For once, I am speechless.
This has always been true, though some figures have been substantially successful at doing it.
We are reminded of the rule once again as Catherine, Princess of Wales, announced that she was undergoing chemotherapy after a cancer diagnosis in a two-minute video released yesterday. That announcement only came after weeks of wild speculation about Kate’s whereabouts, marriage status and health. It was, therefore, too late—too late to prevent the damage to her reputation and that of the royal family by proving that she and Prince William were capable of avoiding transparency when it suited them. The official excuse was that it had taken “time to explain everything to George, Charlotte and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them,” as she said in the video. As explanations for deceiving the public go, a “think if the children!” strategy is as good as one is liable to find, but even it leaves a scar.
Oh yeah, this will improve public respect for law enforcement and the rule of law.
The Murrieta Police Department is posting hilarious arrest and lineup photos with suspects’ faces replaced by Lego heads. This is its response to a new California privacy law that forbids the posting of mug shots and other photos of individuals arrested for non-violent offenses. The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last September, went into effect on January 1 of this year. It also requires police departments to remove other mugshots from social media after 14 days….or replace them with Lego heads, I guess. So those risible images above are not gags or the product of a Babylon Bee wag. The police actually posted them.
I will always be grateful to Curt Schilling. Along with David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and a few others (Dave Roberts, of course, for that clutch stolen base), he was among the most prominent Red Sox heroes in 2004, when the team I have spent far too much time thinking about and following finally won the World Series after 86 years of sometimes Greek tragedy-level frustration. I will also forever advocate Schilling’s admission to baseball’s Hall of Fame, an honor he more than deserves and has been so far robbed of receiving because of politics and woke biases against him rather than any lack of accomplishments on the field.
Make no mistake about it, however, Curt is an asshole. The last time I wrote about Schilling here it was to excoriate him for one of his worst a-hole outbreaks, when he betrayed his supposed friend and team mate Tim Wakefield by announcing that the former pitcher and his wife were both battling terminal cancers, a family tragedy that the Wakefields had wanted to keep private. That ethics alarms fail by Schilling was so serious that the Red Sox organization felt it necessary to repudiate their 2004 championship hero’s behavior.
—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”
Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.
For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law, Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading
Talk about smoking guns…
Big Tech is all in with the rest of the Axis (“the resistance,” Democrats and mainstream media) to rescue President Biden from his own blunders and ineptitude by bringing Donald Trump down by any means necessary. This is no conspiracy theory: they may not “steal” the election, but we can already see that they are doing anything they can think of to rig it. Here’s an example so flagrant that it is almost funny, or would be if it wasn’t emanating from the same people who claim to be “saving democracy.”
On March 16, Trump made his “bloodbath” comment, discussed on Ethics Alarms here and here. Even though his metaphor was unambiguous in its context (the economic plight facing American auto manufacturers if Biden remained President) a memo went out to the Left’s cabal dictating that the comments should be reported as a threat by Trump to encourage violence should Trump not prevail in November. On March 18, FactCheck.org, still biased leftward but perhaps the closest we have to an objective fact-checking service, pointed out that among “bloodbath’s” definitions was “a major economic disaster.” At that time the Google online definition of the word included “a period of disastrous loss or reversal,” and the sentence used to illustrate it was, “A few mutual funds performed well in the general bloodbath of the stock market.”
But that definition exonerated Donald Trump. Thus Google, being good patriots and all, changed the definition! See..
I keep thinking some day, Democrats with ethics alarms and functioning cerebral cortexes are going to wake up, slap themselves sharply in the face, and shout, “This entire party is based on lies, deception, and hypocrisy! What the hell have I been doing?”
If today’s New York Times story titled “Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats” doesn’t have that effect, however, I wonder if anything will.
Since the Times here is carefully trying to inform readers about an organized effort by their readers favorite party that should be received as an indictment on its face, the article proceeds as if there are legitimate arguments pro- and con. “An army of lawyers aims to challenge the steadily advancing ballot-access efforts of independent candidates, who Democrats fear could peel votes away in swing states,” begins the Times. “The aim ”is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,’ “the Times explains quoting one of the leaders of the party’s efforts. It doesn’t mention that this is pure deceit, as the paper has already explained the motivation for the assault on ballot access:
My go-to case for defending the death penalty is the Cheshire home invasion, though the surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an equally strong, indeed I would say irrefutable case. I now have another one.
Read with care.
Kristel Candelario left on a summer vacation in Puerto Rico with a male friend, leaving her 16 month daughter Jailyn alone in a playpen with a few bottles of milk. The neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the baby’s anguished screams as she suffered from abandonment and separation, hunger and dehydration. After a few days at the beach and another stopover in Detroit, Jailyn’s mother returned tp her Cleveland home to find her daughter dead, though she had the gall to call 911 in a panic. She’d been gone for about 10 days. I wonder what she expected to find.
EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.
Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.
The latest kerfuffle spawned by Donald Trump’s loose lips ensnared Keith Olbermann. In an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly last week, Trump blathered about persecuted Presidents, “I was always told that Andrew Jackson was treated the absolute worst. I heard Abraham Lincoln was second. I don’t care,” Trump said. “Andrew Jackson or anybody else. Nobody, when you think of the fake things, nobody’s been treated like Trump in terms of badly.”
Olbermann, being the jerk that he is, re-tweeted the Biden Campaign’s “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated,” with the comment, “There’s always the hope.” This isn’t the point of this post, but 1) Trump was referring to Lincoln’s vilification in both the South and much of the North when he spoke of bad treatment, and 2) Olbermann’s snark was inevitable, in character, and obviously not a “true threat.”
But then people, including some Fox talking heads, started calling for him to be kicked off Twitter/”X,” and Keith pulled his tweet. Then he lied about what he meant, tweeting, “I know nobody with an IQ greater than a halibut’s has believed @FoxNews since 1996 but even from their whores this is idiotic The RT clearly shows I’m hoping Trump’s right, that he IS treated worse than Lincoln. As I’ve said for 9 years: THAT HE’S CONVICTED, THEN DIES IN PRISON ”
Sure Keith. Do you really believe anyone but a few halibut, Fox News, and the nearly million idiots who follow you on Twitter give a fig what you tweet, ever?
But I digress. What I want to point out is that neither Lincoln nor Andrew Jackson top the list of mistreated Presidents. It’s an especially dumb thing to say about Jackson. Jackson was the most popular President since George Washington, cruised to re-election, and left office an icon. I assume what Trump is alluding to is the scandal over Jackson’s wife Rachel, because of her inadvertent bigamy when she eloped with Andy. Jackson didn’t take any criticism well, but he was still mostly worshiped as President, though roundly hated by his political foes for consistently besting them.
Trump has a slightly stronger case with Lincoln, but Abe still was re-elected, and almost immediately deified after he was killed. The following Presidents were treated much worse than Jackson; whether they were treated worse than Lincoln is a matter of perspective: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. I could even make an argument for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Trump has a strong case that he was the most unfairly and viciously treated of all, but the two Johnsons, Hoover and Nixon have strong cases as well. I do give Trump the award for knowing less about American Presidential history than any other POTUS.
That’s something.
Ethics Alarms 