Government & Politics

F. Scott Fitzgerald Thinks Mayor Brandon Johnson Is Brilliant. I Think He’s an Unethical Lying Idiot…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald didn’t know Chicago’s incompetent and dishonest Democratic mayor (the latest one, Brandon Johnson), but nonetheless: anyone who witnessed Johnson’s recent example of holding two opposed ideas in what he optimistically calls his mind must conclude that 1) Johnson is far from brilliant, being an advocate of the “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts” school of logic; 2) the Mayor believes that Democrats are dummies, which on the topic at hand, illegal immigration and law enforcement, is a good bet, and 3) Fitzgerald wasn’t all that swift either.

Mayor Brandon Johnson went on MSNOW’s “The Weekend” yesterday to opine on President Trump’s remarks to reporters at the White House that Trump’s actions had lowered crime in the Windy City. “We just had numbers from Chicago where Chicago crime has gone down pretty good,” the President said, ungrammatically. Wrong, said Johnson. “Where ICE and federal agents were present, we actually saw an increase in violence. In other words, the tension and the chaos that federal agents bring to cities in America, it actually is counter-productive.” 

Then, seconds later, he said, “Yes, we saw a 30 % reduction in homicides, shooting, shooting victims, all down.”

Johnson did not explain that the so-called increase in violence due to I.C.E. being present was entirely due to illegal interference with and attacks against the federal immigration officers from Chicagoans interfering with law enforcement as a result of being incited by elected officials like Illinois Governor Pritzger and others calling I.C.E agents Nazis, Gestapo, and “occupiers.” Johnson had claimed Trump “literally declared war on American cities.” Literally! Ah, how I remember POTUS signing that declaration of war in the Oval Office….

The likelihood that removing criminal illegal aliens from Johnson’s “sanctuary city” while clearly sending a message that the jig was up, in stark contrast to the previous administration’s policies, had something to do with the reduction in violent crime never occurred to the Mayor. Yet in 2024, Chicago earned the title of America’s homicide leader for the 13th year in a row. 

Naturally, nobody at NSNOW cared to point out that Johnson’s argument was self-refuting, or even ask him if he was a Fitzgerald fan. And so they all beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…

The N.F.L. Is Helping Chuck Klosterman’s Prediction Come True [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

I was going to get this up before the Super Bowl, but it turns out that the issue was further crystalized by the game itself. As happens approximately 50% of the time with this annual spectacle, the game was a yawn, and much of the news coming out of the contest involved the NFL’s deliberate transformation of what was once considered a unifying family cultural event, like Fourth of July fireworks, into a partisan, progressive statement about how America sucks, with expensive TV ads extolling capitalism and patriotism at the same time. That’s message whiplash, and ethically irresponsible.

As the New York Times explained, without criticism, the NFL took a hard turn Left when it put Barack Obama pal Jay-Z, the rap star and impresario, in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show after the 2018 Super Bowl had triggered anger from fans over players “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. The Times, spinning as usual, says that the kneeling was intended to “draw attention to police brutality and social justice issues.”

As Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time, none of the kneelers, including its cynical originator, over-the-hill quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ever explained coherently what they were kneeling about. What “police brutality”? Oh, you know, Mike Brown, whom Black Lives Matters still says was “murdered” on its website. What social justice issues? Oh, you know: it’s time for white people to be discriminated against to make up for slavery. The left-turn was a greed-induced mass virtue signal to blacks, clueless young fans, and Democrats. (It helped that President Trump vociferously attacked Kaepernick and Co., so the kneeling appealed to the Trump Deranged too. (See Dissonance Scale, Cognitive)

The Times:

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Ethics Observations on the President’s Response to His Obamas-As-Apes Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 REPORTER: “Mr. President, you frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted is on your social media.”

 PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I know what’s going on a hell of a lot better than you do! You don’t know what’s going on! I know what’s going on.  No, Joe Biden didn’t have a clue, but we know everything. And when you look at what’s happening with our economy, think of it, we’re way years ahead of schedule. We have thousands and thousands of businesses being built right now, so Joe Biden had no clue. If Joe Biden were elected or if Kamala were elected, we wouldn’t have country right now. We won the election because of minority voters.”

