Government & Politics

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

(I know this is like shooting fish in a barrel, but…)

“I wish the NYT would play it dead straight.’

—Blogging contrarian Ann Althouse, complaining about the Times story and its headline, “Ginni Thomas Denies Discussing Election Subversion Efforts With Her Husband.”

The retired law professor writes,

Election Subversion Efforts” is quite a phrase. You could discuss a lot of things and still deny that any of it was “subversion.”… If you believe the election was already subverted, then in pushing for more procedural paths, you’re trying to un-subvert it. If you think the announced results are invalid, you’re trying to get to the true results, not “invalidate the results.” It’s very hard to wade through these loaded terms. 

We have discussed this sinister media spin ever since the November 2020. Questioning the election results and taking related action when Republicans win is simply politics as usual and seeking integrity in the democratic system. Doing so when Democrats win is “election subversion.” The Times is, as it does most of the time now, using its influence to try to bolster Democratic party campaign themes and talking points.

It’s time like these when I miss self-banned New York Times apologist “A Friend,” who could be counted on to mount a contrived defense when his favorite paper was flagged for ethics fouls like this. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Crystal Flute

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The strange episode has everything: history, a President, music, bad taste, fat-shaming, historical ignorance, and more.

Lizzo, the defiantly obese pop singer, rapper and all-around musical whiz who is also a classically trained flutist, was permitted to entertain her Washington, D.C. concert audience this week by playing a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813. She was handed the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, then, as described by the New York Times, “played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.”

“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s!” Lizzo told the crowd. “We just made history tonight.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is...

Was that an appropriate and ethical use of the historical artifact?

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Now Washington, D.C. Wants To Cheapen Citizenship

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Of course it does.

this week, a D.C. Council committee unanimously approved a bill to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, and just to make sure the intent was clear, an amendment was added including illegal immigrants to the voting rolls as well. Oh, the term used is “undocumented’ or some other cover-word to avoid the sorry truth, but you know what’s going on.

Several towns in Maryland and Vermont already give non-citizens municipal voting rights. Non-citizens vote in school board elections in San Francisco, and cities in California, Maine, Illinois and Massachusetts have similar legislation on the drawing board. The inclusion of illegal aliens is more unusual, but D.C.’s elected officials apparently felt the need to virtue-signal after reacting like stuck Swamp Creatures when a few hundred illegals were bused to their metaphorical shores. Like Martha’s Vineyard, the “sanctuary city”-preening District loves illegals as long as the vast number of them have to be cared for and paid for by Texas, Florida, Arizona…you know, the where Little People dwell.

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Occupy Democrats Is Just As Incompetent And Unethical As Its Memes Always Indicated…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That tweet of signature significance isn’t the topic of this post, but it is relevant. [Thanks to comment-master Humble Talent for passing it along.] This progressive group, much like the equally dim Move-On.org, represents shrill far-left ideological cant without nuance, facts, standards or restraint. All of my Facebook Friends who were addicted to posting disinformation and propaganda memes by Occupy Democrats have unfriended me by now I think; it’s too bad, because some of them once had functioning minds, but it’s just as well. Meanwhile, the always evident ethics and intellectual rot underlying OD is finally being recognized.

Occupy Democrats’ campaign finances over several cycles show that the group spent most of the money it acquired from charitable contributions— $577,000 of a total $797,000 raised this cycle—on “fundraising consultants,” with no—that’s zip, nada, zero— contributions going to candidates.

A quarter-million dollars of what the group raised over this past election cycle, did flow into the coffers of Blue Deal LLC, which is owned by Occupy Democrats’ founder Omar Rivero and his brother, Rafael.

Oh! So Occupy Democrats is like Black Lives Matter, then!

A scam.

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The President Sees Dead People: Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

The most important observation may be that the mainstream media is covering this disturbing episode rather than burying it.

From the New York Times:

President Biden looked in the audience on Wednesday for Representative Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana, during a White House conference on ending hunger, apparently forgetting that Ms. Walorski had died last month.

