On a day like today, when there are already a lot of juicy ethics stories on the runway, I have learned from bitter experience not to tackle the most complicated one until my brain wakes up, typically after two giant mugs of coffee and a few of hours. Thus I choose this to kick off the day: CNBC released its ranking of the ten worst states to live in 2026 based on its “Quality of Life “scores. Hilariously, the list contained only Republican-run conservative states. This was preordained because the criteria for the ranking included such leftist-priority items as “air quality” [read “climate change measures”], “healthcare access” [abortion restrictions], “worker protections” [ high minimum wages and DEI policies], and civil rights laws [Can biological males compete against girls? Can they use women’s rest rooms?]
Upon reflection, I am surprised “number of Democratic Socialist elected officials” wasn’t one of the factors weighed.
The rejiggered”Quality of Life” scores were then used to create CNBC’s best states for businesses list, so “blue” states dominate that list like the “red” states fill up the “suckiest places to live.”
Seems fair!
When consulted, a sample group of 1,000 aborted babies overwhelmingly disagreed that the states supporting abortions enhanced their “quality of life.”
This is a remarkable exchange for several reasons.
First, Ana Navarro, the long-time fake Republican, token Hispanic, DEI and Trump-Deranged shill who has a regular platform on ABC’s “news show” “The View,” makes a deceitful statement designed to mislead viewers, especially those who have been in a cave for the past two years. “There have been at least five” people killed by ICE she intones, as if the immigration enforcement agents have been going house to house murdering people. Her deception is right out of the playbook of the Left’s “defund the police” lunatics. Law enforcement officers sometimes have to shoot people to protect themselves. They also sometimes kill people who irresponsibly place themselves in harm’s way by interfering with the officers’ lawful execution of their duties, or when lawbreakers resist arrest. These incidents are investigated and sometimes result in discipline or even criminal charges.
Second, CNN’s Abby Philips, who has to be the most dead-faced round-table moderator in the history of television and one of the most incompetent, just sits there like a barnacle, as usual. An ethical moderator would correct Ana’s garbage on the spot, lest the discussion be built on a false foundation.
Finally, listen to Navarro’s babbling when she is caught like a rat in a trap! Caroline Sunshine asks, “Do you know the names as well of Americans who have been killed by illegal immigrants? Do you have that list, too?” [Aside: Sunshine is one of those people who makes me realize that I made a serious wrong turn somewhere in what I laughingly call “my career”: to say her credentials to be a pundit on CNN in such a discussion are paper-thin is to be generous. Sunshine is a former Disney and B-movie starlet who was rapidly advanced through GOP and Trump I press ranks substantially on the basis of her looks.] That was exactly the right question to expose Navarro’s bias and intellectual dishonesty. Navarro’s reply…
I expect politicians to be hypocritical and without integrity. Journalists, however, especially those who engage in commentary, must display consistent principles, values and priorities or be disregarded, ignored and reviled as destructive, unprofessional, untrustworthy hacks.
Anahit Misak “Ana” Kasparian styles herself a progressive political commentator, a media host and a journalist. With the blatant hypocrisy revealed in the tweets above—first, her pious condemnation of anyone who would gloat about someone’s death, followed by her tweets today rejoicing in the death of lifetime public servant Lindsay Graham—Kasparian reveals herself to be a monster by her own standards.
…and the league is letting them get away with it, while the Axis sports media pretends not to notice.
Three years into her pro career, Caitlin Clark is a recognized superstar and a driver of WNBA attendance, merchandising and popularity. She is, however, a white heterosexual in a league dominated by black lesbians, so she has been targeted, attacked, bullied and injured out of, as Outkick recently put it, “a loathsome combination of race idolatry, jealousy, and territorialism.”
“As Clark’s popularity grew during her rookie season, critics increasingly attributed it to “whiteness” rather than talent, charisma, or style of play. Commentators such as Jemele Hill argued that Clark’s appeal was inseparable from her being a straight White woman in a league made up primarily of Black and lesbian players. “We would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity,” Hill told the Los Angeles Times in 2024.”
