Ethics Quotes

I Hereby Solemnly Pledge, With My Hand On My 1967 Boston Red Sox Yearbook Turned To The Photo Of Tony Conigliaro, That I Will Vote For All African-American Politicians, Regardless Of Policies Or Party, Who Declare That They Will Not Exploit Racial Divisions, And Will Never Blame Criticism, Justified Or Not, On The “Racism” Of Their Critics

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

That politician would not be new New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Adams yesterday ranted at reporters for not being sufficiently laudatory regarding his performance so far in his still-young term. “If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job and we just can’t live in this alternate reality,” Adams fumed. To what does the Democrat attribute what he says is this lack of appreciation? Of course!

“I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me. How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written? How many Asians? How many East Asians? How many South Asians? Everyone talks about my government being diversified, what’s the diversification in the newsrooms? Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”

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Ethics Hero (“Socking It To Georgetown University” Div.) #2: Federal Judge James Ho

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As a graduate and former employee of Georgetown Law Center (and, though I say it myself, a living legend there), I have found the recent disgraceful episode where conservative scholar Illya Shapiro was suspended by the Dean at GULC for a tweet expressing the view that President Biden’s announced plan to make race and gender his primary criteria for filling Justice Breyer’s soon to be vacant seat on the Supreme Court particularly discouraging. (My JD diploma was already face to the wall for previous embarrassments, however.) I have been particularly disgusted by the failure of the GULC faculty to speak up in support of Shapiro in public, though other academics across the country have done so.

Thus it was with particular pleasure that I learned how Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, slated to speak at GULC yesterday on “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” saw the obvious relevance of his topic to Shapiro’s ordeal and shocked his hosts by giving a different lecture than the one announced. He said in part,

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: American Thinker…(With A Flashback And Regrets)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“If this were just a scam that conned myriad wealthy corporations and celebrities, BLM could have been forgiven. But their influence has been damaging to the social fabric of the U.S.”

Conservative blog America Thinker, in a post by Rajan Laad called “BLM is Imploding”

The post was foretold last week on Ethics Alarms, when it featured “Observations On What Appears To Be An Epic Black Lives Matter Scandal.” The unfolding story has still been tamped down by the news media, further fulfilling its toxic role as “enemies of the people.” Laad has some additional details:

Indiana’s attorney general slammed BLM as a “scam” whose “house of cards may be falling” amid the growing legal attention. The states of Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia have all revoked BLM’s charitable registration, while California and Washington are threatening to hold the nonprofit’s officers personally liable for its lack of financial transparency.

The rest of the article is truly damning, and I can’t find anything substantially inaccurate in it. The review is also infuriating. Ethics Alarms correctly saw this movement/scam for what it was from the beginning. That’s no great accomplishment: it should have been obvious. What was lacking weren’t sufficient clues, but sufficient courage and responsibility by the politicians, journalists, pundits, celebrities, elected official and corporations that enabled BLM’s despicable scheme to succeed. It not only raised millions through virtue-signaling extortion, it got itself endorsed by one of the two major parties, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and strategically positioned so that any criticism was immediately used to brand the critic as a racist.

For the record, I want to state that those who fell for this con branded themselves as fools. Those who knew what BLM was and still supported it are worse; the label “unethical” doesn’t begin to do them justice. Continue reading →

It Reveals The Dire State Of U.S. Higher Education Culture That Dean William M. Treanor Of Georgetown University Law Center Isn’t The Most Unethical Law School Administrator Of The Past Year (It’s Close, Though…)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That distinction still has to go to Yale Law School Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Yaseen Eldik and Associate Dean of Student Affairs Ellen Cosgrove, who persecuted, and and threatened a student in this infamous episode last Fall. Their victim is a student, which gives them an edge over Dean Treanor whose target is Ilya Shapiro, GULC’s newly hired director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and vice-president of the Cato Institute.

