Government & Politics

Confronting My Biases, Episode 6: Pot Users

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The status of marijuana in the U.S. is a mess, with the drug still being illegal under federal law and the states slowly sliding down the slippery slope to legalization, because they see revenue in it. The confusion is going to get worse before it gets better. Ohio was the only state to legalize marijuana for “recreational use” last year. The Kentucky General Assembly legalized medical marijuana this year, but patients will have to wait until 2025 for the program to kick in. Voters in Oklahoma rejected the legalization of recreational marijuana in last March, and Hoosiers voted against legal marijuana in Indiana in early April.

The Department of Health and Human Services sent its latest findings on marijuana to the Drug Enforcement Administration, recommending that it be reclassified as a Schedule III drug. That classification would mean that the substance has a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” However, I wouldn’t trust the now thoroughly woke HHS to do an unbiased study on the topic, since the most stoned American are progressives and Democrats. Throughout the last few years, there have been various studies suggesting that the drug is not as harmless as its proponents have been claiming it is, and there is enough evidence of heavy use of pot causing long-term cognitive problems to tell me that we still don’t know what lurks in the genie’s bottle.

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I Thought Disney Lost Its Copyright on Mickey Mouse Today. Uh, NO…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

A little over a week ago, I wrote (in Item #3),

As the capper on a really bad year for Disney, Mickey Mouse finally loses its copyright protection on Jan. 1, 2024, and goes into the public domain. Disney unethically used its lobbying power to use its iconic founding rodent to persuade the U.S. Congress to extend copyright protection beyond all reason. Disney’s monopoly over Mickey will end95 years after his debut in the short film “Steamboat Willie,” long, long after the original copyright protection would have expired based on the correct theory that once an artist has gleaned a reasonable benefit and profit from a creation, it benefits the culture and society to be able to use the work to spark innovation and new uses for the original work.

As Carnac the Great would say, “Wrong, Ethics-Breath!”

Disney still has its hooks into Mickey, as the company continues to warp U.S. intellectual property law, setting the precedents for other properties to avoid the public domain far longer than is healthy for the culture. Yes, the original Mickey of 1928’s trailblazing Disney cartoon “Steamboat Willie” (above) has lost its copyright, but not this Mickey,

…or this Mickey,

or this Mickey,

or this one,

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Comment of the Day: “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.

Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right.”

***

You don’t understand anti-Semitism?

You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of “the other,”especially “the other” who does well.

Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been “the other.” In ancient days they were “the other” because they worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were “the other” because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for trying. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many the Romans dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine.

In Christian Europe they were “the other” partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were “the other” for the same reasons. The majority never likes “the other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending. Moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims, who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.

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In the Twin Cities, Auld Lang Synconpetence…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The alternative headline was “We’re the government and we’re here to help you, we just don’t know what the hell we’re doing!”

For New Year’s Eve last night, in order to keep local revelers safe and as a nice, Big Brother wants to end the Old Year and start the new one showing that he cares gesture, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota had announced that Metro Transit would let customers ride free from 6 p.m. to the end of service on all routes including the return trip on the Northstar commuter rail after the Vikings-Packers game at U.S. Bank Stadium. The “Miller Lite Free Rides” promotion covered all buses and light rail, sang the public transit authority: “No fare, no coupons; simply hop on and take a seat for free!”

However, for some ridiculous reason, many of the main lines were scheduled to complete their final runs before midnight. The official reason was because Black Lives Matter planned its first 2024 mostly peaceful demonstration as the new year rang in downtown, and didn’t want white celebrants to be able to flee.

Just kidding! In fact, there was no reason at all for the self-defeating schedule other than typical municipal government bureaucratic incompetence

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Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I don’t want to end the year on a down note, I really don’t, but…

The ugly head of anti-Semitism or, giving some of the reaction a more charitable spin, the callousness and lack of sufficient concern for the fate of Israel has been a revelation for me. I’ve never understood anti-Semitism, and being forced to acknowledge that this contagion that once was at the heart of the evil plunging the world into a catastrophic conflict is still thriving came as a shock this year. Over at Simple Justice, liberal (but not progressive) criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield neatly assesses the significance of the anti-Jew and anti-Israel sentiments erupting on college campuses, in the black community, in the Democratic Party and other places where the woke run free. He writes in part (today),

“….the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and its ensuing war in Gaza has bubbled up the fundamental differences between a liberal democratic nation and the swell of simplistic authoritarianism of the young.

