Government & Politics

Ethically Provocative Quote of the Month: Duval County School Board Member Charlotte Joyce

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“If we don’t do something about this problem, then it could be the demise of traditional public education in Duval County.”

—-Duval County school board member Charlotte Joyce during a recent board meeting, quoted by Politico in “School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close. The Republican governor’s school choice programs may serve as a model for other GOP-leaning states across the country.”

I saw that two-day-old story from Politico while web-surfing late last night, and had two immediate reactions: “What a perfect opportunity for Bruce to make an appearance from the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive!” and “Good!”

I know nothing about Charlotte Joyce, her political affiliation or her attitude toward public schools, but I do know this: America’s public school system is broken, and was broken deliberately by ideologues who decided that the best way to achieve radical transformation of American rights, society and culture was to use mandatory public education to indoctrinate children from the youngest ages right through high school, after which college would pick up the assignment. Parents, lazy, apathetic, uninvolved and often badly educated and uninformed themselves, allowed this to happen under their metaphorical noses. The horrific result, among many others, is that chaos on college campuses as students whose minds have been poisoned by intersectionality cant now equate the terrorism of Hamas with the civil rights march on Washington.

Good job, everybody!

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Busted! MIT’s Anti-White Program Exposed As the Illegal Discrimination It Is and Was Designed to Be

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Bravo to Prof. William Jacobson’s Equal Protection Project. Its civil rights complaint filed against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed the flaming racial discrimination engaged in by the Creative Regal Women of Knowledge, or “The CRWN” program. (Nice acronym-making there, MIT. I’d let the folks at Harvard try the next one while you stick to equations…) Jacobsen’s blog, Legal Insurrection, announced the complaint in a post, MIT Program Open Only To “Women of Color” Challenged By Equal Protection Project As Violating Civil Rights Laws,a week ago. After it received considerable local publicity, MIT tried to weasel its way out of the scandal by changing the way the program is described on its website, as you can see above.

Are they really that dense at MIT? Do its lawyer really think an announcement that says, “This program is designed to exclude white women, but we can’t stop you if you’re white and are determined to take part in a program where you’re obviously not welcome” complies with anti-discrimination laws. Can you imagine a college program described as one “designed to inspire white women” and “to support and celebrate” whites, but adding that its “open” to non-whites too causing anything but an uproar?

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Final Ethics Observations on the Media’s Alito Flag Set-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…the main one being that the distress signal is appropriate, because the Axis of Unethical Conduct proved with this fiasco that it is ruthless, shameless, untrustworthy, and will do anything in 2024 to mislead the public if it might mean a few extra votes for Democrats. Or maybe the main one is that your friendly neighborhood ethicist was right about this story from the very start, which is why Fredo asked to make another appearance as my spokesman.

And this, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.

Or a functioning republic.

Let me not get to far ahead of myself. Right now, the whole, biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, Biden-protecting propaganda-spewing mainstream news media, the third partner in the Ethics Alarms-dubbed Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” and Desperate Democrats completing the troika) is doing a mass Jumbo (“Flags? What flags?”) regarding what was its favorite earth-shattering scandal a week ago. This sudden amnesia was brought on because the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to embarrass its old rival, effectively eviscerated the Times’ “Get Justice Alito!” scoop, which EA first discussed here, and subsequently here, here, and here. (Don’t make me describe it again: I was sick of it days ago.)

Two days ago, the Post revealed that it had known about the first flag episode more than three years ago and had decided that it wasn’t newsworthy (because, as the revealed facts showed clearly, it wasn’t). Now-retired SCOTUS reporter Robert Barnes traveled to the Alito’s home on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, to follow-up on an anonymous tip he had received from some Alito-hating asshole neighbor about the flag. After investigating, Barnes and the Post concluded there was no story, because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, Alito’s wife, not the Justice, as part of her dispute with her neighbors.

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Ethics Villains: Ireland, Norway, and Spain

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This revolting development tempts me to write a dark parody of “Abraham, Martin and John” called “Ireland, Norway and Spain.” it would end with…

Anybody here not like terrorism?
Would you care to explain?
I guess it’s OK as long as it kills Jews
Say Ireland, Norway and Spain…

Spain, Norway and Ireland announced this week that they would recognize an independent Palestinian state. The coordinated announcements from the leaders of the three countries said that Palestinian independence should not have to wait for a negotiated peace deal with Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel immediately condemned the announcement as validating Hamas terrorism, which it undeniably does. Netanyahu has always held that the establishment of a Palestinian state would pose an “existential danger” to Israel, called the decision by the three nations “a prize for terrorism” that would “not stop us from reaching a victory over Hamas.” Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, said that Spain, Norway and Ireland had decided “to award a gold medal to Hamas terrorists.” The announcements were made just days after the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on suspicion of war crimes.