Hill is an anti-white racist and routinely enables others in her quest as regular Ethics Alarms readers know. For example, she claimed that Harvard’ incompetent, plagiarizing DEI president Claudine Gay was forced to resign because she was black, not because she embarrassed the university. [Incidentally, I am constantly confused because Jemele Hill is a black anti-white racist female sports commentator and Jamelle Bouie is a black anti-white racist male New York Times columnist. I know they are different people, but neither should be taken seriously. I apologize in advance if I mix them up, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.]
Clark was viewed as an outsider and an interloper on black, gay territory, so she was targeted from the beginning. Chennedy Carter hit her with a blindside hip and then entered a social media post encouraging other players to “hurt” her next time. (Baseball would suspend a player who did that.) DiJonai Carrington poked Clark in the eye during a playoff game later posted online accusing Clark of “white privilege.” Angel Reese committed several hard fouls against Clark and posted TikTok video mocking her as a “white girl afraid to catch the fade.” Nice. Baseball would suspend a player who did that, too.
The movie is “Little Big Man,” 1970’s very strange, sui generis, Western satire/drama anti-Vietnam film that visits Western movie tropes, warps history, and mixes horror with humor. I was second-guessing my leaving it out of “Twenty-Five Indispensable Movies For Understanding American Culture,” so I decided to watch it again.
Is it “Little Big Man”anti-American? I don’t know: the film certainly shows our culture’s admirable ability to engage in self-criticism and reflection fearlessly when it is called for. None of the other films on the list deal sufficiently with the U.S.’s conflicted feelings about Native Americans and their unjust but unavoidable fate. That’s too big an issue to leave off the list.
It’s a tight call: which of the major performance awards are the most biased and meaningless? Even after the Oscars went completely DEI the Emmy Awards were the clear winner of the Most Partisan and Biased Awards Award, but this time the voters outdid themselves.
Billy Bob Thornton is one of the most versatile and interesting actors alive. Actors of his caliber traditionally stay away from television though that tendency is breaking down rapidly now: aging super-stars like Nicole Kidman have been making one streaming series after another. Billy Bob is the star of “Landman,” easily one of the best series on TV, and the latest season of the show (that’s the trailer for the next one above) gave him an especially fine showcase for his talents. Yet he was not nominated for an Emmy, and neither was “Landman.”
The reason was, simply, politics. Taylor Sheridan, the creator of “Landman,” “Tulsa King,” “Yellowstone” and all of “Yellowstone’s” excellent spinoffs, tells stories that embrace conservative values and characters like Billy Bob’s Texas oil man. Today’s Hollywood neither likes those values or the nation that birthed them. The partisan bias is undeniable: Even the reliable Axis mouthpiece Esquire noticed and objected.
Ironically, while I was feting an old friend over the Independence Day weekend, another old friend, this time a college classmate who roomed with one of my very close friends so I spent quite a bit of time with him, used Linked-In to promote a “Medium” essay he seemed to think was worth reading. Foolishly, I read it earlier this week.
Let’s call this old friend “Bobo.” Bobo has had some tough breaks, but he’s smart and resilient and landed on his feet. He did end up on my blacklist for what I consider to be a major breach of ethics and friendship. About 30 years ago Bobo reached out to me when he was visiting D.C. and said he wanted to get together to catch up. When we did meet, he pitched me on a ski resort he worked for as the head of marketing, complete with a promotional package. The meeting had nothing to do with “catching up”: Bobo was using our past relationship to get a contract from the organization I was working for at the time.
The next time he was in town and called me, I ignored him.
