Ethics Train Wrecks

More Election Ad Deceit in NH

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Former Senator Kelly Ayotte is the GOP candidate for Governor of New Hampshire. She is also one of the long-time Roe v. Wade opponents who is being targeted by pro-abortion groups in attack ads. If you listen closely, some of the ads reveal the dark and ominous heart of the ‘We Love Abortion!’ movement.

I have had to watch one such ad repeatedly while following the Boston Red Sox as they are just-barely contending for a wild card berth. A sad-eyed mother reveals that when she was pregnant, a doctor who checked out the embryo (that was well past the usual legal abortion period in many states including New Hampshire) told the mother that “my baby would not survive.” She goes on to say that Ayotte is so cruel that she would make a mother like me “carry” a baby for months knowing that “it would not survive.” Ayotte supports the current 24 week limit on abortions.

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Once Again, Ethics Alarms Must Ask, “How Many Insults To Their Intelligence From Biden and Harris Will Voters Tolerate?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It was the fatuous and insulting “Biden” message above about the American hostage found murdered in Gaza that mandated this post, but I was already thinking about the ongoing insults after seeing a Harris TV ad last night that made my head explode.

I couldn’t find it on YouTube this morning, but Kamala was smirking as she again wafted vague about the “opportunity economy” while giving the political equivalent of singing “Imagine.” She said that “everyone should be able to get a car loan.” How would that work, exactly? It was Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank’s delusion that everyone should be able to get a home mortgage that set up the 2008 economic collapse. She says that she will lower prices and lower taxes, yet Harris cast the deciding vote on trillion-dollar government pork buffets that exploded inflation and made more taxes crucial if the U.S. is going to avoid a National Debt Armageddon. She says she refuses to return to the “politics of the past,” whatever that means—when governments didn’t try to lock up their political opponents, maybe?

There is literally not a single substantive policy statement in the whole ad, not one. Isn’t everyone insulted by ads like that? What kind of dolt would see and hear such deliberately non-substantive boilerplate recycled from “Hope and Change” and say, “Wow! I’m going to vote for her!” Why would anyone vote for a candidate who is so obviously using platitudes to avoid letting them know what she is really planning to do?

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Ethics Quiz: The Undated Envelope

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled 4-1 last week that voters fialing to include an accurate, handwritten date on the envelopes used to submit their mail-in ballots should not have their votes disqualified, though the state’s law requires it. The majority argued that the state constitution’s clause about “free and equal” elections precludes disqualification for such a “technicality.”

The ruling will probably keep several thousand Pennsylvania votes cast by careless morons from being thrown out in the upcoming election, which is expected to be especially close in that state.

“The refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote” in the Pennsylvania Constitution, wrote Judge Ellen Ceisler for the majority. The opinion made victors of the left-supporting groups who sued to loosen some more voting requirements.

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On “the Truthful, Brief, 21-Point Biography of Kamala Harris”: Ten Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I don’t know who “Cynical Publius” is: does it matter? (Grok is the irritating Twitter/”X” AI bot, and I couldn’t stop it from photo-bombing my screen shot.)

Points:

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More Non-Traditional Casting Double Standards Hypocrisy: “Whitewashing ‘Little Shop of Horrors'”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is another installment of a frequent topic on Ethics Alarms: non-traditional casting, DEI casting, and and virtue-signaling stunt casting just to appear woke. The position here as a long-time stage director who has been responsible for some audacious non-traditional casting in my time (I once cast the role Cole Porter with a woman) remains unchanged: if it works and the audience enjoys the show as much or more than it would have with a traditional casting choice, then all is well. (Full disclosure: casting Cold Porter as female did NOT work. At all…)

The mission of any stage production is to be fair to the show’s creators and make the production as effective theatrically as possible, not to make political or social statements that get in the way. (Prime example of the latter: this.)

Curmie sent me a link to “Yes, You Can Whitewash ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, But Please Don’t” at Chris Peterson’s Onstage blog. I love the musical (my old high school doubles tennis partner, Frank Luz, co-starred as the sadistic dentist in the original off-Broadway production and the cast album) based on the wonderful 1960 Roger Corman camp movie classic. I thought its creators would revive the genre, but Disney snapped them up (“The Little Mermaid”; “Beauty and the Beast”) and then half the team, Howard Ashman, died.

