Government & Politics

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Sen. Amy Klobuchar

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“The facts are clear here. This is unbelievable. You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice … advocating for overturning a legal election to the sitting president’s chief of staff. She also knows this election — these cases are going to come before her husband. This is a textbook case for removing him, recusing him from these decisions.”

—-Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) on ABC’s “This Week,” blathering nonsense to co-anchor Jonathan Karl today, as he, predictably, showed neither the erudition nor the guts to correct he, as she insisted that a conflict of interest that does not exist in law is a “textbook case.”

I was tempted to let the Senator’s outrageous misinformation (Will Twitter suspend her for it? Nah….) slide, except that 1) Too many lawyers and reasonable progressives of my acquaintance settled on her as their favored 2020 Democratic Presidential hopeful, and she said ridiculous things like this throughout the debates, using false certitude for fact and reason, and it ticked me off; 2) her statement isn’t just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, and 3) you know how I hate to see high officials that the public trusts use their megaphones and influence to make it even more ignorant than it already is.

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Ethics Dunce: NY Prosecutor Mark Pomeranz

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Last week, the New York Times and other media gleefully reported that Mark  Pomeranz, one of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who was part of the “Get Trump” effort that has been ongoing in New York almost from the minute he was Trump elected President, believed that the he was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable.” This information came as his resignation letter somehow was released to the press.  Pomeranz submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg stopped pursuing an indictment of Donald Trump. Bragg had picked up the long-running attempt to charge Trump from his predecessor Cyrus Vance, Trump’s own personal Javert, who did not run for re-election.

What neither the Times nor any other source bothered to point out was that Pomeranz’s public statement that Trump was guilty of crimes were bright line violations of prosecutor ethics both in New York and across the profession.

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Ugh. Masks Again. My Breaking Point Is Getting Nearer…

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Last night in Northern Virginia, I waited to be served at a SubWay behind a young, apparently well-to-do mother and her two children, no more than 5 or 6 years old. All three were tightly masked, though in the cloth variety that are—yes they are— virtually useless. The two women behind the counter were masked, of course, for business and PR reasons. I wasn’t. Also in front of me was a young African-American woman (who ordered a BMT with cucumber, mayo, mustard, oil and vinegar) who also wore a cloth mask, while two young men behind me were unmasked.

For about the tenth time in recent weeks, I had to wrestle my tongue to the floor to avoid asking the masked women in line, “Pardon me, but why are you wearing those things?” and the mother “Why are you forcing those tiny children to walk around with half their faces covered? (I also wanted to ask the woman in front of me, “Mayo, mustard, oil and vinegar all on an Italian sub? What are you, nuts?” But that’s another issue.) Once again, I resisted the urge, but I can feel myself nearing the point where I’m going to do it. In fact, I’m nearing the point where I think it is the duty of Americans who care about the culture, societal values and future as a democracy to challenge the maskers, especially those who are abusing and warping their children.

These people should be made to defend their conduct. It’s not a private matter, not when masks carry a message and send messages to others. There appear to be two varieties of masked Americans, one pathetic and the other sinister: those who wear masks as a symbolic show of solidarity with the statist, totalitarian Left that wants the government to train the “little people” to do and believe what they are told, and those who have been turned into lifetime germaphobes and agoraphobes by media scaremongering, inflated death statistics and incompetent health officials. Every day, in tiny, incremental ways, these two, sometimes overlapping groups are tearing down American individuality, liberty, and the quality of life.

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The White House Gets Another Jumbo

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

You know, at some point, this has to matter, doesn’t it?

For four years, the mainstream media, Democrats and the Trump-Deranged claimed that anything that President Trump said or tweeted, whether it was gaffe, a mistake, a joke, hyperbole, puffery or, as was indeed often the case, deliberately misleading, was a democracy-threatening lie. This media theme was an exaggeration on its own, and a damaging one, diminishing Trump’s public trust and making it difficult for him to do his job—as indeed was the whole point of the “Trump lies” obsession.

So what is the American public supposed to conclude when President Biden says something that is clear and unequivocal, and the official White House position is that he didn’t say it?

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Go Ahead, I Dare You, I Dare Anyone: Explain The Contrast Between The New York Times Reaction To The Jackson Hearings With Its Response To The Kavanaugh Hearings As Anything But Blatant Partisan Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I’ll admit it: I prepared for this yesterday. I’ll also confess that I post it in part to metaphorically rub the noses of the obstinate New York Times defenders who might visit here in their destructive denials of what is, daily, right in front of their noses.

As I knew it would as surely as I knew the Republican Senators would not do the ethical and statesmanlike thing and be polite, perfunctory and non-confrontational in their examination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, I knew that whatever they did would be attacked by the Times and mainstream news media as racist and hyper-partisan. Thus I tracked down the Times’ story following Justice Kanaugh’s confirmation, from October 6, 2018. You can read it here: Half of the focus was on the fact that his confirmation made the Court dangerously conservative, and not on the Democrats’ despicable smearing of the nominee with a contrived accusation of sexual assault (that supposedly occurred before he attended college or law school, much less before he was a judge).