“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” Mr. Biden said as he thanked lawmakers who had sponsored legislation on the hunger issue. The president appeared to be confused at her absence and said something under his breath about whether she had planned to be at the event.

In fact, Ms. Walorski was killed on Aug. 3 in a car accident in her district, along with two of her congressional aides, when a vehicle she was in collided head-on with another. The driver of the oncoming car was also killed.

Mr. Biden did not correct himself during the remarks, but the incident quickly went viral on Twitter and other social media platforms, with some people seizing on the moment as evidence that Mr. Biden, who is 79, lacks the mental capacity to be president.

“Some people”? Not to throttle a theme, but why just “some people”? Isn’t forgetting that someone is dead (when you made a public statement about her death just a month earlier) a classic sign of dementia? And why is this a surprise to anyone who has been paying even a little attention to Biden since before he was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination?

Of course, after that straightforward and factual account, the Times slipped back into familiar “Republicans pounce” territory. “The president’s political opponents have been pushing that attack since he took office.,” the news item says. It’s not an attack! It’s a legitimate concern for any American when it becomes obvious that the leader of the nation is sliding into senility. Again: why aren’t Democrats and the President’s supporters equally alarmed? Integrity? Honesty? Responsibility?

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Clarence Thomas Gets A Rare “Double Dunce,” Ethical And Political

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I really don’t comprehend how this can happen with someone like Justice Clarence Thomas. Donald Trump, sure. But Thomas is smarter than this.

Between 2003 and 2007, Ginni Thomas, the Justice’s controversial wife and a hard-Right activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records. Yet Justice Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years. He checked a box labeled “none” where “spousal non-investment income” is supposed to be disclosed.

Federal judges are bound by law to disclose the source of spousal income, meaning that if the information found by Common Cause is accurate, Thomas did not comply with the law. SCOTUS justices are supposed to obey the law, even more than everybody else, in some respects. Legal ethics expert Steven Lubet (I used his legal ethics textbook when I taught the subject at American University!) says that a failure to disclose spousal income by a federal judge “is not a crime of any sort, but there is a potential civil penalty” for it. “I am not aware of a single case of a judge being penalized simply for this,” the professor says.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Georgia Republican Senate Candidate Herschel Walker

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“You know, he without sin cast the first stone. Does my opponent believe in redemption, being a pastor? That’s what’s so funny. And I say that because I’m not gonna get into what happened with him in his past. I want him to do—what’s going on with his policy. He’s talking about something I was a part of over 15 years ago, maybe even longer.”

—Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker, quoting Jesus from John 8:7 while ducking a question about allegations of his past domestic abuse.

Atlanta-based magazine Rolling Out asked Walker about domestic abuse allegations that occurred between 2001 and 2008. In Walker’s primary race against Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, a campaign ad posted online claimed that police reports and court records from 2001 to 2008 indicated that Walker had “a history of physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior” involving his ex-wife, Cynthia Grossman who was   married to the former NFL star from 1983 to 2002. The question is a fair one, since earlier this month, Walker released his own campaign attack ad claiming that his opponent in the Senate race, Democrat Ralph Warnock “hit his wife with his car,” was “accused of neglecting his small children” and “ran from the process server” who tried to serve him court papers. Continue reading →

The Apparent Democratic Party Strategy To Stave Off November Defeat: Lie Their Heads Off

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The problem is that this plan depends on the full collaboration of the mainstream media, and cracks are appearing in that previously reliable alliance.

During a Democratic National Committee event, president Biden once again indulged some of his favorite pieces of misinformation (Did you know that Donald Trump lied all the time?). Biden said that gas prices have fallen by “$1.30 a gallon,” with the average now being “less than $2.99” in 41 states and the District of Columbia. He also said that the current unemployment rate of 3.7% is the lowest it has been in over half a century.