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Note to the “Wise Latina”: There’s No Crying on the Supreme Court!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried. There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored….for what, I can’t imagine.

Awww! Poor Sonja! What’s she crying about? That she’s obviously over her head on the Supreme Court with actual legal scholars and experts who can make persuasive arguments about what the law is and what the Constitution means instead of just relying on warm, fuzzy feelings and mandatory progressive sentiment? That mean old conservatives aren’t buying her “But…but…it would be nicer if we decided this way” routine?

Did Sandra Day O’Connor, when she was in the minority on a liberal majority court, ever say she just went into her office and wept when a SCOTUS vote didn’t go her way? Did Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when she was on the losing end of a 5-4 ruling? Did Scalia? No, but this Justice not only weeps over her defeats, she thinks its something to be proud of.

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Nope, Can’t Watch “Bridgerton’ and Respect Myself in the Morning

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I was looking for a new series to stream, as the time it takes on the streaming services for me to choose a movie almost requires as much time as watching the movie. At least with a series, your choice is pre-determined for many sessions. “Bridgerton” has a new season (#3), and I had never tested it; Grace had it on her list for future viewing, because she was an English literature major and knew the Regency period in England well.

I had quite a bit of trepidation approaching “Bridgerton” because it’s another Shandaland production. I eventually baled on every Shonda Rhimes show I’ve ever sampled, including her flagship, “Grey’s Anatomy”: they are all over-heated soap operas with less nuance than “Dallas.”

But what the hell. I started Episode 1 last night and made it maybe a third of the way through. The production values were high, and the acting was Masterpiece Theater-level at least. It had only two gratuitous and vigorous coitus scenes, which is less than the average for a Shondaland production. I could not, however, stomach the African-Americans and British aristocrats-of-color wandering around early 19th Century English social scene.

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A Critical Addendum to the Left’s Alito Flag Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I had already decided to shut down my commentary for the day (judging from the traffic, I see that a lot of people are starting their Memorial Day Weekend early) when I saw a fascinating note on The Volokh Conspiracy, and I just can’t let it pass, since it puts the two posts (here and here) about the “Get Alito!” flag fixation in proper perspective.

Josh Blackman, a regular contributor to VC, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, and the president of the Harlan Institute, reminded readers about something that occured the day after election day in 2016, November 9. The Supreme Court was in session, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wore the jabot she only sported when dissenting from a majority opinion. Ginsberg herself had explained her sly fashion messaging in in 2014:

but in this case there was nothing to dissent from other than the obvious: Donald Trump, whom Ginsburg had called “a faker” before the election, had defeated Hillary Clinton. The Associated Press got the message and reported on it.

Unlike the Alito flags, there is no question about who was making the political statement regarding President Trump: it was Justice Ginsburg. Nobody fooled her into wearing that collar. A relative didn’t wear it, she did. Nor was the symbolism of the collar in question: Ginsberg herself had said exactly what it meant. This was a far less ambiguous and far more serious display of bias by a SCOTUS justice than the contrived flag outrage, yet no Republicans in Congress exploited the incident to call for Ginsburg to recuse herself from future cases, or to move for a Congressional censure.

Ah, but Ginsburg was a news media favorite, female, progressive, Democrat and cute in her casual and repeated crossing of the lines of judicial propriety. I have to check, but I don’t recall the members of my legal ethics expert association registering any problem with Ginsberg’s open protest of Trump’s election, while the listserv has been roiling over Alito’s flags all week, with Ginsberg-adoring female members being particularly indignant.

At the last second I deleted a comment I was ready to make yesterday after following the hypocritical thread. It read, “I’m sorry, but the partisan bias and hypocrisy being displayed here by alleged legal ethics scholars isn’t just depressing, it’s disgusting.”

Blackman concluded, “I have a very, very difficult time taking the outrage over the Alitos’ flags seriously. The Justices routinely convey messages through their words and deeds. Who gets to decide what is an appearance of impropriety? People who are inclined to despise the conservative Justices will draw the worst possible inferences from all of their acts….These people are loathe to co-exist with anything they disagree with, so will take umbrage at the slightest sleights.”

In contrast, I take it very seriously. The Double standard harshly demonstrates how little integrity and honesty exists even among our most trusted professionals.

Oh-Oh! Now It Seems That TWO Historical Flags Someone Else Has Used As Free Speech Were Seen Flying Over a Justice Alito Residence! Clearly, This Violates the “Obscure Flags” Section in the Judicial Code of Ethics….

