Government & Politics

More Evidence California Doesn’t Get That First Amendment Thingy…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It’s not the only one, but still…

Assembly Bill 1831, introduced by California Assemblyman Marc Berman (D–Palo Alto) this month, would expand the state’s definition of child pornography to include “representations of real or fictitious persons generated through use of artificially intelligent software or computer-generated means, who are, or who a reasonable person would regard as being, real persons under 18 years of age, engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.”

Does Berman comprehend why the possession of child pornography is a crime in the first place? Clearly not. Somebody please explain to him that the criminal element in child porn is the abuse of living children required to make it. The theory, which I have always considered something of a stretch but can accept the ethical argument it embodies from a utilitarian perspective, is that those who purchase or otherwise show a proactive fondness for such “art” in effect aid, abet, encourage and make possible the continuation of the criminal abuse and trafficking of minors. It is not that such photos, films and videos cause one to commit criminal acts on children. That presumption slides down a slippery slope that would justify banning everything from Mickey Spillane novels to “The Walking Dead.”

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A Boomerang For Republicans In New Hampshire [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

OperationChaosII

You may recall that Rush Limbaugh was lambasted in the non-conservative media when in March of 2008  he launched Operation Chaos.  Rush directed his zombie followers to vote in Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton to stop Barack Obama from clinching the Democratic nomination early and to maximize the chances of a messy Democratic nominating convention. In 2016, Rush declared Operation Chaos, The Sequel open for business.   He instructed the Dittoheads to vote for socialist Bernie Sanders, whom none of them would consider voting for in a real election even if someone was pulling their fingernails out with pliers to make them Bernie Bros.  Instapundit, Newsbusters and other rightward sites cheered Operation Chaos II on.  As Ethics Alarms concluded at the time, “Conservatives are no more ethical than progressives, it’s just that their lack of ethics expresses itself in different ways.”

Or the same ways, in some cases. Trump Derangement, after all, justifies anything and everything, so Democrats in New Hampshire pulled off their own version of Operation Chaos (and didn’t even give credit to Rush, since departed to that Big Talk Show in the Sky, for their inspiration).

Exit polls in the New Hampshire primary indicated that  70% of Nikki Haley’s votes came from from non-Republicans who, at least one analyst surmised,  had no intention of voting for her in a general election. They would be Biden voters, presumably, and some said so. More non-Republicans voted for Haley, in fact, than Republicans. (Also, Haley got more votes than the President did, but you had to write in Joe’s name, so that may not mean much.) Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202, but the Left’s version of Rush’s unethical stunt allowed the mainstream media to spin the results into a “Trump is weaker than he thought” narrative.

In 2016, I wrote that “Rush’s steaming pile of depraved Machiavellianism is not worth my composing a new brief against it.” Then, I reprinted part of what I had written  about Operation Chaos the first time. For the sequel, I substituted Bernie for Hillary. This time, I’ll use Nikki Haley, and I also have to replace “Republicans” with “Democrats” and strike the references to conservative pundits like Mark Levin who were cheering on Rush’s stunt.

And yes indeed, it is satisfying that the GOP and conservatives were hoisted by Rush Limbaugh’s stinky, unethical old petard. Continue reading →

Unethical Quotes of the Month: The University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is not an encouraging situation.

Last week, the University of North Carolina’s Faculty Council met to consider, among other matters, a resolution condemning anti-Semitism on school’s campus. An on-campus event in November included a speaker who said, referring to the barbaric terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, that “October 7 was for many of us from the region a beautiful day.” No one at the event did or said anything to reject that sentiment. The proposed resolution stated, “We strongly condemn the antisemitic statements made during a Unity roundtable event No Peace Without Justice held on November 28, 2023.”

That wouldn’t seem too difficult to agree with or too controversial, would it? Yet the resolution failed to pass. The Faculty Council voted 32-29, with six abstentions, to table the resolution for the foreseeable future. Here are some of the most striking comments made by those who objected to the resolution:

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The NY Times Promotes Big Lie #4 (“Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist”) Again

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Nah, there/s no mainstream media bias!’“

Despicable.

“Mocking Haley, Trump Adds to His Long History of Racist Attacks—The former president is again focusing on race and background as he campaigns against Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.” crowed the New York Times in what was allegedly a news report. The story is another installment of Big Lie #4 on The Big Lies Of The “Resistance” Directory, “Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist.”

The fact that the Times is still doing this—that lie is one of the hoariest and most persistent in the whole ugly batch—means, quite simply, that the paper can’t be trusted. Simple as that. Its editorial policy is to lie about Donald Trump, and other things, of course, but if a news organization will lie about anything to forward an agenda, then it should never be trusted.

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From the “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files…Ethics Dunces: Parents Who Allow Their Daughters To Be Subjected to THIS

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s Henry Hanlon, apparently a male basketball player who “identifies” as female. Clearly, it’s good for his ego. (Can’t tell who I’m talking about in the photo? Guess!)