 REPORTER: “Does this post maybe hurt Republicans with, you know, Black voters after the…”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You know, I was, look, we did criminal justice reform. I did the historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. Nobody has been, and that’s why I got a tremendous, the highest vote with male Black voters that they’ve seen in many, many decades. I’ve done great with them. Black voters have been great to me. I’ve been great them. Black voters has been great me. I’ve been great to them.  And I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned. We have — I’ve had a great relationship. Think of what I’ve done. Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could do it. Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could do. Clinton couldn’t. They actually went the other way. They went into a very bad thing for African American people, Black people. They went to a — they did very bad things. I did very good things. But criminal justice reform, and then I funded the universities, which nobody else was willing to do. They were going every year, they’d come back to Washington and they’d be begging for money, begging. I got to be friendly with some of the heads of the schools and they would come back and they would literally tell me they’re forcing us to beg. I’m the one that got them long-term financing and more than they were looking for.  So there’s nobody that’s done more. And I think maybe more than anything else was criminal justice reform. They’ve been trying to get it for years. And I’m the one that got it done, so nobody can tell me about that.”

 “That somebody posts, the staffer posts, you know, posts. And I knew it was all about, if you take a look at that, and see the whole thing, it was a small section at the very end. But that was about fraudulent elections, which we have, a lot of them. We’re gonna get it stopped. And I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on.”

Observations:

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BREAKING: DEI Bias Eats The A.P.’s Brains

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Why would the Associate Press feel the world needs this “news” when Savannah Guthrie’s mother is still missing?

The Associated Press is troubled that there are so many white athletes at the Winter Olympics. No, it really offered a new story that says this. No I am NOT kidding. The apparently woke-mad Chris Nisi complains in “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role” [Note: “Culture plays a big role”= “Bulletin: Water is Wet.”]…

Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer — Sweden’s men’s national team has several Black players including Liverpool striker Alexander Isak — it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports…At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception. That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.

The lack of athletes of color at the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports in general — has been a recurring theme in the U.S., which is sending one of its most diverse teams to the Games. It hasn’t gotten the same attention in Europe.

The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams…”

 

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No, Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post Became An Untrustworthy Blight On America Long, Long Ago And I Can Prove It…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I just saw the above and felt it was as good a visual intro to this essay as any. Now keep in mind that here I am not suggesting that the recently gutted Washington Post is necessarily a worse travesty of journalism than the rest of what we laughingly call our news media. I just had Fox News on in the background while I reorganized my sock drawer and heard it breathlessly cover the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother for a full ten minutes. Fox is doing this, I surmise, to avoid discussing President Trump’s latest social media scandal, as I do here. But I digress….what prompted this EA post is this recent bit of nostalgia in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter, who wrote in part,

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups. The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself….But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster…I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

First, let me say that I am impressed that Peggy still writes as beautifully as ever, and I forgive her for being married to the guy who fired me at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and who tried to cheat on her with one of my interns until I intervened). However Noonan is one of the NeverTrump Republicans, and bias has clearly made her stupid regarding the Post’s bias and abandonment of fair, accurate, objective journalism as its mission. Come on, Peggy…

