Government & Politics

Ethics Pot Meet Ethics Kettle II: Apparently The Washington Post Really Thinks It Has More Integrity Than Fox News

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Here’s the head-exploding quote from Washington Post political columnist Phillip Bump today:

Speak up, Bret Baier. Speak up, Chris Wallace. Join colleague Geraldo Rivera in making public your unvarnished thoughts about “Patriot Purge” and all the other non-journalism that somehow qualifies for prime-time airing at Fox News. Your insistence on addressing the network’s outrages “internally” is a cowardly approach and one that is, by all evidence, not working.

The Washington Post, and indeed Phillip Bump himself, are ethically estopped from attacking Fox News for “non-journalism.” In fact, the sudden escalation in attack on Fox News by the worst mainstream media Democratic propaganda purveyors—like the Post—appears to be just another tactic in the now desperate “We have to save Joe Biden!” push by the same people who should be fairly and critically documenting the unfolding catastrophe in D.C..

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Ethics Pot Meet Ethics Kettle I: Rep. Boebert (R-Co.) vs. Rep. Omar

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

It’s like one of those monster vs. monster movies, such as “Godzilla vs. King Kong”: who do you root for? In the case of extreme right-wing, irresponsible and uncivil GOP fire-breather Lauren Boebert battling extreme leftist House Democrat Illhan Omar, the only ethical position is to hope they fight each other right out of Congress, where they both do immeasurable harm.

Omar is, I hope I do not have to explain in much detail, horrible. She would be the worst of “The Squad,” but, incredibly, the other members are so irredeemably awful that this is a tough call. Her background is full of scandals that would guarantee the end of the career of any non-black, non-Muslim representative in a sane party, which the Democratic Party is no longer. She repeatedly makes anti-Semitic, anti-Israel comments. Her infamous characterization of 9-11 (a comment barely reported by the mainstream media) was that “some people did something.” She has advocated defunding the police in Minnesota.

None of this justifies any member of Congress attacking her with ad hominem rhetoric, but Colorado’s Lauren Boebert is special, even by far right Republican standards. She has used Omar’s religion against her, calling her part of a “Jihad Squad” and told an audience before Thanksgiving that a Capitol Police officer was concerned about Omar boarding an elevator until Boebert reassured him by saying, “Well, she doesn’t have a backpack. We should be fine.”

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Ethics Dunce: The State Of Missouri

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

black-men-jail

Kevin Strickland was finally set free last week after spending more than 40 years for a triple murder that he did not commit. He had been convicted in 1979 for the April 25, 1978, murders of Sherrie Black, 22, Larry Ingram, 21, and John Walker, 20 without any physical evidence, despite the fact that there was no physical evidence tying him to the crime. His sentence: life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years, and two concurrent 10-year-sentences. In releasing him, Judge James Welsh, of Missouri’s Western District Court of Appeals stated that in addition to the lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime scene, another man convicted in the killings had always maintained that Strickland had not been involved.

What wrecked his life was the identification of a single eye witness, Cynthia Douglas, the only survivor of the attack by four armed men in 1978. After being treated for gunshot wounds, Douglas had been able to identify two of the four men responsible for the attack but could not identify the others. Eventually, she picked Strickland, who was “a known associate” of the two men Douglas had identified as shooters, from a line-up, and that was sufficient for a jury to convict him.

Within a year of Strickland’s conviction based on her ID, Douglas began to tell friends that she thought she had made a mistake, but it was not until 2009 that she decided to do anything about it. She finally sent an email to the Midwest Innocence Project, saying in part that she was “seeking info on how to help someone that was wrongfully accused. This incident happened back in 1978, I was the only eyewitness and things were not clear back then, but now I know more and would like to help this person if I can.”

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Is It Too Late To Call It “The Wuhan Virus” Or Better Yet, “The China Virus”?

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

Coronavirus_H

I believe this issue should be settled in the context of the immortal words of Chinese dissident Paladin Cheng, who said, “Don’t trust China. China is asshole.”

There is no longer any serious dispute over where the pandemic came from, or why it spread so far and did so much damage before the world was able to respond in a timely fashion. Either the virus arose from the unsanitary, disease breeding Wuhan wet markets, or escaped from a Wuhan lab. Then China, we also now know, covered up the rampaging contagion, allowing it to travel via plane and other means to all corners of the globe.

Conclusion: China is accountable. China is liable. China is asshole.

Of course, we knew the latter even before the pandemic, but China is also profitable, which is why everyone from the NBA to Hollywood to Disney to Hunter Biden still want to avoid making certain that the public knows just how bad—evil, even—the Chinese government and culture is. I presume that after multiple mutations and other distractions, in five years or less most of the public won’t know or remember where the virus that we allowed to wreck the economy, society and culture came from. Where is “Covid,” anyway?

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A New Peer Reviewed Study Casts Doubt On The Accuracy Of Climate Change Models…And The Mainstream News Media Doesn’t Think That’s Something The Public Should Know [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Climate change models

The day before Thanksgiving, the journal “Science Advances” published a new study of Arctic water temperature that indicates that the warming began decades earlier than was previously thought. The study found that “the expansion of warm Atlantic Ocean water flowing into the Arctic, something called “Atlantification, has caused Arctic water temperature in the region studied to increase by around 2 degrees Celsius since 1900.