The Medium essay was as good an example of Trump Derangement and progressive indoctrination as one is likely to find. Bobo is based in Colorado, and is apparently a Boulder ventriloquist dummy with the Axis of Unethical Conduct drinking glasses of water while he mouths their message. This thing carried the obnoxious headline, “Is 850,000 Fireworks enough?“, so I knew what I was probably in for. Still, the essay was even worse than I expected. As I said, Bobo is smart, or used to be. But here is what he wrote, absent gratuitous quotes from John Adams, FDR, Dr. Mortimer Adler (?), and Thomas Paine, a pompous introduction, and shoehorned in at the end, another promotion of a project he’s involved in, and probably paid to push
“Nearly every day, our social fabric is being torn apart by executive orders, endless lawsuits, and odious Supreme Court rulings cheered on by the current administration. Let’s also put a bookmark in place to visit the fragmented, siloed media landscape that has amplified unimaginable lies, perpetrated false claims, and exaggerated ludicrous conspiracy theories while doing the bidding of dark money moguls and narrow corporate interests. These bad actors are ripe for prosecution. Criminal disinformation is rampant as they continue to mislead far too many Americans. Do I need to remind my readers that FOX News was guilty of knowingly lying to their listeners and paying nearly a $Billion$ fine? The more we learn about the fragmentation of our sources of information and loss of integrity in journalism, the uglier it gets. There is so much more to say about news deserts, food deserts, lack of trust, wealth disparity, homelessness etc. The meta crises are vast and complex… All this chaos is by design and funded by what many call the Big Ugly Bill — supporting the 800-plus pages of Project 2025. The primary architect and author of that project, Russell Vought, is currently the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
“In 2017, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Steve Bannon declared that Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees were selected for the purpose of the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. And, that was his first administration. My last article in Medium addressed the issue of accountability — it fell on the deaf ears of Republican Senators….In Trump 2.0, think of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. This all boils down to fewer public servants looking out for what people care about, like clean water, clean air, food safety, and better schools for our children. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“…Wondering whether there was anything to be said that hadn’t already been said, concerned that more words would simply be adding trauma to an already deeply traumatized citizenry, I hesitated…. In 1993, we were celebrating our nation’s 217th anniversary of the courageous Declaration of Independence. I had recently returned from the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Rio, where I had been embarrassed by the proclamation of then President George H.W. Bush, whose first words to the assembly and the world were: “The American Lifestyle is non-negotiable”…
“…Celebrating our independence from tyranny and oppression is baked into our cultural heritage. Yet, in the midst of an historic heat wave, ironically fueled by more than a century of polluting our atmosphere, we have a President determined to “set a world record, like you’ve never seen before” by adding 850,000 bombs bursting in air this evening. Let’s find another way to celebrate that doesn’t add one more molecule of pollution to our precious atmosphere… before this administration literally burns down everything they detest.
“Most observers agree we have precious little time left to change; others are certain collapse is unavoidable. The optimists see this as a golden opportunity to redesign everything that is dysfunctional and destructive. A friend recently reminded me that HOPE is a VERB with its sleeves rolled up! With empathy and compassion, courage and heartbreaking bravery we can move beyond this moment of cruel havoc and selfishness…”
As you know, I have been regularly wrestling my fingers to the floor to avoid responding to such junk on Facebook and elsewhere, but this was too much, especially coming from a fellow Harvard grad. I wrote as a reply to his Linked In post that included the Medium link:
Since you asked for feedback, [Bobo], it’s bad form to complain about false media reporting and then to post “that FOX News was guilty of knowingly lying to their listeners and paying nearly a $Billion$ fine.” That’s not true in several ways. 1. Fox wasn’t found guilty of anything: there was no trial. 2. The issue was alleged defamation, not “lying to their listeners.” The First Amendment protects networks from being punished for lying; otherwise, MSNBC and CNN would be indicted every day. 3. There was no “fine.” A settlement is not a fine or even damages.
Spinning like that removes an essay from the realm of enlightening commentary to just partisan talking points. A collection of characterizations isn’t an argument. Which SCOTUS opinions to you consider “odious”? I read them all, and they were all legally sound, including the one that rejected the President’s EO ending birthright citizenship.
Meanwhile, how about that Graham Platner?
