Government & Politics

Sen. Cassidy Loses His Primary In Louisiana As He Deserved To…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy missed the runoff in the state’s GOP Senate primary last night, finishing third. This means his tenure as U.S. Senator will end in 2027.

Well, good. Cassidy voted to convict President Donald Trump after he was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House in a purely partisan abuse of the impeachment process. Emulating Liz Cheney is not a good look for a Republican Senator.

Or anyone, really.

In 2021, Cassidy joined Democrats and a small band of bitter anti-Trump Republicans in voting to convict Trump after his second impeachment trial. Trump had called Cassidy a “disloyal disaster” and warned Louisiana voters that the senator was “BAD FOR LOUISIANA.” Well, convicting Trump would have definitely been bad for the nation, the stability of our government, and the institution of the Presidency. The second impeachment, properly mocked as the “snap impeachment” by Prof. Jonathan Turley, occurred without thorough House hearings, witnesses and an investigation. It was not designed to remove a rogue President, because Trump had already lost his re-election bid. The case that the riot at the Capitol was an “insurrection” was always legal nonsense, and the accusation that President Trump was somehow an accessory to the criminal acts of the drunk and stupid rioters never made sense.

I am pretty certain that the dual abuse of the impeachment process by the Democrats has effectively killed the device as a necessary fail-safe on Presidential misconduct. Now impeachment has been reduced to a cheap weapon of political warfare, and Cassidy was willing to cross party lines to endorse what was a Constitutional debacle. Never mind loyalty…the problem with voting for an unjust impeachment of one’s own party’s POTUS isn’t a lack of loyalty, it is an excess of stupidity, judgement, and responsibility.

Good riddance.

So NOW the Climate Change-Hyping “Experts” Admit That Their Fear-Mongering Models Were Garbage!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
GUEST POST BY RYAN HARKINS

[From your host: I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported. Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]

I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.

To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.

The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have

“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”

We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.

Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.

The Low Chair Trick

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Kudos to Ann Althouse: she flagged the use of the old chair dominance trick by Xi to make sure he appeared higher in his chair than President Trump.

Ann’s sketchy popular culture literacy was also exposed again: most normally-acculturated Americans would immediately think of the famous scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where George Bailey (James Stewart) bargains with town bully Mr. Potter in a chair that reduces him to the stature of a child. Ann’s mind went instead to the scene in “The Great Dictator,” a far less well-known Chaplin film, where satirical versions of Mussolini and Hitler (Chaplin) keep raising their chairs’ heights during a meeting. Ann’s choice makes the point better, but she often posts about not having watched a lot of old movies, and it shows. (I have watched too many old movies, and it also shows.)

But kudos to Ann again for tracking down a December 2, 1987 David Letterman show when a young Donald Trump called out Letterman for having his guest chairs lower than the host’s, complaining, “How come this seat is at such a low level? You know, I’m looking at him. He’s got this stage rigged, folks…. That seat is a good six inches higher than my seat.”

Notes:

  • In law school I took a negotiation course from Adrian Fisher, then the Dean of Georgetown Law Center and known as a key U.S. negotiator in both SALT Treaties. Fisher had an exhaustive knowledge of negotiation mind games, and mentioned the chair trick as such a well-known and devious tactic that attempting it would be regarded as an insult by professional diplomats.
  • Trump had the good sense not to mention his annoyance with the chair trick in China. This indicates to me that he is capable of self-restraint when he chooses to exercise it, which is, obviously, not nearly enough.
  • Read (at Ann’s link above) the exchange between Letterman and Trump from 40 years ago. I detect no difference in Trump’s discourse from what we are used to today. One of the more irritating Big Lies the Axis (including my Trump Deranged Facebook friends) keeps pushing is that Trump’s rhetoric indicates cognitive decline (so he should be removed via the 25th Amendment.) He’s always talked this way.
  • Letterman has also always been an asshole. And a liar. When Trump points out that Letterman’s chair is “a good six inches” higher than Trump’s chair, Letterman says “And so am I” suggesting that it’s an illusion because he’s taller than Trump. Letterman is (or was) 6’2″ and Trump is (or was) an inch taller.
  • I blame Letterman for late night TV turning into the all-partisan-propaganda-all-the-time blight on society epitomized by Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. He’s an Ethics Villain.
  • Trump proved in that exchange that he, like Fisher, knew the negotiation game well.
  • Note also in the transcript how a Trump was talking about the same international trade grievances in 1987 that he has tried to address in his second term.
  • Letterman meanwhile, like any good class-obsessed left-winger, keeps trying to bring the discussion around to Trump’s wealth because, after all, as AOC tells us, billionaires are the cause of most of America’s problems.

Letterman’s wealth is estimated to be only 400 million.