Just two days ago, I described Shapiro’s foray into the debate over President Biden’s looming Supreme Court nomination, which will have to be a black woman because race and gender are more important to the Far Left than qualifications, ability and experience in the branch of the government that protects the Constitution, but mostly because Joe promised he would while in Full Pander Mode as he fought for his party’s nomination to oppose President Trump in 2020. Shapiro issued a series of tweets that were crystal clear to anyone reading them rationally and honestly, making his case that Biden should be nominating Justice Breyer’s replacement on the basis of qualifications, ability and experience. A careless choice of words, however—this was Twitter, after all—gave race-baiters and progressive censors an opportunity to pounce, and they did.

Shapiro was accused of being a racist (of course); the law schools black student association demanded he be fired (also of course); and GULC’s ostentatiously woke Dean capitulated to the anti-free speech and anti-academic freedom mob, announcing yesterday to me and other “alumni/ae”, as the marvelous Dean I worked for, the late David McCarthy always called them…

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Unethical—And Ignorant!—Quote Of The Month: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“The air in humid, hotter environments contains more water, which can condense onto the virus particles, make them bigger and theoretically fall to the ground faster. Wu compares the particles to a rock in this case — the more mass, the faster it falls.”

—-Washington Post Reporter Kasha Patel, forgetting about Galileo and gravity in an alleged science article headlined,  “Covid-19 may have seasons for different temperature zones, study suggests.”

Her editors also seem to have missed 6th grade science. In truth, I believe I learned about Galileo’s experiment with the Leaning Tower of Pisa before the sixth grade, after Santa left a children’s book about “great moments in science” in my sister’s stocking. We shared it, and it ended up with me: it’s around the house somewhere. I think about the book every time I end up on Walter Reed Drive in Arlington, which is often. His story is also in it; I wish I could think of the title.

The full quote is… Continue reading →

Not Just An Unethical Statement, But An Unbelievable One: The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There’s nothing quite like starting the day with a head explosion.

A New York Times story today about the start of Sarah Palin’s libel suit against the New York Times—Conflict of interest? What conflict of interest?—contained this astounding statement:

The Times has denied those allegations, rebutting the notions that it would ever knowingly print something false…

The thrust of the Times objective, unbiased analysis of the lawsuit against the Times is that “Ms. Palin’s evidence is weak,” but she might win anyway, thus creating one more danger to democracy by weakening freedom of the press.

The evidence is weak? The Supreme Court decision in The New York Times Company v. Sullivan held that for public officials to prove defamation, they had to show not only that a news story was false and harmed their reputation, but that the story resulted from “actual malice,” involving printing a claim or allegation with “reckless disregard for the truth” or knowing it was false. Palin is suing because a Times editorial in 2017 stated that when Rep. Gabriel Giffords was shot by a lunatic in 2011, the crime had “clear[ly]“ been incited by a map circulated by  Palin’s political action committee showing 20 congressional districts that Republicans were hoping to win, including the one held by Giffords, labeled by stylized cross hairs. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month: Golden State Warriors Owner Chamath Palihapitiya

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay. You bring it up because you care and I think it’s nice that you care. The rest of us don’t care. I’m just telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line.”

—–Golden State Warriors owner Chamath Palihapitiya, in an interview.

This statement, classic signature significance, neatly explains why the National Basketball Association remains metaphorically in bed with the brutal regime in China, why the Biden Administration refuses to hold the country responsible for its role as an international outlaw (and inflicting its virus on our population,economy and the world), and if you change just one word, why the United States allowed Hitler’s Final Solution to proceed as far as it did.

Give credit where it is due: at least Palihapitiya is being honest. As for his fellow owners, we can see that they feel exactly the same way through their conduct, but prefer not to say so out loud. It might cut down on the profits from souvenir NBA jerseys. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Signature Significance): Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“Few people have done more for this state and this country than this driven, brilliant, sometimes irascible, deeply good man from Searchlight, Nevada.”

—-Former President Barack Obama, speaking at former Democratic Party Senate leader Harry Reid’s funeral.

Harry Reid was asked about his repeated lie during the 2012 Presidential campaign that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes over the previous decade.  Reid even made that allegation from the floor of the Senate.

