Government & Politics

Lyric Political Correctness In “The Little Mermaid”: Not Unethical, Just “The Great Stupid” Doing What It Does…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

From the Ethics Alarms mailbag came an inquiry about the latest kerfuffle over the upcoming live action version of “The Little Mermaid.” There are two great production numbers in the original, both sung by a crab: the Academy Award-winning “Under the Sea” and the more sedate “Kiss the Girl,” in which Ariel’s devoted crustacean friend urges Prince Eric, Ariel’s secret love, to take the plunge and kiss the magically land-bound fish-woman.

Here are the original lyrics:

There you see her
Sitting there across the way
She don’t got a lot to say
But there’s something about her
And you don’t know why
But you’re dying to try
You wanna kiss the girl

Yes, you want her
Look at her, you know you do
Possible she wants you too
There is one way to ask her
It don’t take a word
Not a single word
Go on and kiss the girl

Sing with me now
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
My oh my
Look like the boy too shy
Ain’t gonna kiss the girl
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Ain’t that sad?
Ain’t it a shame?
Too bad, he gonna miss the girl

Now’s your moment (ya, ya, ya)
Floating in a blue lagoon (ya, ya, ya)
Boy, you better do it soon
No time will be better (ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya)
She don’t say a word
And she won’t say a word
Until you kiss the girl

Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Don’t be scared (sha-la, sha-la-la ya, ya, ya)
You got the mood prepared (woah, woah)
Go on and kiss the girl
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Don’t stop now (sha-la, sha-la-la ya, ya, ya)
Don’t try to hide it how
You want to kiss the girl (woah, woah)
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
Float along (sha-la, sha-la-la)
And listen to the song
The song say kiss the girl (woah, woah)
Sha-la-la-la-la-la
The music play (ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya)
Do what the music say
You got to kiss the girl
You’ve got to kiss the girl
Oh, don’t you wanna kiss the girl
You’ve gotta kiss the girl
Go on and kiss the girl

Via the surviving member of the team that wrote the songs in “Mermaid” (and better yet, “Little Shop of Horrors”), Alan Menken, we learned this week that Disney, which is too woke for its own good these days (and ours), ordered up some lyric changes in the song because “people have gotten very sensitive about the idea that [Prince Eric] would, in any way, force himself on [Ariel].”

Oh, please.

Continue reading →

“Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich,” Continued: Prof. Turley Weighs In, Among Others

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I’ve been looking for commentary by legal and ethics experts I trust that defend Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump, now that the thing is in black and white. (Speaking of White: old Popehat blogger Ken White was one of the first I checked. The former Ethics Alarms Award-winner as best ethics blogger has so far avoided the topic, I suspect because he regards explaining why an indictment of someone he obviously detests is a lot of hooey with the same eagerness he applies to having sex with a horseshoe crab.) In the earlier post today, Ethics Alarms looked at Andrew McCarthy’s analysis, which was searing in its contempt for Bragg’s efforts. Later, I discovered that one of the Washington Post’s worst knee-jerk progressive members of its editorial board, Ruth Marcus, wrote,

…the indictment unsealed on Tuesday is disturbingly unilluminating, and the theory on which it rests is debatable at best, unnervingly flimsy at worst.That is a scary situation when it comes to the first criminal charges ever lodged against a former president.

Then she almost immediately demonstrated why I hold her in such contempt by adding,

I’m not saying prosecutors will lose this case. They could well win, and I hope they do, because a failure to secure a conviction will only inflame Trump and his supporters in their claims that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them.

Got that? She hopes Bragg wins a bad case and Trump is convicted because Trump and his supporters will have evidence to support the “claim” that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them. Somebody explain to Marcus, a lawyer, though it always astonished me that she is, that ethical lawyers don’t want defendants to be convicted on bogus charges no matter who they are.

Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Unethical Concession Speech!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election Tuesday gave Democrats (well, liberals/progressives—the election is supposedly non-partisan) a one-vote majority as it faces deliberations over the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and the voting rules for the 2024 presidential election. Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s defeated former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly and ended 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Kelly’s concession speech made Richard Nixon look gracious. Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote, Incompetent UN-elected official—Kelly qualifies for several EA designations, none of them positive. His speech alone shows that the voters made the right choice. Who wants a judge with such atrocious judgment?

What a jerk.

________________

Pointer: valkygrrl

Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Of course, we’ve known for decades that the man was a ham. Yesterday, however, unethical prosecutor Alvin Bragg provided decisive evidence that the former POTUS is also a ham sandwich, with an abusive grand jury indictment that perfectly embodied the old saw (first coined by former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler) that district attorneys could get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.”

When the breathlessly anticipated indictment finally came down from the grand jury (here is the indictment), it fulfilled the worst predictions of critics.