  • “Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was.” Yes, and the Post has been a significant catalyst for this.
  • “The Post was a pillar.” When was the Washington Post last a “pillar”? Watergate?
  • “… a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.” As I will shortly demonstrate, the Post had become a Democratic Party, progressive mouthpiece long before that.
  •  “Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad.” In fact, that’s exactly what is happening, because conservatives, Republican and ethicists recognized that the Post had become a partisan weapon, and the Mad Left regarded it as its champion of useful disinformation and public deception. 
  • “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it.” Appears? APPEARS??? That condition has been obvious to anyone with the integrity to admit it since at least 2008, when the Post joined most news organizations in campaigning for Barack Obama. This included blaming the bi-partisan 2008 economic meltdown on only Republicans when Ted Kennedy’s and Barney Frank’s fingerprints were all over the debacle, calling GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin unqualified when she had more relevant experience for the Presidency than the Democrats’ Presidential nominee, and mocked her intellect while ignoring Obama’s running mate’s well established IQ issues.
  • “I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it.” In the immortal words of John McClane, “Welcome to the party, pal!” But the Post wasn’t engaged in journalism, and hadn’t been for many years. Where was Noonan then? Why wasn’t she sounding the alarm?
  • “Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information.”  Something bad? You mean like the nation being locked-down based on the teachers’ unions refusal to do their jobs, Deep State health officials lying about what they knew,  and the Democratic Party’s desire to crash the economy to get rid of Donald Trump? Like an election being held in 2020 with insecure ballots and blue states violating their own election laws? Or a President being demented and his wife and staff running the country while the news media assisted in the cover-up? Like a group of Democratic prosecutors targeting the greatest threat to their continued power and using third world tactics to try to lock him up? Those kinds of “bad things?”
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Ethics MEGA-Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

As I noted in the previous post, President Trump had an epically unethical week, even for him. I found out about the latest horror on Facebook and “X”, from the post above by my friend Mary Milben, who proved her integrity and courage. Mary, you see, is MAGA’s official songbird. a brilliant soprano who has performed at many Republican functions from coast to coast. She is also an African-American who has suffered criticism for her support of the President as all high-profile black conservatives do. Despite the fact that her prominence, celebrity and livelihood depends on her relationship with the President and his supporters, she immediately spoke out against Trump’s Truth Social account posting of a 62-second video on conspiracy theories about the “stolen” 2020 Presidential election. At the very end was added a non-sequitur section, set to the Tokens’ ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight,”showing Trump as the Lion King and various Democrats as jungle animals, including Barack and Michelle Obama as…apes.

I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple “niggers.”

After an uproar that I will bet is not going to subside, perhaps ever, the video was taken down. Karoline Leavitt, presumably following orders, took a defiant (and stupid) stance, saying “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

You know, like the desperate search for Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother. The President of the United States appearing to compare the most popular African-Americans in the nation and the only black First Couple as sub-human primates isn’t news. Seriously, Karoline?

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Another historic moment for our 47th President! Donald Trump is not only the first President but also the first individual to rate three Ethics Dunce honors on Ethics Alarms in a single week, as well as setting a record for two in a single day, with the one coming up.

I bet you can guess what that one’s about…

The Justice Department arrested demonstrator Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer, for her part in the illegal protester raid on a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, along with Don Lemon and other pro-illegal immigrant activists. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted an image of the arrest on Twitter/”X” showing Levy Armstrong dignified and composed, walking in front of a law enforcement agent. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary shared that post, but the White House posted a fake, AI-altered version of the arrest in which the lawyer appears to be sobbing. Her skin is also darker. I pasted the original photo next to the fake one above.

There is no defense for this, nor is there any spin you can put on it where this dishonest, deceptive. gallactically stupid conduct doesn’t land at the President’s feet, stinking like week-old fish. Incredibly, irresponsibly and also stupidly, White House officials defended the fake with deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr writing on X that the “memes will continue.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson also shared a post mocking the criticism.

Morons. Utter morons! The only ethical response possible would be to 1) take down the fake posts, 2) apologize profusely 3) fire the staffer or staffers immediately responsible and 4) for Trump, himself and at a microphone, take full responsibility while swearing never to allow anything like that again.

But he won’t do that.

It shouldn’t take a genius or a humble ethicist to explain why this episode was so harmful, but apparently nobody at the White House can figure it out, so here we go:

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My Head Just Exploded Over This News of the Corruption Of Our Legal System That I Didn’t Know About Because The Media Decided a “Today” Host’s FAMILY CRISIS IS MORE IMPORTANT…!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In case you can’t tell, I’m madly disgusted about this, “this” meaning both the episode I’m going to write about, and the fact that I didn’t hear or read about it immediately because of our incompetent, irresponsible news media deciding that their dumb audience would rather share feelings with Savannah Guthrie.

From the New York Times: [Gift link!]