So what, you ask? Well, apart from the fact that the findings suggest that the climate change models considered “scientific consensus” and ” settled science” are not so settled after all. [Notice of correction: The earlier version of that sentence carelessly implied that the new study disproved the predominant science. That was not my intent. Thanks to Luke G. for calling me on this.] meaning that if you were skeptical Robert Kennedy, Jr. thinks you should be prosecuted, the new data calls into question many if not all of the climate change models. Francesco Muschitiello, one of the paper’s authors, explained, “This is something that’s a bit unsettling for many reasons, especially because the climate models that we use to cast projections of future climate change do not really simulate these type of changes.”

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Comment (s) Of The Day: P.M. Lawrence And Steve-O-in NJ On “Stolen Lands”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

BLM Thanksgiving

It’s not as if a racist, Marxist, anti-American organization like Black Lives Matter has to try to be obnoxious, but nonetheless, it treated Thanksgiving celebrants with that holiday message this week. Normally Comment of the Day posts that arrive in an Open Forum are accorded guest blogger honors, but I couldn’t figure out a clean way to unlink the two comments presented here. I apologize to P.M. and Steve.

The “stolen lands” indictment has rankled me for a long, long time, and the two Ethics Alarms regulars between them have done an excellent job of covering the issue.

First up is Steve-O; P.M. Lawrence will take over later.

***

steal [stēl] VERB [stolen (past participle)}: 1. take (another person’s property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it. “Thieves stole her bicycle” ·
synonyms: theft · thieving · thievery · robbery · larceny · burglary · shoplifting · pilfering ·
2. dishonestly pass off (another person’s ideas) as one’s own. “Accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying”
synonyms: plagiarize · copy · pass off as one’s own · infringe the copyright of · pirate · poach · borrow · appropriate

conquer [ˈkäNGkər] VERB 1. overcome and take control of (a place or people) by use of military force. “The Magyars conquered Hungary in the Middle Ages”
synonyms: defeat · beat · vanquish · trounce · annihilate · triumph over · be victorious over · best · get the better of · worst · bring someone to their knees · overcome · overwhelm ·

So tell me, which of the above definitions more accurately reflects what happened here in the US? To steal something from someone, the other person must first possess it. Can you really steal from those who don’t believe anyone can own land? Not really. But you can conquer that area.

Unfortunately, history is almost nothing but conquests. It’s not the story of people becoming friends. History has been about conquests since Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerians and since Joshua led the Hebrews over the Jordan to attack and take the city of Jericho. In fact, if you go all the way back to the earliest Biblical stories, the Hebrews first came to be when and because a sheik in the Bronze Age Mesopotamian city of Ur answered a call that came directly from the man upstairs promising him the land originally promised to Caanan, grandson of Ham, because Ham proved himself unworthy by seeing Noah drunk and uncovered in his tent and doing nothing about it. Most of the rest of the Old Testament is about the Hebrews getting, losing, and getting back the land promised to them by God. Most of us grew up reading of Joshua bringing the walls of Jericho down and cheering on David as he stood up to Goliath, giving Saul’s army the chance to defeat the Philistines, and never once asking the question of whether they were right. However, come to the modern state of Israel, and suddenly it’s stolen land, stolen from the Palestinians, who were never a nation to begin with, and at any rate were Johnny-come-latelys since the Caananites, Hebrews, Seleucid Greeks, Romans, Persians (briefly), Byzantines, Crusaders, and Turks had the territory before them.

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The New York Times Has An Outbreak Of Integrity In The Midst Of Its Progressive Bias Fever!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

books

The Times has compiled its list of the “best books of the last 125 years” as part of the celebration of the 125th anniversary of its Book Review Sunday supplement. Readers are invited to vote for their favorite on the list of twenty-five.

Here is the list:

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Thanks, Professor: We Needed That

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. is criminal law specialist who trains Harvard Law students and practices law. He has just issued a superb explanation and analysis of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict—fair, objective, and best of all, readable by those whose eyes usually glaze over at legal scholarship.

It should, in a just and sane society, permanently shut up—embarrass, even— the politicians, celebrities, and social media dolts who are still calling the jury’s verdict “racist” or an indictment of the legal system. Of course, it won’t. If there is a more annoying example of people loudly braying uninformed opinions about a technically complex matter that they know little or nothing about, I can’t think of it right now.