“Oh, we have to wait to see the indictment” was the mantra from Bragg’s defenders, and that was sort-of true. However, we already knew that this was a bad case: the statute of limitations has lapsed, Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce federal law, the act of paying for a non-disclosure is not a crime, the claim that the pay-off was really a campaign contribution is based on circumstantial evidence at best, the key witness is Michael Cohen, one of the sleaziest lawyers in the professions long line of sleazy lawyers and convicted perjeror, and both the Justice Department and Bragg himself had already decided it was too weak to prosecute, at least to prosecute ethically. Moreover, Bragg’s “statement of facts” before the indictment (which you can read here), made the case sound just as weak as many suspected it was.

When we learned that there were 34 counts, we thought, or at least I did, “Wow! Bragg must have a lot more to pin on Trump than Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen!”

Uh, no.

Continue reading →

Ethically And Legally, Yeshiva University Can’t Have It Both Ways

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yeshiva University is in a legal fight with a group of LGBTQ students, the YU Pride Alliance, that demands that the Modern Orthodox Jewish university recognize their campus club. To make the argument that it can refuse to do so, Yeshiva is claiming that it is a religious institution, which would which would exempt it from anti-discrimination laws under the First Amendment.

There’s a problem, though, a rather substantial one. Before the 2021 lawsuit, Yeshiva held itself out as an educational institution, which made it eligible for public funds but also meant that it could not defy city and state non-discrimination laws. The institution has received an estimated $230 million in taxpayer dollars to pay for the construction and renovation of its facilities, among other expenses, when it claimed to be an educational institution before 2021.

Now Yeshiva is stuck. The chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee has stated, “Regardless of anyone’s motives, misrepresentation to procure public money is dishonest and could potentially violate state law.” If it acquired those state funds legitimately, then Yeshiva cannot deny the students their organization without breaking the law. If the school has always been a religious institution as it now claims, it engaged in fraud by claiming otherwise to get $230 million dollars. Continue reading →

Ethics Reflections On Jeb Bush’s Tweet

/ Jack Marshall / 82 Comments

Jeb Bush—remember him?—managed to reclaim his lost significance briefly with the tweet above, which was batted around the Sunday morning TV shows, on podcasts and in various blogs.

Observations:

  • He wouldn’t mention Trump’s name, because the former POTUS is the equivalent of Voldemort to the Bush family. How juvenile. But Jeb was and is a weenie, and that’s one of the reasons he never got to run for President.
  • Why should anyone care what Jeb Bush thinks about the indictment? He isn’t a lawyer. He isn’t a New York politician. Using the tweet as an appeal to authority is pathetic: “But Jeb Bush says…” on this topic is exactly as persuasive as “But Joy Behar says…”
  • It’s too late, by about seven years, for the Bush family to emulate fairness and objectivity regarding Donald Trump. The previous two Republican Presidents could have helped unify the GOP, helped Trump accomplish policy objectives they agreed with, bring NeverTrumpers back into the fold and avoided (maybe) the current Democratic Party assault on democracy by not acting like the Corleones and sending out their Luca Brasis to seek revenge on Trump for saying mean things about George and Jeb. They made it clear that they placed family pride above national interests and the institution of the Presidency. Jeb, like George W. is ethically estopped from urging fair treatment of Trump now.
  • The tweet makes no sense, when it isn’t stating the obvious. The fact that Justice et al. didn’t take up the case doesn’t prove anything by itself. Maybe those decisions were political and Bragg’s was not. Of course “this” is very political: any time a prominent political figure is investigated or charged it is political by definition, because the actions have political consequences. “No shit, Sherlock”—indicting a former President is very political, but that doesn’t automatically mean it also isn’t a matter of justice. James Comey decided in part that Hillary Clinton should be let off the hook for conduct that lower level officials have been prosecuted for because he felt that charging a Presidential candidate mid-campaign would unjustly influence the election, which is a valid act of prosecutorial discretion. Was that “justice”? Would charging her have been less political and more about justice?
  • “Let the voters decide”? Ugh. When would Jeb want that principle to apply? Where would he draw the line, or would there be any line at all? Never indict a candidate or potential candidate regardless of evidence of a crime? Any crime? A felony? A crime involving “moral turpitude,” which disqualifies citizens from being lawyers? The public loves the King’s Pass,” #11 on the rationalizations list, which holds that special people—you know, the famous, the beautiful, the rich, the accomplished—should be held to lower standards of conduct than the schmuck next door. We don’t want people who think like that on juries, do we?
  • Asked to comment on Jeb’s tweet, former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, as political a DA as one could find, answered,

Continue reading →

A Show Of Hands On The Trial And Conviction Of Douglass Mackey

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Douglass Mackey was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn last week of Conspiracy Against Rights during the weeks before the 2016 election by circulating false and misleading tweets that, I think it is fair to say, were aimed at tricking naive, stupid or ignorant Hillary Cinton voters into failing to cast valid votes. The verdict followed a one-week trial before United States District Judge Ann M. Donnelly, and now Mackey faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

This is an immediate and significant law vs. ethics conundrum.