Others in my position have adopted the woke view of the world, some because they needed the validation that comes from espousing the popular views of progressives, and others because they were never quite as serious as I thought. Or hoped. But how many more marches by  the young and unduly passionate who justify terrorism and suddenly find rape and murder acceptable when done by those their tribe tells them to favor?

Will 2024 be an inflection point, where people finally come to grips with the fact that they’ve become the enemy they righteously believed they were fighting? At first, it seems there might be an epiphany, a realization that dividing the world into the oppressed and oppressors was an infantile way to deal with the many problems facing society. But since then, it’s become apparent that the young and unduly passionate have fallen back into their tribal ways, enjoying the fresh air of sowing misery on blocked highways for an irrational and destructive cause.

I never would have believed in my old man head that we would be back to open Jew hatred again. Yet here we are, and tens of thousands of people who would claim the mantle of progress fully embrace the end of Jews. Never in its wildest dreams would Hamas have believed that raping and beheading Jews would turn them into progressive darlings, but here we are.

Will this cause young progressives to recognize the error of their ideology? Will they realize that their sudden existential concern for Palestinians when they cared nothing about them until it meant they could openly hate Jews, proves that they are just another flavor of haters, of authoritarians, of racists?”

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A Supreme Court Section 3 Ruling Preview?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy on Reason’s website, where constitutional law experts hang out and opine and then mostly inarticulate readers pile on, Steve Cabrizzi has pretty much slam-dunked the position that the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against those who supported the Confederacy in the Civil War holding office in the re-united United States of America can’t be used against Donald Trump. Unlike the convoluted and boot-strapping decision of the Colorado Supreme Court and the transparently partisan decision by Maine’s Secretary of State (both part of the now eight year-old effort by Democrats to use extra-legal means to destroy an adversary they fear and loathe), Bacrizzi’s brief is clear and straightforward.

First he explains the technical reasons why “Donald Trump is obviously not disqualified from seeking re-election under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” writing in part,

The words “President or Vice President” were deliberately edited out of the final version of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. This, together with the disqualification of presidential electors and vice-presidential elector who have engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” makes it clear that the Framers’ of Section 3 did not intend for it to apply to presidents or vice presidents who engaged in insurrection. This impression is augmented by the fact that Section 3 methodically applies in order from the highest office to the lowest office. Section 3 first disqualifies insurrectionist Senators and then Representatives. It then disqualifies all appointed civil or military officers; it then disqualifies insurrectionists from serving as a member of any State legislature, and it finally disqualifies in insurrectionists from serving as State executive or judicial officers. This careful hierarchy suggests that the phrase “or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not apply to the President or Vice President, but applies only to appointed federal officers…

This fact is further confirmed by the Appointments Clause of Article II, Section 2, which says [The President shall nominate, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.”  The President does not appoint himself so obviously he is not an Officer of the United States under the Appointments Clause. Moreover, the Commission clause of Article II, Section 3 says that “[T he President] shall” i.e. must, “Commission all the Officers of the United States.”  No President has EVER commissioned himself or his Vice President either before or after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The President is obviously not an Officer of the United States for the purposes of the Commission clause.

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Comment of the Day: “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To ‘What Caused The Civil War?’

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This choice was tough: yesterday’s post on Nikki Haley’s bone-headed and tone -deaf answer to the soft-ball question about the cause of the American Civil War sparked several COTD-worthy observations, but I chose this one, by Chris Marschner, to represent the field. Haley’s gaffe, along with her typically weaselly attempt to wiggle out of it, is looking like that rare breed these days, a botched public statement that actually has “legs” and does serious harm to a candidate’s prospects, like President Gerald Ford’s assertion in a debate that Poland wasn’t an Iron Curtain country, or Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” statement. Naturally some on the Right rushed to Haley’s defense, as with this WSJ piece, and critics on the Left “pounced,” as with historian Heather Cox Richardson’s substack piece that called Haley’s answer “the death knell of the Republican Party.” ( This is known as “wishcraft.”) To me, this was just one more instance of Haley proving that she is untrustworthy and excessively calculating to ever believe. In some respects she’s the opposite of Trump, who is, mostly correctly, regarded as an authentic character who believes what he says, at least when he says it. Like the vast majority of politicians, Haley appears to believe what she thinks the most people want her to believe, until she discovers that they don’t.