On “The View,” ABC’s depressingly popular “gullible idiots watching progressive idiots” news show, panel leader Whoopi Goldberg (because in the land of the blind…well, you know the metaphor), declared that Rittenhouse was a murderer. People will take that as authority, you know. She played a video of Anthony Huber’s father on CNN holding an urn containing his son’s ashes and emoting bitterly against Rittenhouse going free, as if the lament of a parent in such situations ever is anything but an irrelevant appeal to emotion. Then, armed with this irrefutable “evidence,” Whoopi gave her verdict on Rittenhouse, saying of Huber (who was shot while beating the teen with a skateboard), “He saw someone get shot. He thought he was doing the right thing. So … even all the excuses in the world does not change the fact that three people got shot. Two people were murdered. To me it’s murder. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry too, Whoopi. I’m sorry you lack the sense of responsibility to keep your opinions on issues you don’t have the knowledge and background to understand to yourself, and instead wield them to make the public stupid. I’m sorry you believe “thinking you are doing the right thing” is ever a justification for doing the wrong thing (and you don’t believe that yourself: were the men who lynched Emmett Till blameless because they thought they were doing the right thing?). You have no way of knowing what Huber thought anyway. I’m sorry you are so ignorant that you can say something like “if he shot them and they died, then he’s a murderer,” which is redolent of your failure to take the initiative over the years to fill the gaps in your high school dropout education. Mostly I’m sorry that you’re not getting enough work as an actress and comic, both occupations you’re brilliantly qualified to do, so you’re stuck with being an incompetent pundit for a living.

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Was Nixon Brought Down By A Prosecutors’ Conspiracy?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

watergate

Geoff Shepard‘s intriguing new book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President , is out today. Shepard, a Nixon aide who turned against his former boss during the Watergate hearings after hearing some of the Oval Office tapes, has assembled a large amount of what he calls “irrefutable” evidence that President Nixon was victimized by extreme prosecutorial misconduct in a “deep state” effort to bring him down. He has even set up a website where those documents can be reviewed.

Shepard, who has been obsessed with Watergate for decades and has written three previous books about the scandal, forced the release of a secret prosecutors’ “road map” used to convince a grand jury to indict key Watergate figures and spur the impeachment inquiry. He also claims his research shows that Watergate prosecutors were coordinating with Judge Sirica, which was one reason many of them, included the sainted Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, improperly took documents with them when they left the case. Amusingly (I guess), the Washington Examiner calls this “a big legal no-no.” That’s one way of putting it, I guess—a stupid way. If true, it’s grounds for disbarment for the lawyers and impeachment for the judge.

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Comment Of The Day: A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory…Part III: Facts Don’t Matter

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

dominos

I’m sorry about the apparent obsession here with the Rittenhouse case, but I believe that the episode has ethical significance on many levels, particularly in the way it demonstrates that toxic progressive bias has headed into end game territory, sort of like with rabies when a victim becomes afraid of water.

What we are seeing and hearing is ugly and would be frightening if it wasn’t so self-evidently irrational. I guess we have seen other examples where political fanaticism causes vast numbers of previously functional Americans to blow out their critical reasoning fuses for all to see, but right now I can’t think of one so striking. Groups that cease to be capable of reason tend not to do very well after a while.

Yes, Steve-O-in NJ has another Comment of the Day, and yes, it’s long, but it touches perceptively on too many important matters to let go by. I especially admire his description of the “chain reaction.” (I could not disagree with his last sentence more, however.)

Here it is, on the post, “A Rittenhouse Verdict Inventory Of Ethics Heroes, Dunces, Villains And Fools, Part III: Facts Don’t Matter”…

***

So, the verdict is in and Kyle Rittenhouse walks on all charges. I thought about it, and as an attorney who has occasionally worked civil rights cases I do not see any bases for federal civil rights charges against him. Most of the federal civil rights statute has to do with punishing those who act under color of law to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights. Those statues are generally designed to bring down law enforcement officers who abuse their authority for no good reason. There is also the question of a hate crime, however, there has been no allegation nor proof that anyone he killed was a member of a protected class killed because they were a member of protected class.

The Federal statutes are simply not designed to give the federal government a second bite at every state murder prosecution that fails to make. I suppose the Feds could try to cobble together gun charges or terrorism charges (but that’s a very long stretch). However, they would still have to draw a jury pool from Wisconsin, and all of Wisconsin has now seen this trial and knows this would be just an attempt to punish someone for a crime he was already acquitted of. Jerry Nadler should have known better then to suggest this, but he was simply pandering to his base and his party’s base.

This was another classic domino situation of one breach of the law leading to more as described by the Hon. Guido Calabresi, senior judge of the Second Circuit Court of appeals, in an address at my law school graduation. Things were already tense in this country because George Floyd decided he would break the law and pass fake money, then resist arrest while high as a kite, then Derek Chauvin decided he would break the law and press George Floyd against the ground with his knee until he was fatally injured, then a huge number of people decided they would break the law and riot, then a whole lot of public officials decided they would break the law and fail to do their sworn duty to protect the people. While the nation was still reeling from this, Jacob Blake decided he would break the law and resist a lawful arrest, officers got heavy handed, and still more people decided they would break the law and riot, set fires, and destroy and ransack property that was not theirs to destroy or ransack. Kyle Rittenhouse unwisely decided to get involved in this mess, while armed. Three individuals with lengthy criminal records decided they would break the law and violate common sense and attack Kyle and try to kill him while he was armed for the rifle. Finally Kyle found himself with no alternative but to open fire, killing two and wounding a third.

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