Government & Politics

The President’s Deceitful Executive Order

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

If I were maintaining a “lie database” on Joe Biden (like the Washington Post does, among others, on Donald Trump) this would go right on it. And yes, I have not read a single analysis on any source that explains the deceitful quality of the President’s latest executive order. Unlike several of the others, this one is constitutional. It is just completely misleading, and deliberately so.

Yesterday, Biden ordered financial and travel sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. That explanation at the top of the New York Times story cleared up initial confusion on my part. “Biden issues executive order targeting Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians” was the headline at Axios, and similar headlines abound. Huh? Does Biden think that he, like Leonardo DiCaprio, is King of the World? What power does the President of the United States have over citizens of foreign nations who aren’t in the United States? The answer, for those of you praying that J Biden and the Democrats can save democracy from the previous President who abuses presidential power, is none. None. The executive order is grandstanding of the most cynical sort. Biden literally could issue similar fanciful orders “sanctioning” Parisians who annoy visiting Americans by being rude to them with as much effect.

Continue reading →

UPenn’s Anti-Semitic Lecturer

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That cartoon above, showing apparent Zionists (as in “Jews”) sipping Gazan blood like wine, is probably the most outrageous of political cartoonist Dwayne Booth’s works…I don’t know, maybe this one is..

All a matter of taste, I guess. The ethics question is, now what, if anything?

Booth is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication having joined the school as an adjunct faculty member in 2015. Political cartooning is certainly a valid courss of study. He currently teaches two classes, but since Hamas’s October 7 terror attack, his off-campus cartooning has become especially controversial.

Booth publishes political cartoons under the pen name “Mr. Fish.” One of his classes teaches students the political cartooning art by exploring “the purpose and significance of image-based communication as an unparalleled propagator of both noble and nefarious ideas,” according to Penn’s website. “Work presented will be chosen for its unique ability to demonstrate the inflammatory effect of weaponized visual jokes, uncensored commentary, and critical thinking on a society so often perplexed by artistic free expression and radicalized creative candor.”

You can see more of Booth’s anti-Israel cartoons here. As far as I can determine, there is not sufficient basis for disciplining him or ending his association with the school. Political cartooning, though I personally view it as a crude, over-rated and deceitful form of editorial, is by nature extreme in device and approach. Booth’s own political opinions and obvious anger at Israel that he expresses as “Mr. Fish” or on social media are not relevant to his value teaching the political cartooning craft, and would seem to be squarely within the margins of both academic freedom and the first Amendment, provided that his commentary in class and on campus are not directed at Jewish students.

However, if a school, like the University of Pennsylvania, decided that, at a time when there are unusual tensions around the Gaza-Israel conflict its lecturer should cool his public fervor or consider another teaching position elsewhere, that would be a fully ethically defensible position. He’s right at the line now.

He might even have crossed it.

Add Two Unethical and Irresponsible Progressive Policies Together And This Is the Result

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Great—even a dyed-in-the-wool conservative gadfly like Ian Miles Chong is adopting coded woke-speak now. Those aren’t migrants, kicking and beating on NYC police. They are illegal immigrants.Darwin Andres Gomez Izquiel, 19, Kelvin Servat Arocha, 19, Juarez Wilson, 21, Yorman Reveron, 24, and Jhoan Boada, 22, were chased down, arrested, and charged with assault. They they were released without bail, because, as we know, the criminal justice system is racist letting criminal go while depending on an honor system to get them before a judge or jury is the sensitive policy. Illegal immigrants have demonstrated that they have no respect for our laws, and ny attacking cops, these illegals have demonstrated that they have no intention of being law abiding citizens. Writes fire-breathing conservative columnist Athena Thorne in response to that video:

“In New York City, Biden and Mayorkas’s legacy plays out daily. Asylum scammers continue to romp around the Big, Rotten Apple, merrily shoplifting businesses into oblivion, burning down buildings with their off-brand lithium-ion batteries, and mowing down New Yorkers with their e-bikes and uninsured vehicles in hit-and-run incidents. Lawlessness breeds lawlessness. And we taxpayers have the privilege of bankrolling all of it.

At the beginning of her column, she describes the video as “Trump’s latest campaign ad.”

It’s hard for me to see how she’s wrong. When people vote for the almost incredibly flawed Donald Trump, they are voting against scenes like what we see above.

“Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” An Ethics Movie That Seems Disturbingly Relevant Today

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well this was certainly refreshing and unexpected!

Donald Trump-knockoff billionaire Mark Cuban stated in gratuitous tweet that he has “never hired anyone based exclusively on race, gender, religion,” but that “race and gender can be part of the equation” because he believes “diversity is a competitive advantage.”

What virtue-signaling claptrap! What does that last part even mean? Does Harvard consider that its acceptance of diversity as a substitute for genuine credentials and ability has given the university a “competitive advantage” as it competes for the best students, faculty and donors? Yesterday, in addition to having it revealed that its top DEI officer is a DEI hire herself who rose to predominance with the assistance of bogus scholarship, a wealthy donor who last year gave the university $300,000,000 dollars announced that he was through. “Will America’s elite university get back to their roots of educating American children – young adults – to be the future leaders of our country or are they going to maintain being lost in the wilderness of microaggressions [and]a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame…?” Ken Griffin asked in response to being asked if he could be lured back as a donor. Continue reading →

The Rest of the Story: The Latest in the Alex Murdaugh Murder Trial Train Wreck Has Me Depressed About the American Justice System

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is bad for me: after all, my profession is substantially involved with the justice system and the law. I keep learning things that make me increasingly cynical regarding the fairness, competence and integrity of the American justice system, and lately it has been

…right in the kisser. (I’ll have another horror story for you later today, if all goes according to plan.)