The other half concentrated on Kavanaugh’s angry attack on the authors of this character assassination attempt, which, sayeth the Times and the anti-Kavanaugh partisan professors it chose to interview, raised questions about his “judicial temperament.” This was the most disgraceful treatment of any Supreme Court nominee ever, before or since, yet no hint of that verdict appeared in the Times.

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Pssst! Joe! If Your Goal Is To Not Be Petty and Juvenile Like Trump, This Isn’t How To Do It…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

What’s going on here? I honestly have no idea, but I do know it’s idiotic. The Council is the ultimate non-partisan body. For the President to boot two celebrities, one from sports, another from TV, off the Council as some kind of political strike can only look bad. Both are also “of color”—Joe knows that if Trump did this, he’d be called a racist. But he’d also be called a petulant child, and rightly so.

Who in the White House thought this was a good idea? It does not fill me with faith in the quality of Biden’s advisors.

Oz, like Walker, says he won’t resign. I wouldn’t either. For a President, this is the essence of punching down.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Ethics Observations On The Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Senate Hearings, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The Post editorial was so ethically awful that it warranted special attention. The rest of the story…

Observations:

1. As I so sagely predicted, the Republican attacks on Jackson have been declared racist by Woke World, democrats and the news media. Here are some of the comment on the Post editorial:

  • “I am reminded of what Jackie Robinson had to go through in 1947 when he broke the color line in baseball. How he had to take every shot, every insult, every racist thing thrown at him without complaint. And now, in 2022, Judge Jackson had to sit there and just take every insulting, despicable, racist and sexist thing thrown at her without being able to call out those who treated her with such bigotry, such callous disrespect.”

  • “Graham, Blackburn, Cruz and other GOP inquisitors know retention of the racist vote is crucial to the election of Republican candidates. They are intent on pandering to that component of Trump’s populist base. The senators’ disrespectful treatment of Judge Jackson doubtlessly did much to retain that base support.”
  • “Come on. “Not all Republicans are racists” is so 2016. ANYONE and I mean anyone who votes for a Republican in 2022 is a racist. Period. Maybe not fully racist meaning gee, they might have concerns about inflation or whatever, but racist in the end. R = RACIST.”

Nothing any of the Republicans said to or about Jackson was racist, but it doesn’t matter. The tough questioning served no purpose, but helped bolster the “Republicans/conservatives are racists” Big Lie. The justification was “tit for tat.” It is incompetent politics, particularly at a time when minorities are increasingly open to conservative candidates. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Maybe The Year): Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going to go back and kill Americans. It won’t bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That’s a better outcome than letting them go. And if it costs $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail. Because they’re going to go back to the fight. Look at the fricken Afghan government that’s made up of former detainees at Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain’t working.”

Senator Lindsey Graham in a meltdown at the confirmation hearing for SCOTUS nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, before walking out in a tizzy.

Hmmm. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that high ranking elected officials from both political parties appear to have little regard for core Constitutional principles? I’m going out on a limb here by stating that it’s a bad thing.

In fact, it is terrible.

Graham, an alleged conservative, proudly went on record as supporting “pre-crime” punitive measures (Watch “Minority Report” for a fair assessment of how that works) along with a pure “ends justifies the means” endorsement, spiced up by some “if it saves just one life” false logic. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Prof. Michael Ignatieff

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Lincoln should be with us all these days especially since ‘malice toward none’ has been replaced by malice toward all, as if in our ideological arrogance we have forgotten that neither God nor justice is necessarily on our side.”

—-Philosophy scholar Michael Ignatieff, Ph.D. professor at  Central European University in Vienna, Austria, in his recent book, “On Consolation,” his examination of how figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises.

In a chapter devoted to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered in March 4,1865, near the end of the Civil War and with his own assassination six weeks away, Ignatieff explains that Lincoln concluded that “neither side could ever know what God intended by the fiery trial,” so “the victor had no right to raise the sword of vengeance while the defeated had the right to claim the dignity of honorable defeat. Humility about the ultimate meaning of the war, in other words, created the space for mercy.” Continue reading →

I Would Say That The “Doomsday Clock” Has Finally Lost All Integrity, But It Never Had Any In The First Place

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I hate to repeat myself, I really do. Unfortunately, unethical people keep doing the same damn things over and over while the rest of the public has short memories. I could write this post almost entirely by cutting and pasting from a 2017 post I already re-posted once, in 2020, but it has more ethical implications for us now.

Last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that it will not move the time on the infamous “Doomsday Clock” closer to “midnight,” which symbolizes curtains for civilization. This, said the Washington Free Beacon, raised “questions about the practices of an institution several legacy media outlets refer to as scientific.” A whether the clock would move forward after citing criteria the organization used in the past, such as armed conflict involving countries with nuclear weapons, a spokesman from the group said the time would remain unchanged and declined to answer any follow-up questions about how the heck that could be the case.

After all, last week President Biden was openly talking about World War III. Russian president Vladimir Putin has put his nuclear arsenal on “high alert,” and NATO has mobilized its response force for the first time since its inception. The West has installed crippling sanctions against Russia, which Putin, who is alleged to have gone nuts, has pronounced as acts of war. So why is the clock frozen in place when one would think it would be speeding terrifyingly forward?

Shut up! These are scientists! Why don’t you trust them? They’re smarter than you, and they know best! Science denier! Now put your damn mask on and trade your car in for a bicycle. Continue reading →