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

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

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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It Sure Looks Like Kamala Harris Never Worked At McDonald’s. Does It Matter?

Today RealClearPolitics reporter Paul Sperry tweeted that the Harris-Walz campaign is no longer referencing her alleged job at McDonald’s when she was in college, and has not responded to media questions about the location of the McDonald’s store (obviously somewhere in California, if anywhere) or the exact dates of her employment.

“So what?” you well might say. And under normal circumstances, I well might concur. The Harris campaign is anything but normal, however. This a candidate for President who is trying to get elected as a generic Democrat, which she most assuredly is not even in an era of extreme, anti-democratic Democrats. Her party has decided that its best, indeed its only chance to win in the wake of the catastrophic Biden administration’s record is to create a thumbs up or thumbs down vote on Donald Trump, an election in which the identity, record, beliefs and policy agenda of his opponent are irrelevant as long as his opponent isn’t demonstrably senile. This relegates almost all of the campaign discussion to trivia and boiler plate puffery, and mostly to how Harris and her managers choose to package her, because to most American, those who haven’t been paying attention to an inert Vice-President, packaging is literally all there is.

Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area in the summer after her freshman year in college, is a relatively recent addition to her official life story. It first surfaced in 2019, when Harris ran for President and tried to wrest the nomination from Joe Biden, a politician whose trademark has been his working stiff roots. Since taking over the top of the 2024 ticket from poor Joe, Harris has again been evoking the fast food job to portray what the Washington Post called “her humble background.” (Harris, the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher and a tenured Stanford economist, does not come from a humble background.)

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

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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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

“Why does a public school herd its students into campaign events — replete with student musicians repurposing the school’s fight song to support a political candidate? It’s compulsory schooling and compulsory participation in politics. The purpose is openly political.”

Bloggress Ann Althouse, criticizing a Harris campaign stop at a high school in Georgia.

I am inclined to agree with Althouse and see this as totalitarian-ish indoctrination, but only because the public schools have been tending increasingly that way in recent years. It’s possible, I think, that the motivations of the teachers and the school were not partisan but educational. In a healthier era when parties didn’t try to demonize each other, a chance to experience a Presidential campaign up close would have been regarded as unique teaching opportunity. I know that in 1960, when I first began my obsession with U.S. Presidents, I would have loved to be in the middle of a candidate’s visit, and which candidate would have mattered to me not one whit.

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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

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.

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Pointer: Reason

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

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

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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Ugh! Ethics Dunce—AGAIN—: University of Houston Law Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

This is an example of why I am disgusted with my field and chosen profession. Just last month I designated Jefferson, a legal ethics professor among other things, as an ethics dunce for her blatantly partisan and biased commentary. This time, it’s personal.

Seeking to find a reliable, trustworthy, accurate source of legal ethics news and developments (since the demise of the excellent legal Ethics Forum, I am reduced to the scattershot, overwhelmingly left-biased commentary on the APRL listserv), I subscribed to the professor’s substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, taking seriously her promise that it would supply a “Monday morning tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics.” But the Legal Ethics Roundup I received this morning, like all its predecessors this month, cheerfully informed me that “For the month of August, the Legal Ethics Roundup is on pause.”

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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”

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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