Yesterday, a judge refused to grant a new trial for Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina lawyer, now disbarred and convicted of murdering his wife and son. His defense team argued that a court clerk had improperly influenced the jurors in his case, which, if she did not, was only moral luck. I wrote about the unethical clerk here last Fall. Even before the allegations were made about the clerk, Rebecca Hill, signaling and sometimes prompting jurors that they needed to convict Murdaugh, the trial and his conviction looked like a travesty of justice.

Here is what I wrote about the case after the trial…

“Reviewing the astoundingly thin evidence, I do not understand why the trial judge didn’t throw out the jury’s verdict and declare Murdaugh acquitted because there was not enough to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt as a matter of law. There wasn’t. This was an example of a jury convicting a defendant of murder because they decided he was a bad guy and there were no other suspects. Alex Murdaugh lied repeatedly regarding the deaths of his wife and son and he was undeniably a thief and a sociopath—but prosecutors couldn’t and didn’t present much more than theories about whether he was the killer. Judges are understandably, reluctant to over-ride juries, but in this case it was necessary. If the Trump Deranged reasoning that the conclusion that someone is just an untrustworthy bounder is sufficient to assume guilt of criminal activity is becoming a cultural norm, our justice system is approaching a crisis, if it isn’t in one already.

The only motive that the prosecution could come up with for claiming Murdaugh was behind the double murder of his wife and son was that the lawyer thought he would be more leniently treated for the other crimes he was being charged with if juries and judges felt sorry for him as a result of their deaths. That’s just bonkers, and if I were a member of the jury, I’d regard the prosecution having to resort to such a theory as per se reasonable doubt. But as if that weren’t enough, Murdaugh’s trial was tainted by a fame- and fortune-seeking law clerk. (I recently wrote about the carnage triggered by another unethical law clerk scandal. What the hell’s going on out there?)

Continue reading →

If This Poll Is Accurate, The American Public May Be Too Incompetent and Irresponsible to Live In a Democracy…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek found that 18% of voters are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a candidate endorsed by pop singer Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift has been essentially dedicated to music since she was 14, though she did graduate from high school in three years. There is nothing she has to offer in trenchant political commentary besides celebrity, and to a large number of Americans, as we already know, that’s enough.

So naturally, as the buzz was in Washington, D.C. today, the Biden campaign is working hard to get Swift to endorse Joe, if possible at the Super Bowl.

It is estimated that 8 million new voters will enter the ranks of the US electorate this year, making a total of 41 million Gen Z voters. This is also a group that surveys show has a low opinion of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, free enterprise and the United States generally, so maybe they don’t even need Swift’s OK to vote Democratic. My guess, and maybe I’m whistling past the metaphorical graveyard, is that most of that 18% may be more likely to vote if Taylor tells them who to vote for, but the majority of them won’t be engaged enough to vote anyway.

If the election is going to turn on somethings as trivial and meaningless as celebrity endorsements, its not even worth worrying about. Those idiots will deserve what they get, and so will their elders, for letting society and the culture get that stupid.

Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

Continue reading →

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Rep. Omar?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was actually going to begin this post with a parody of the cheery song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,” but decided against it for two reasons. First, no English words rhyme with “Omar,” so you’re stuck with fake sort-of rhymes like “home are” and “sonar,” and second, this is too serious a problem to cover in a song parody.

Among Donald Trump’s myriad offensive, stupid and gratuitously inflammatory comments while President was when he said in 2019 that the members of “the Squad” should “go back to where they came from.” This was particularly inept since most of that group of radical, socialist, anti-Semitic and or dumb-as-bricks Democrats are “from” the good ol’ USA, but in the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at least, Trump may have had a valid point that he, as usual, chose the worst possible way to express.

In 2019, Omar declared as part of the anti-Semitic theme much of the Squad vocally embraces, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says that it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Her message was that a lot of U.S. officials—you know, Jews— allowed a conflicting fealty to Israel to blunt their duty to pursue what is in the best interest of the United States. But yesterday, a video surfaced on Twitter/X showing Omar rousing a Somali-American crowd in her district by saying in part,

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Fox News Comic Greg Gutfeld

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Everyone understands how bad the world would be without journalists because we haven’t had any for decades.”

—Fox News court jester Greg Gutfeld, justly mocking the whines of the Washington Post’s ridiculous Taylor Lorenz about the lay-offs in her profession, if it can be called that any more.

The rest of his rant is amusing and well-deserved, but that single sentence is enough to accurately describe the failure of Lorenz’s colleagues and peers, and the total lack of self-awareness displayed by this inexplicably employed hack, who, in a typical outburst last month, proclaimed that “Anyone who’s worked as a journalist at the [New York Times] knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions. Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not.”