The San Francisco Waldorf high school girls basketball team is on a roll, thanks to its court domination by team captain Henry Hanlon. No, he doesn’t even bother to carry a female name. California’s Interscholastic Federation (CIF) established “Gender Identity Participation” rule in 2013, and it is bats.“All students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF athletics and/or activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity,” the policy states. As CIF’s Associate Executive Director Brian Seymour explains, “All of our athletes, all the eligible athletes, are afforded the opportunity to compete with the gender they feel most comfortable with.” Oh. I can see where a high school athlete might be “most comfortable” with a fanciful gender ID that allows him to feel like the Harlem Globetrotters playing against their eternal patsies, the Washington Generals.

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Ethics Observations On The 2023 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Not a surprise, but still an ominous trend...

As usual, those polled were asked, “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low or very low?”

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Ethics Quiz: Presidential Immunity

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is there anybody out there who wants to argue that complete Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution is a safe, necessary, responsible and civically practical policy? Hello?

I’m not even going to ask the question in the usual quiz form, other than to wonder who would agree Trump’s theory this other than a former President facing multiple partisan prosecutions of varying legitimacy designed to take him out of the next election, or an aspiring leader who endorses near dictatorial powers in a republic.

George Washington made it quite clear that the U.S. President isn’t a king; indeed, this may have been George’s most important among his many precedent-setting and self-imposed embellishments on the office. There have been Presidents who believed in treading carefully within a carefully moderated set of powers; there have been others, like Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts and Nixon, who took the office in the other direction, sometimes to the point of defying laws as well as exploiting areas of Constitutional ambiguity.

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Classic: CBS Reports on the Fani Willis Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now that the anti-Trump, Democrat propaganda-promoting, biased and incompetent mainstream media has been forced to cover the unfolding Fani Willis ethics debacle that threatens to swallow her partisan “Get Trump!” prosecution, it is giving us blazing examples of just how untrustworthy its coverage can be. The headline above looms over CBS’s “news” story that is really a lame and transparent effort to try to spin the Fulton County DA out of the mess of her own making.

The focus of the report is that poor Fani just about had to hire her lover as one of the prosecutors in the high profile case against Donald Trump, because she was “unable to find someone in the DA’s office with the stature and credentials needed for the case,” and “turned to at least two other legal heavy hitters in Atlanta who turned the job down.” Then the article, while conceding that Nathan Wade had little relevant experience, tells us that Wade was Willis’s “friend and mentor” <cough!> and that she told colleagues he “had the toughness to handle the scorched-earth legal tactics that Trump’s lawyers and their co-counsel were likely to employ in the legal battle.” You know, because Trump is such an evil bastard.

Then the article explains that…

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Oklahoma State Senator: Nathan Dahm, (R-Broken Arrow)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Senator Dahm has introduced Senate Bill 1837, the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” Here are its main provisions:

“Each individual reporter, producer, writer, editor, or any other employee involved in the production of content distributed by a media outlet is hereby required to:

a. complete a criminal background check conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
b. receive a license as prescribed by the Corporation Commission as provided in subsection C of this section,
c. complete a propaganda-free safety training course of no less than eight (8) hours as prescribed by the State Department of Education, which shall be developed in coordination with PragerU,
d. provide proof of liability insurance no less than One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00), and
e. submit to quarterly drug testing for illicit substances to be administered by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation”

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Fani Willis Is Toast and Those Arguing That She Isn’t Are Revealing Their Own Ethics Problems

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

When Ethics Alarms first published a commentary related to the unfolding Fani Willis scandal, it was under the headline, “Since the Media is Sure to Report This Major Ethics Story As Late As Possible If At All, I’m Going To Risk Commenting On It Too Soon…” That was a week ago, and it is now clear, though not definitively proven, that indeed Willis did hire her adulterer boy freind as one of the prosecutors on her Trump case, that she has benefited from it personally, and that she has a fatal conflict of interest that will eventually require her removal from the case, probably bar sanctions, and perhaps even criminal charges. Willis using a church appearance to try to shift the issue to racial persecution by the Evil Right was a fairly obvious indication that the allegations in a court filing are true; so is that fact that neither Willis nor her “great friend” have denied the allegations, which would be the obvious move if the scandal was imaginary. Nonetheless, as I expected, the news media is still slow-walking the story, and the usual Trump-Deranged suspects among law professors, legal ethicists and lawyers are trying hard to muddy the water so the public sees the facts as right wing conspiracy-mongering and unethical attacks on the righteous pursuers of their idol.

Mark well those lawyers, ethicists, pundits, professors and publications that try to defend Willis. They have told you, and everyone paying attention, that bias has either made them stupid, or that they are willing to lie “for the greater good.” They are untrustworthy, in either case.

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