Peterson cites the license-holders’ quite reasonable casting note:

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The Great Stupid Rolls On: Remarkably, “Finger Gun 5” Surpasses the Original and All the Previous Sequels In Cruelty and Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is where the “Do Something!” mentality regarding guns gets us.

Ethics Alarms has covered four previous instances where demented and incompetent school officials in Tennessee have yielded to panic as the justification for policy and expelled—not merely suspended, but expelled—-for a whole year, a 10-year-old boy after he pointed his finger in the shape of a gun and made mock “machine gun” noises.

I reviewed the history and the abject stupidity of this plot last September in “That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With ‘Finger Gun 4’??” and I am not feeling all that well this morning, so excuse me for not rehashing this idiocy again: that post is pretty thorough. It recalled the original school administrator finger gun hysteric’s “comment “justification” that it was important for an unlicensed finger gun wielder to “understand the implications of the gesture”, to which I responded as I ruled the school’s conduct child abuse,

What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

and concluded, focusing on “Finger Gun 4,” in which that idiot school administrator cited the current “climate” as justifying the suspension of another six-year-old,

Here’s the climate: teachers and administrators see their roles as cultural revolutionaries and believe schools should be turned into breeding grounds for future progressive voters who think the United States is racist, abortion is a right, open borders are compassionate, income redistribution is essential, reparations must be made, and guns are evil, along with whites, men, and Republicans. The implications are that no responsible parent should entrust their kids to public school.

The justification for this instance of “Do something!” grandstanding is a new state law that had only recently gone into effect. It was passed after a former student shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville (Look! The Barn Door Fallacy!) and requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they “threaten mass violence” on school property. Of course, no one in their right mind thinks that a 10-year-old making his hand into a gun-like shape is seriously threatening anyone, but these people are not in their right minds.

They will, of course, all be voting Democrat in November.

___________________

Pointer: Reason

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Two Glaring Examples…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

1. The former reliably progressive, Democrat-supporting Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi nicely exposed the Washington Post’s astoundingly flagrant Democratic operative Phillip Bump (EA dossier here) on Taibbi’s substack. (I have been temped to subscribe, but…)

In “Note to Philip Bump: The Washington Post columnist speaks on CNN; a brief reply” he writes:

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Unethical Tweet of the Month: Actor Bradley Whitford

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Just remember, the Ethics Alarms position is to strive as much as possible to remain unbiased regarding a performer’s art regardless of his or her demonstrated political orientation or revealed personal character flaws. I enjoy Bradley Whitford as an actor.

But only an unethical, bullying asshole would write a tweet like that.

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Comment of the Day: “As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn: The Sequel”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

This is an unusual Comment of the Day by Chris Marschner (on the post,“As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn”), but it makes an important point, indeed, the crucial point that exposes the intellectual dishonesty of the Times’ “Think of the Children!” campaign to demonize Israel as it tries to defend its right to exist.

***

I reworked the original Times story to reflect a similar situation in the mid-20th century. All I did was change the name and the players. If the Times had written its report this way, then the Brits, the French, the Poles, the Czecks and others would be goose-stepping to their new bosses and Israel would not exist.

It is obvious to any rational thinker that when a nation faces existential peril from zealots who believe they are the rightful heirs of the entire region and that no one except the devout believers of Mohammed may live peacefully there, that when they are attacked they must eliminate the immediate as well as the long term threat in order to minimize civilian losses. We did this twice in the Pacific and Europe when despots saw opportunities for empire building.

My NYT rewrite:

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“As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn”: The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Today the Times published another in its continuing reporting efforts to demonize Israel, encourage anti-Semitism, support the unconscionable Biden -Harris pressure on Israel to agree to a ruinous cease-fire, and to validate Palestinian terrorism. The Ethics Alarms commentary on this piece is essentially identical to what appeared in its predecessor, As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With “Think of the Children!” Porn…which stated in that the Times report…

“…can evoke no possible response from typical semi-attentive and easily manipulated readers than “Think of the children! The Jews are monsters! Cease fire now! The Gazans have suffered enough! Justice for Palestine!”

And this is exactly the end result that Hamas sought when it launched its cease-fire shattering surprise terror attack on Israeli civilians, including infants, on October 7.”

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