Linked In made me delete a several hundred words. What I originally had before the Platner sign-off was this:
I know, I know. What’s the point of another test the Axis media is sure to flunk?
The Washington Free Beacon reported this week that an Inspector General audit of the Minority Business Development Agency’s flagship program found that 96 % of the reviewed transactions were improperly approved.
Wowsers.
The November 2025 audit reviewed $16 billion in transactions approved by the MBDA business center program, a network of federally funded consultancies, public and private, aimed at “supporting minority-owned businesses.” A business had to be at least 51% minority-owned to qualify for services: you can figure out how easy that requirement is to scam around. $15.4 billion of the $16 billion in transactions reviewed were “duplicate transactions, transactions with missing or inadequate documentation, and transactions that MBDA should not have approved based on the underlying activity.” One “minority-owned business” obtained a $33 million contract through the program without providing any paperwork to justify it.
President Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 killing the agency. Naturally a partisan federal judge blocked the EO, so the administration fired all its employees in October because another federal judge in March 2024 had ruled that basis of the agency’s mission was unconstitutional and that it was illegal to use race or ethnicity to determine what businesses deserved grants. The Biden administration ignored that ruling.
Did you know that President Trump, that fascist, has ignored court orders?
The audit began under the Biden administration, so it can’t be discredited as a partisan exercise. It did only look at ten of the 40 business centers funded by the agency before the Trump administration ended it last year, and it only chose only those centers with a documented history of bookkeeping irregularities.
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) July 8, 2026
Exactly.
The President acceded to a “cease fire” that only gave America’s sworn enemy time to regroup, and Iran an opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot be trusted to meet the terms of any treaty or agreement, as Barack Obama cynically and foolishly pretended when he sold out our country and Israel’s in the “palettes of cash for lies” deal.
Iran is in the grip of a sick culture that cannot accommodate the modern world. I’m sure Trump will be assailed by the usual suspects for calling the Iranian leadership “scum,” and probably the Pope as well, because, you know, humanity, redemption, yada yada.
Islam is a religion that celebrates lying to the enemy as a virtue. To trust the current Iran regime is a death wish.
That whiny, divisive, Trump Deranged video re-hashing familiar progressive, “No Kings” talking points while attacking the elected President of the United States is as good a symbol as any of the despicable efforts the Angry Left…now in the process of morphing into the Communist Left, made to undermine our 250th Anniversary celebration.
What a collection of Hollywood has-beens and hysterics! Then, for good measure, they had to include Margaret Atwood, because everyone knows President Trump wants to force American women to be baby machines. Then there was Chuck Todd, by far the worst, dimmest, most biased an partisan host “Meet the Press ” ever had, whining on his podcast,
Trump’s doing all of us a favor by selfishly trying to steal this anniversary from us. We now see who he really is. So no, it’s not the celebration we deserve. It’s not the one we could could have had. But we get a mirror, and the mirror is telling us something. The country is a lot bigger than Donald Trump. It is bigger than any president and it’s obviously bigger than any political party. And there’s no one definition of patriotism. But it still needs leaders who understand that. It still needs citizens who insist on it. And it still needs people willing to say that the national story belongs to all of us, not just whoever happens to hold power at any one moment. America at 250 may be a lost opportunity. Donald Trump has absolutely sullied the brand of America, doesn’t have to be at 275 Donald Trump has absolutely sullied the brand of America. But America 275 does not have to be…For some people the central text in their lives is religious and I respect that. For me the constitution has always carried that kind of weight. So that’s why I’m so angry and feel betrayed. I do. I feel betrayed as an American by him on this. The Constitution is not perfect, but it gives us a way to keep going. It gives us structure for disagreement. It gives us a method for repair. It gives us the possibility of becoming better without pretending we were always good.May it makes some of the same promises that some religious texts do for people.And this is why I’m so pissed off. Not because I love the country less, but because I love the idea of America enough to resent seeing it cheapened by this man.America deserved better at 250. Someday, I believe it will get better, but it’s in your hands.”
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