“That doesn’t matter. What matters is that he delivers.”
—-Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell on the “Morning Joe” show on MSNBC, discussing his (and President Obama’s) support for Sen. Arlen Specter, who is locked in a dead-heat race for re-nomination with challenging Congressman Joe Sestak. Continue reading
“I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is.”
—–U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Arizona’s controversial illegal immigration enforcement statute.
The President’s top lawyer cannot just express off-the-cuff opinions based on hearsay and second-hand reports as if he was sitting at a bar, shooting the breeze and munching on beer nuts. When the head of the Justice Department, not to mention one who is an African-American and presumably speaks with some moral authority on the issue of racial discrimination and civil rights, says on national T.V. (“Meet the Press”) that the law “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling,” that opinion will be presumed by all hearing it to be based on something more than Katie Couric’s bias and The New York Times’ slants. Continue reading
When actress Hattie McDaniel, the imposing African-American actress who played “Mammy” in the film “Gone With the Wind,” was criticized for her willingness to accept stereotypical and often degrading roles, she countered, “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be one for $7.” Not Lena Horne. Breaking into the movie business as a dynamic and glamorous singer-actress in 1942, she insisted on a long-term contract with MGM that specified that she would never have to play a maid. Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal is being assailed by some gay and lesbian advocates for running an old photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, bat raised, waiting for a pitch in a softball game. “It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant. “The question from a journalistic perspective is whether it’s a descriptive representation of who she might be as a judge.”
What???? Continue reading
Ethicist Bob Stone has proposed a useful and perceptive solution to the perplexing problem of lax ethics in government bureaucracies. Calling on them to adopt “a strong sense of mission and a culture of trust, with authority and responsibility shifted from the few at the top to the many front-line workers,” Stone declares that too often “what passes for ethics is merely another set of rules to comply with, and ethics training usually consists of badgering workers about bribery, conflict of interest and favoritism.”
As a solution, Bob proposes a statement of ethical principles, so brief that it would easily fit on an index card:
I will:
When in doubt, my test is can I explain my actions to my mother or to my child.
Stone recommends that leaders and managers customize this to their own organizations, print it, distribute it, and then–and this is the most important part—regularly use events and decisions to discuss ethical lessons and principles with the staff, using the Statement of Principles as the starting point.
You can read his entire essay here. I recommend it. Bob has a long and distinguished background in that Mother of All Bureaucracies, the Pentagon. He knows what he’s talking about.
It has been almost a week since Cinco de Mayo, and I’m still not sure how to assess the conduct in this story.
A group of five students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California were told by a school administrator that their American flag bandannas were “disrespectful” to the Hispanic students at the school celebrating Cinco de Mayo, and that they either had to remove them or leave. After their parents were called in to discuss the matter, the boys decided to leave. As you might imagine, this was an instant politically-charged custom-made for Fox News. The school district issued a statement saying that it didn’t agree with the administrator’s handling of the situation. The boys issued a statement affirming their support for American patriotism, and asserting that they felt discriminated against and robbed of their First Amendment rights. Then, the next day, about 85 mostly Hispanic students staged a noon protest march through Morgan Hill to express their support for the administrators.
Were the students wrong to wear American flags on a day that Mexican-American students were celebrating Cinco de Mayo? Was the school wrong to send students home for wearing apparel that featured the American flag? Is it ever fair to treat the American flag as inappropriately provocative in the United States? Continue reading
“No tolerance policy” is clearly a misnomer: what it appears to mean in practice is “self-designed trap to expose the incompetence and lack of basic fairness of school personnel. According to that definition, “no tolerance” polices are working extremely well.
For example, an Orchard, Texas third-grader at Brazos Elementary was given a week’s detention for first-degree possession a Jolly Rancher. The school’s principal and superintendent said they were simply complying with a state law that limits junk food in schools. The miscreant, Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch when a teacher saw the candy and confiscated it. Her punishment is that she must be separated from other students during lunch and recess for the rest of the week. Continue reading
The long knives are already out for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now the latest Supreme Court nominee. Once, before the late Ted Kennedy shamelessly accused Robert Bork of being a racist, a sexist and a monster to boot, U.S. Presidents were accorded the respect by both parties in the Senate have confirmed whoever they chose for the High Court, unless the choice was so cynical or politically tainted as to demand defeat. No more. Now each nominee has to thoroughly debase herself or himself by denying the political philosophies that produced his or her nomination in the first place. The first casualty of the nomination process is integrity.
Is it too late to go back? Is it too late to be fair? Continue reading
Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it. This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.
The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it. The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.
As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.
Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading
Randy Cohen’s first response in this week’s installment of “The Ethicist” (in the Sunday New York Times Magazine) isn’t exactly unethical, but it isn’t exactly ethical, either, if little things like obeying laws still matter to you. The real value of Cohen’s column this time is to remind those who blithely condemn Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement statute as “cruel,” “racist” or “un-American” the extent to which the Federal Government’s failure to control our boarders and enforce the immigration laws has corrupted and confused us all.
Stuart Gold, from Brooklyn (and I respect Stuart for making his name public) queries Randy about how he should deal with knowledge that a local supermarket is exploiting some illegal immigrants working there by not meeting the legal requirements for minimum wages and working conditions. Stuart is friendly with the workers and wants to help them, but he doesn’t want to get them fired or deported. Cohen tells him to advise them of their rights if they don’t know them, but to leave any proactive steps to them.
This is reasonable advice, but look at what we have: Continue reading
