests and objectives of those nations.

This isn’t hard, nor should it be.

But for Kamala Harris, it is. This is a problem.

Having met with the Israel Prime Minister, Harris initially said that the U.S. has an “unwavering commitment” to Israel, its right to exist and its security. She called Hamas a “brutal terrorist organization.” Then she said,

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Busted! The “Completely Independent” Government Transparency Website” Proves It Is Just Another Democratic Party Propaganda Agent [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The effort across the news media and elsewhere in the Axis to distort Kamala Harris’s past record and documented positions sufficiently to render the public totally misinformed regarding the candidate whom Democrats are offering for President in November is rapidly reaching comic proportions. It reached Orwellian proportions some time ago.

GovTrack promotes itself as being independent, unbiased,and trustworthy. For five years, it included an entry on that esteemed site that ranked Harris as the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019—more liberal than, for example, Bernie Sanders, who is a proto-Communist, and Elizabeth Warren, who advocates a confiscatory wealth tax, wants to cancel most student loan debt, proposes to break up Big Tech companies, and wants a $20 trillion “Medicare for all” program paid for by taxing the living daylights out of businesses. Kamala’s more radical leftist profile is not, one may assume, a policy agenda the majority of Americans favor, so our unethical journalists and related villains are trying mightily to convince voters that Harris “isn’t what she is.”

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Ugh. Could Someone PLEASE Explain the First Amendment to Donald Trump? Quickly?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

This morning, I was simultaneously listening in on CNN (hyping Harris absurdly), MSNBC (well, you know) and Fox News, where the morning trio of hyper-partisan clowns were hosting Trump in a 30 minute phone monologue. First, I got a laugh when a CNN reporter commented on Harris having to navigate the complexities of Israel’s war with Gaza (Hamas). He actually said, first, “This is a major issue for Harris” and five seconds later that “Republicans are trying to make an issue out of this.” Yes, Harris was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease fire in Gaza, essentially making sure Hamas’s adverse consequences for slaughtering and raping Israel civilians on October 7 were minimal, but because she was only a VP at the time, and, after all, Kamala Harris, Idiot, nobody paid much attention to how irresponsible that position was. It is an issue, of course, but CNN will try “Republicans pounce!” even when everyone should pounce.

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