Mackey was part of an apparently loosely organized effort by Trump supporters in 2016 to use misleading and false tweets and memes like those above to fool Hillary Clinton supporters into believing that they could vote for the Democrat in the Presidential election via text messaging. The question raised by the conviction is whether such internet-based election dirty tricks actually violate the federal civil rights statutes. The relevant one in this case makes it “unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person of any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the United States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”

Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Got It: Apparently All Criticism Of Progressive Figures Or Positions Is Based Entirely On Hate…”

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

JutGory, on the post, “Got It: Apparently All Criticism Of Progressive Figures Or Positions Is Based Entirely On Hate And Bigotry. Good To Know!

***

The Left seems obsessed with hate. They seem to see it everywhere.

I am not sure from where this form of argumentation comes.

Are they quick to accuse so that they cannot then be accused?

Is it an argument deployed because it is one that cannot be defended against?

Do they actually think that is what people are motivated by?

Is it a convenient straw-man argument?

Continue reading →

Ethics Villain: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, And Other Observations On The Trump Indictment

/ Jack Marshall / 83 Comments

Last week’s indictment of Donald Trump, engineered by a hard-Left partisan Manhattan D.A. who had made his intentions known when he was running for office, didn’t change any of the ethical calculations here that were recorded when that indictment seemed imminent almost two weeks ago, or in the update, when it appeared that Alvin Bragg might have lost his nerve and decided to be an ethical prosecutor after all, here. I reviewed both posts to see if I would change anything, and I would not, but the final line of the March 18 essay still resonates: “The indictment will remind people of why he won in the first place.” Bragg’s exercise in politically-driven law enforcement will drive far more voters to Trump than it strips away. This makes his actions as politically and pragmatically irresponsible as they seem to be legally and ethically indefensible.

It is necessary to include the caveat “seem to be” because we haven’t seen the indictment yet. Maybe Bragg has legitimate cause (other than “he’s a bad guy and must have done something illegal”) to bring criminal charges against the ex-President, though virtually no unbiased legal analyst with any legitimacy thinks that’s likely. If he does, then his pursuit of Trump may be unwise, and its passion may be fueled by bias, but it is not unethical.

From another perspective, however, even if there were valid and legitimate reasons to charge Trump in this case—and I will be surprised if there are—if there ever were a situation where prosecutorial discretion and restraint were screamingly called for, this is it. The ripples and waves emanating from this indictment and, heaven help us, the arrest and trial will cause so much havoc in our political system, legal precedents, societal divisions, and national discourse that it cannot even be quantified or predicted. They could easily result in Donald Trump being elected again, or arguably worse still, in Joe Biden being re-elected. Whatever happens as a result of Bragg’s conduct, it is certain to be bad for everyone except, maybe, the fanatical Trump Deranged, who have already demonstrated a willingness to destroy the Constitution, the Rules of Law, democratic institutions and ethical standards to get their prey.

Also:

Continue reading →

Pet Goat Ethics: Is There Anyone Behaving Ethically In This Mess?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Are they just not installing ethics alarms any more?

Above you see Cedar the Goat with his 9-year-old owner, now grief-stricken because Cedar ended up on a State Senator’s menu thanks to a series of unethical acts that could have been short-circuited if anyone with power or authority had been a little more ethical, but no.

Jessica Long bought Cedar last year as a pet for her nine-year-old daughter, but for some reason decided to hand the beloved pet over to a livestock auction at a district fair, which stipulated that the all sales were final and Cedar, like all the other farm critters, would be sold for meat. The fair’s brochure clearly stated “no exceptions.” But Long’s daughter was distraught about the prospect of losing Cedar, so her mom begged the fair to give him back before bidding started.

“Pet schmet,” the fair’s rulers essentially replied. “Making an exception for you will only teach our youth that they do not have to abide by the rules that are set up for all participants,” Shasta District (that’s in California) Fair Chief Executive Officer Melanie Silva lectured in an email. So Cedar was duly auctioned off to a representative of California State Senator Brian Dahle for $902. Just $63.14 of that goes to the state fair and the rest, $838.86 to Long.

Thinking hard (but not well) about how to please her daughter, Jessica kidnapped the goat and decided to “take the goat that night and deal with the consequences later.”

Oh, good thinking there, Mom!

The fair’s livestock manager contacted Long warning of “serious consequences” if the goat wasn’t returned. Then a sheriff from Shasta County, filed a search warrant, a judge signed off on it and officers used “breaching equipment to force open doorway(s), entry doors, exit doors, and locked containers in pursuit of their target.” Cedar was the target. Clever Long, however, had sent Cedar into hiding at a distant farm in Sonoma County, but it still didn’t work: authorities got her goat anyway and drove him 200 miles to Shasta County for slaughter.

It is believed that the little goat was served at a community barbecue to which he had been donated as a gesture by Senator Dahl. And that he was delicious.

Continue reading →