Reid’s accusation was an outright, brazen lie. Romney released his tax returns for those years. In 2011, Romney paid $1.9 million in taxes; in 2010, he paid slightly more than $3 million in taxes. The Washington Post Fact Checker, a reliable defender of unethical conduct by Democrats, gave Reid Four Pinocchios for his “no taxes” claim. Another inveterate left-biased factchecking group, PolitiFact, gave the claim a “Pants on Fire” rating.

Reid’s answer to the query became infamous: he responded, “Romney didn’t win, did he?” Later, he insisted  that the lie was “the best thing he ever did.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

manchin

“Why did they hope for so much when they had a 50-50 Senate? Why did they think they’d won the support “to realize [the liberal leaders’] longtime policy goals”?

—-“Politically neutral” blogger/ former law professor Ann Althouse, commenting on the Democrats’ expressions of anger, disappointment and betrayal after Sen. Joe Manchin scuttled their multi-trillion social policies spending bill.

Why indeed. There have been a couple of Ethics Alarms posts about this general topic already, but Althouse’s reaction is particularly deft, since it functions as both a “What the hell’s the matter with these people?” legitimate query and a rhetorical question in which the answer is implicit.

That answer is that the Democrats have abandoned the basic tenets of how this republic is supposed to work as well as the principles of democracy that have served it so well. Never before in our history has the attitude of a political party been that once they have been granted power they have leave to put in place whatever policies and laws their most radical and extreme members can imagine irrespective of the clear expectations and beliefs of the American public.

The closest I can recall is the immediate prelude to the Civil War on the subject of slavery, and even then, the South revolted because it anticipated that the Republican Party would behave this way. The sweeping New Deal policies were undertaken by Democratic control of Congress and the White House with overwhelming support of a frightened public in the grip of The Great Depression. Lyndon Johnson’s extensive reforms followed his landslide victory over a conservative candidate whose views has been resoundingly rejected.

The fact that the House and the Senate are almost evenly divided reflects the lack of consensus or even a clear plurality of public opinion favoring many of the measures in the now-dead “Build Back Better” bill. Democracy exists on a foundation of respect and trust: a closely divided public compels elected officials to proceed carefully and to avoid the appearance of the government running roughshod over half the nation. If a party in power believes fervently in policies so much of the public opposes, then it must lead and persuade, not mandate and decree.

This Democratic Party’s strategy, instead, has been totalitarian in both method and spirit. The pandemic response of Democrats has been constitutionally dubious restrictions on personal liberty, mobility, and autonomy. Those who oppose their policies in this and other areas have been vilified, insulted, denigrated, bullied and threatened, and from the highest levels. Instead of legitimate debate and persuasion, the party has relied on propaganda, and a complicit news media that is expected to mislead the public while enhancing an extreme partisan message. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Comic Sarah Silverman [Corrected…It’s Ron De Santis, Not “Jim.” Sorry, Ron. Sorry, Everybody…]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

1551

“The truth has to matter.”

—–Sarah Silverman, actress, comic, progressive activist, rebuking MSNBC’s Joy Reid for a typical fact-free and inflammatory statement.

Ron DeSantis, the Republican Florida governor, announced a proposal last week that would allocate $3.5 million in state funds toward re-establishing the Florida State Guard.

As an announcement explained:

The establishment of the Florida State Guard will further support those emergency response efforts in the event of a hurricane, natural disasters and other state emergencies. The $3.5 million to establish the Florida State Guard will enable civilians to be trained in the best emergency response techniques. By establishing the Florida State Guard, Florida will become the 23rd state with a state guard recognized by the federal government.

Somewhere a memo went out from Democratic Party Cheap Shot Hysteria Headquarters encouraging disgraceful reactions like this, from Democratic state Sen. Annette Taddeo, who is running for governor:

DeSantis smear tweet

On the plus side, it’s good for voters to know that Annette can’t read: note that the information that 23 states already have a state guard is right in the announcement.

Can’t read, or won’t stop trying to confuse the public? Here’s former Florida Governor Charlie Christ, making a solid effort to surpass Taddeo’s idiocy:

Crist tweet

A “secret police” with a public announcement!

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