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The contrived Justice Alito flags controversy has exactly one valid use: it shows that the panicked Axis has lost all sense of proportion and self-preservation, that its ethics alarms are deader than Generalissimo Franco, and that between now and November nothing can be ruled out, from violent uprisings to horrified leftist wackos tearing off their clothes, painting themselves mauve and running amuck coast to coast while shouting dirty limericks. Good to know.

Here’s the New York Times, which launched the previous “Bad flag, BAD flag! “scoop (as of this moment, the Times has published nine—NINE!—articles about the flags):

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google Street View image from late August also shows the flag.

In two words, so what?

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Not Exactly An Ethics Hero (Recovering Ethics Dunce, Maybe?): Comedy Central’s The Daily Show

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Look! The Daily Show is finally choosing to mercilessly mock not just absurd Democrats, but even absurd Democrats of color! See?

Well paint me blue and call me Smurphy! True, it only took almost four years, and a Republican with such rhetorical handicaps and brain fog would have been skewered weekly, indeed daily, by all of the Axis-allied comedy shows. Think of Dan Quayle, or David Letterman’s nightly mockery of George W. Bush, and Trump, of course. Late night TV has left a lot of big laughs on the metaphorical table, but it was worth it, the writers and comics concluded—“it” being to divide the nation, insult half of all potential viewers, and abandon their supposed mission of being as funny as possible without playing favorites, and politics be damned—to “get Trump” and make the world safe for Woke Fascism.

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Nikki Haley, 2024 Weasel of the Year [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Honestly, I don’t know how this woman can look at herself in the mirror.

Much of the American public is fed up and disgusted with what I call the Four W’s: the woke, the weak, weenies, and weasels. All are labels for ethical voids. The woke are incompetent and irresponsible. The weak lack the “enabling virtues,” the character traits that permit one to be ethical: courage, fortitude, valor, sacrifice, honor, humility and forgiveness. Weenies lack integrity, and weasels, in some ways the worst of the bunch, are dishonest and untrustworthy, as well as operating under the unethical delusion that the ends justify the means. If one wants to objectively comprehend why so many people support Donald Trump for President, despite his dazzling array of disqualifying character traits, look no further than the Four W’s. For a current day politician, he is remarkably free of those crippling characteristics, not entirely and not in all cases, but substantially, and impressively in comparison to almost any other public figure.

Yesterday, Nikki Haley said she would be voting for Trump in the upcoming election. Let’s see [This is a corrected version of what I first posted: I missed some twists and turns]…first she was Trump’s U.S. Ambassador, and apparently a booster. She resigned in 2018 for mysterious reasons, then, after serving on the Boeing board just long enough for that to register as a black mark, she initially defended Trump after the rioters hit the Capitol in January of 2021 (saying it was not “his best” moment—you know how I hate that rationalization). Then, just bit later in the same month, told an interviewer, “We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

What is “we can’t let that ever happen again” supposed to mean, if not “Don’t support this man”?

Then, as Biden’s slow-moving car crash proceeded and it looked like Donald Trump wasn’t finished as a political force yet, Haley started trying to edge back into his good graces…until she thought she saw an opportunity to be the GOP nominee herself. Then she was again condemning Trump, insulting him relentlessly, questioning his mental fitness, saying that he is, like Biden, “too old,” and calling Trump and Biden “equally bad.” She accused him of having disrespect for the military, indicating that “he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.” After signing the required GOP pledge to support whoever was nominated by the party to run in November as a condition predicate to participating in the debates (and criticizing Trump for not signing the pledge and boycotting the debates himself), Haley then reneged on that pledge once it was clear that nobody would stop Trump. She argued that she wasn’t bound by it (au contraire: lawyers are ethically obligated to be true to their pledges) because the party she thought she was supporting wasn’t what the Republican Party now is in its embrace of Donald Trump, or something.

Why all the flip-flopping, back-tracking, reversals, double-talk and hypocrisy? She makes John Kerry look like Sir Thomas More. She makes Bill Clinton look like George Washington, and if Bill was asked who chopped down the cherry tree, he would say, “It depends what you mean by ‘chopped’.” But Haley now thinks she has a shot at being chosen as Trump’s running mate: after all, she never shot her dog. Nikki Haley has made it clear that she will say anything at that she thinks will benefit her ambition and quest for power. No one should ever believe her, trust her or rely on her, ever.

She would have been the perfect running mate for Trump, about five reversals ago. Trump has a flat learning curve, but he was betrayed by so many so often since 2016 that he would no more tie his fates to Nikki Haley than shoot a nail gun into his skull.

Nikki Haley is indisputably a weasel. I can’t imagine a worse one.