“A former obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was convicted in 2022 of sexually abusing patients must be given a new trial, a state appeals court said on Monday, overturning the former doctor’s conviction. The former doctor, James M. Heaps, 69, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in April 2023 after jurors in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County found him guilty of three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person. U.C.L.A. has already paid about $700 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Heaps, who was affiliated with the university in various roles from 1983 to 2018.

“A three-judge panel on the California Court of Appeal ruled on Monday that Mr. Heaps had been denied a fair trial because the trial judge never told Mr. Heaps’s lawyer or the prosecutors on the case about a note that the jury had sent while it was deliberating in October 2022.

The “Note to Judge” said that a recently seated alternate juror had “expressed to us that his limited English interfered with his understanding of the testimony, resulting in every case being the same, and his mind is already made up.”

Under the California Code of Civil Procedure, people who lack “sufficient knowledge of the English language” cannot serve on trial juries. The appeals court ruled that Mr. Heaps’s conviction must be overturned.”

“We recognize the burden on the trial court and regrettably, on the witnesses, in requiring retrial of a case involving multiple victims and delving into the conduct of intimate medical examinations,” the appeals court wrote. “The importance of the constitutional right to counsel at critical junctures in a criminal trial gives us no other choice.”

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement that it planned to retry Mr. Heaps ‘as soon as possible.’ Mr. Heaps will be sent back to county jail, the office said, and a court could release him on bail.”

I will now pause a bit while you mop your skull and brain bits off your computer screen. I’ve found that Windex does a good job, though you have to pick up the bigger pieces with your fingers.

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I assume the President will get severely criticized for this, and he will deserve it. “Make America Weenies Again.” Is that the strategy?

President Trump said yesterday that he has personally ordered the withdrawal of 700 I.C.E. officers from Minnesota and that his administration could use a “softer touch.” Earlier in the day, Tom Homan, the White House mush-mouthed “border czar,” said about 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state because an “unprecedented number of counties” were finally cooperating with federal officials and allowing ICE to take custody of unauthorized immigrants before they were released from jails. “This is smart law enforcement, not less law enforcement,” he said.

Okaaaaay. Maybe that’s true. It doesn’t matter. How the action will be received by the open borders mob, not just in Minnesota but in Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Virginia and the rest, is that interference with law enforcement works, riots work, elected officials demonizing law enforcement works, and open defiance of the federal government and U.S. laws work. Trump’s move, especially in a week when The Nation, the Far, Far Left magazine, nominated Minnesota for a Nobel Peace Prize for encouraging attacks on I.C.E officers, is a retreat that can only encourage more George Wallace -style nullification.

I know he is stuck with a party of weenies who will always surrender first principles when the whining from voters gains volume (“Why does law enforcement have to be so mean?”) Nevertheless, The President should have driven a hard bargain here, beginning with a demand that Tim Walz and his lackeys shut the hell up and stop talking about fighting law enforcement, arresting officers, the Civil War and the Holocaust. Trump should have threatened to use the Insurrection Act and added a “Dirty Harry”-esque “Go ahead. make my day.”

I get it: Trump doesn’t want to invoke the Insurrection Act. But his decision to try to avoid conflict only increases the likelihood that he will have to.

That Tears It: I’m Heading To The Woodchipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

On Facebook just now, two brilliant women I have long admired, loved and respected posted the following on Facebook:

…One quoted FDR about the President as a “moral leader.” This was intended by my friend as a knock on Trump. She obviously knows next to nothing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He cheated on his devoted wife for most of their marriage, ultimately dying with one of his mistresses. He locked up Japanese American citizens in arguably the worst civil rights breach of any American President. He helped the Holocaust to proceed by allowing anti-Semites in his Cabinet to foil the efforts of Jews to escape Nazi Germany. FDR condemned Eastern Europe to decades of brutal Communist rule in gratitude to Stalin. Roosevelt also allowed himself to be elected four times, the last time when he knew he was dying: an odd choice to use in contrast to a President being accused of being a “king.”

FDR was a great President in many ways, but few of our leaders were less interested in morality or ethics than Roosevelt.

.…The other poste that she read Kamala Harris’s book and found it inspiring. I don’t even want to talk about that one…