CNN, in the midst of a course correction (as in “maybe we should go back to actual journalism a bit”) debunked both statements. “Biden’s claim about average gasoline prices was false, as the White House acknowledged by correcting the official transcript after CNN inquired about the claim on Friday afternoon,” CNN reported. “In fact, zero states have an average price under $2.99 per gallon, figures from GasBuddy and the American Automobile Association show. As the correction notes, Biden got a key digit wrong: 41 states and the District of Columbia have an average price under $3.99, not $2.99….“But the price of gas is one of the most important numbers in politics. Even if the President made an inadvertent error this time, his incorrect remark was televised live on CNN and MSNBC.”

Later, Biden changed his story to say that “a few” states had average gas prices under $3. That was also a lie.

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Comment Of The Day: NetChoice LLC v. Paxton (Item #4 In “Sunday Consequential Ethics Epiphanies, 9/18/2022”)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I am enmeshed in a disagreement with esteemed and long-time Ethics Alarms commenter Chris Marschner regarding Texas’ HB 20 signed into law last year. It prohibits social media platforms with over 50 million monthly U.S. users from censoring posts based political positions and viewpoints. To my surprise (although considering the Court, maybe it shouldn’t have been) the Fifth Circuit helding that the right to free speech didn’t include the right to censor speech, a privately-owned platform. That opinion is here. I wrote that I didn’t understand the opinion at all, meaning that while I find the way social media platforms employ bias and partisan favoritism to censor posts using double standards profoundly unethical, I also think the Texas law is screamingly unconstitutional, and is likely to be held to be so by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, I understand the opinion better than I did thanks to Chris’s advocacy.

Here is his Comment of the Day on Item #4 of the post, “Sunday Consequential Ethics Epiphanies, 9/18/2022: On Incompetence, Diversity, Censorship And More..”

***

You and I are in complete agreement on the issue of viewpoint discrimination. I will counter that the service provided is not free. It is true that monetary compensation is not used but the Users barter for the service by providing valuable personal data and rights to the content they post online on an ongoing basis.

While Facebook does not sell users data directly it does so indirectly by serving as a middleman using its algorithm to serve up targeted advertising. That is the foundation of the business model from which the service derives its income.

One might argue that the perceived value of this trade is lopsided in favor of the user because of the billions of dollars needed to create and maintain the platform while all the user exchanges for access is giving the Service intelligence about the User. The problem with that argument is that it only appears lopsided because until the business model was developed the user has no individual means to collect financial compensation for them being subjected to an endless barrage of advertisements. Through this business model Users obtain an exchange of value by creating a social media account. In a sense, Facebook, et al serves as a medium of exchange which is the primary defining characteristic of money. Continue reading →

Today’s Dumb Woke Hollywood Casting Question: “Why Does Hollywood Keep Using Fat Suits?” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times today decides to try a new frontier in the woke casting double standard adventure—you know, the incoherent theory that minority actors should be considered for all roles and all character types regardless of sex, race, size or physical characteristics, but it is unethical for white performers to play any character that they have to act and use make-up to evoke. You know, like good Hollywood liberal Tom Hanks claimed when he issued his recent  mea culpa for playing a gay, AIDS battling lawyer in “Philadelphia.”  So, using the same logic, Tom must have been equally hostile to “diversity, equity and inclusion” when he took a role away from some brilliant, unknown actor with a 75 IQ to play Forrest Gump, just as an autistic actor should have starred in “Rain Man” instead of Dustin Hoffman.

Suuuure. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Great Stupid often has that effect on me. Sorry.

The Times’ query, in the headline to a column by Arts Section pundit Farah Fleurima, is “Why Does Hollywood Keep Using Fat Suits?” Gee, it’s a mystery! And come to think of it, why does Hollywood keep using make-up? Special effects? Fake blood?

Here’s a much tougher question: why does the New York Times let people who know nothing about performing, entertainment, business, audiences, comedy, and casting write columns like this? Continue reading →