I’ll say here that I think Chris is too easy on Haley. To answer that question without even mentioning slavery is incomprehensible, especially in 2023, when an entire political party has bet all its chips on racial grievances, “a threat to democracy” by racist fascists, and Trump Derangement. Any minimally educated and aware politician should be able to say, succinctly: “There were three primary causes: slavery, states’ rights, and to preserve the union. Next question.”

Here is Chris’s Comment of the Day on the post, “When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: Nikki Haley’s Answer To ‘What Caused The Civil War?’”…

***

South Carolina the first state to secede from the union did so on December 20, 1860. The rationale for secession was the fear that the institution of slavery was being threatened by the federal government. There was no blood spilled until the decision to preserve the union was made a year later.

According to Historytoday.com, “The American Civil War was fought to preserve the Union. There had long been tensions between the rights of the states under the constitution and those of the federal government, so much so that South Carolina and the administration in Washington almost came to blows over the issue of tariffs in the 1830s. It was slavery, however, that brought matters to breaking point.”

The Civil war began in April of 1861 when Abraham Lincoln ordered that Fort Sumter, under the command of U.S. Major Robert Anderson who occupied the still under construction fort during the approximate 15 month standoff between Union forces and the South Carolina militia, be resupplied with fresh troops and “humanitarian aid”. Naturally this was seen as an encroachment by U.S. troops on sovereign ground by the South Carolina Governor. Nonetheless, Lincoln sent the ship called the Star of the West with 200 troops and supplies to resupply the fort. When it arrived in Charleston harbor it was driven back to sea by the militia.

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Obama’s Favorite Songs: An Often Ignored Insidious Form of “Fake News”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Among the Ethics Alarms long-promised essays that have yet to be posted (you never know when one will finally pop up!) is the Ethics Alarms Fake News Directory. A story that has ended up on many MSM news sources reminded me of why what I thought it would be an easy list to compile turned into a chore. It has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Variety, CNN, the Hill, the Chicago Sun -Times, Yahoo!, AOL and dozens—yes dozens— more. The breathlessly urgent story: Barack Obama shared his list of favorite songs for 2023, or, as the Post put it, “Obama’s 2023 bangers include Beyoncé, Burna Boy and Blondshell.”

There was real news about Obama recently: several conservative-leaning news sources like the New York Post and Fox News reported that the ex-President had lobbied Harvard’s governing body to keep unqualified serial plagiarist Claudine Gay as president of Obama’s alma mater. Of course, the “good” media didn’t see that as newsworthy, or felt that the public didn’t need to know about it. Instead, many of them chose to treat Obama’s annual favorite music list as worthy of breaking news treatment.

This is favoritism and propaganda by innuendo. Only a celebrity presumed to be deserving of top of the cognitive dissonance scale status can get such treatment. The publications that printed this non-news as news are pushing readers to adopt their position: this is an inarguably good and great man of iconic stature, and so attention should be paid to his every thought, statement and opinion. It is a familiar media propaganda tactic and was one of the ways the news media propped up Obama during his mediocre terms as President (and I’m being kind) when they treated his college basketball tournament bracket choices as worthy of attention. These same news sources didn’t think the Hunter Biden laptop discovery was news in the middle of a hotly-contested election, nor did it rush to cover an accusation by a former Biden Senate staffer that he had raped her, but the music playlist of a politician with no special expertise in music at all—at least Bill Clinton played the saxophone—warranted coverage.

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Observations On The NeverTrump Section 3 Big Lie Push

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Maine joined Colorado in barring from its GOP primary ballot yesterday, as Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) decided that she “had no choice.” She had no choice because she is a rapid partisan Leftist who, like many Democratic operatives in various positions of power within the legal establishment, she is determined that President Biden be rescued from his election peril by any means necessary. Trump’s actions before and during the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol do not justify charging him with inciting a riot, much less an “insurrection” that would trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Maine’s completely partisan and anti-democratic move is sure to be appealed along with Colorado Supreme Court’s finding last week that Trump could not appear on the ballot in that state under the 14th Amendment provision designed to keep members of the Confederacy that prevents insurrectionists from holding office. The U.S. Supreme Court will review the case, one hopes quickly, and had better resolve the issue of whether Trump can run again or if the nation will be thrown into Constitutional chaos by allowing some states to block him.

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Has-Been Director Panders to the Trump-Deranged, Trump Responds Like The Silly Jerk He Is, and the Media Pretends This Is Newsworthy: Make It Stop!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:

ACT I

The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”

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