__________

Pointer: Ann Althouse

An Unpleasant Reminder Of Why Ethics Alarms Holds That Editorial Cartoons Are Unethical (and Outdated) [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This:

[The revision referred to in the headline is that I changed the phrase “political cartoon” to “editorial cartoon” throughout the essay. My fault: that was what I meant and still mean when I use the term “political cartoon.” Obviously that confused people: I apologize. “Doonsberry” is a political cartoon; so were “Pogo” and “Li’l Abner.” They were cartoons about politics, and their primary purpose was to amuse. Editorial cartoons, like the one above, are supposed to be treated seriously, like editorials. That’s what this post is condemning. I’m an idiot for not realizaing I was confusing the issue.]

As I wrote in 2017, it’s time, long past time, really, for editorial cartoons to be sent to the ash heap of history.

To clear up any confusion: I’m not a huge fan of memes, but I’m warming up to them a little because they are unequivocally graphic jokes, intended to be outrageous, satirical, maybe offensive but always funny. Editorial cartoons evolved as artistic punditry; they might use humor, but their ultimate goal was to make serious, trenchant, ideally witty observations on the political scene while appearing in newspaper editorial pages.

With very, very, very few exceptions, editorial cartoonists are artists who are partisan one-trick ponies.They are neither as smart or as analytical as they think they are. The template for these would be Herb Block, the mysteriously acclaimed Washington Post editorial cartoonist, who thought he was being clever by always drawing businessmen with huge bellies and smoking long cigars, or making Richard Nixon look like an axe-murderer.

That shameless cartoon above was posted with approval by an old friend of mine, a history professor at an elite college. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. How many things are wrong with that thing? The mind boggles. The juxtaposition of the flag-raising over Iwo Jima and the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais makes no sense. The implication that the long-needed judicial holding that a 60 year old law crafted to deal with conditions in the Southern states in 1965 no longer is relevant to those states in the 21st century is somehow pushing the nation back 160 years is temporally, historically, factually and legally gibberish. True, it is a pictorial equivalent of the Democrat’s House leader’s meltdown, as the ridiculous Hakeem Jeffries ranted, “Because we know this unprecedented assault on black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era, the ghost of the Confederacy has afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now! ” That, however was, or should be, an embarrassment to all Democrats and black Americans with a 6th grade education.

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Ethics Dunce and Incompetent Elected Official: Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) missed the last 43 House votes and hadn’t been seen for a month, several news reports noted yesterday. Moreover, her office had been mum on the matter. The eight-term incumbent is 83 years old, and her last recorded House vote was on April 17. House reporter Jaime Dupree noted on BlueSky Wednesday that she “missed all 10 votes on Wednesday in the House,” leading to the questions being raised yesterday. “80% of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen supposedly said. That’s a low bar, and Wilson still hasn’t cleared it.

Last night, Wilson surfaced at last and explained that she is recovering from eye surgery. “Following left eye surgery, my priority has been ensuring a full and responsible recovery,” Wilson said. “Although I am currently unable to fly under my doctors’ orders, my work has not stopped for a single day. While recovering in the district, I have continued carrying out my official duties, meeting with leaders, local organizations, city and county officials, and constituents.”

Nope, not good enough, not hardly. Normal people can’t just disappear from work for a month without adverse consequences, and elected officials have a duty to their constituents to be on the job or to inform the public and the news media why they aren’t. Wilson’s X timeline showed no change since she disappeared four weeks ago, and her staff was apparently under instructions to keep everyone in the dark about her whereabouts, in one case posting a photo of her represented as recent that was really a year old. That’s unacceptable.

Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense went AWOL too, though only for ten days, in 2024. He should have been fired, but Joe didn’t fire anybody, no matter how useless, incompetent or unqualified he or she might be. Wilson should be fired by her district’s voters in November, but of course she won’t be.

If you cant trust your Congresswoman to show up to vote or let you know why she isn’t, then you can’t trust your Congresswoman, period. Wilson’s party is claiming that Jim Crow is back and blacks are being “disenfranchised” because the Supreme Court won’t allow “good discrimination” to guarantee majority black districts. Wilson represents one of those districts, and not showing up in Congress to vote really does “disenfranchise ” her constituents.

Of course, Wilson now assures us that she was “carrying out [her] official duties,” except for the only one that is absolutely required. Why would anyone believe her?

Update on “Dog-Rapegate”: Israel Is Suing the Times

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Good.

(I originally published this post without a graphic, waiting for the memes to come out. I decided on the one above…)

Israeli officials not only released a bombshell report this week extensively documenting Hamas violence on and after the October 7 terrorist ambush, but they are also suing The New York Times for libel as a response to its publishing Nick Kristof’s outrageous claim that Israel was torturing Palestinian prisoners by, among other methods, having them sexually assaulted by trained dogs. The Times also released the libelous accusation on the day before a new, thoroughly sourced report on Hamas violence, “Silenced No More,” was scheduled for release. The Times, almost alone among news outlets, refused to publish that because it reflected poorly on Hamas. It preferred to assert that Jews are training Lassie and Rin Tin Tin to get off on anal rape.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry announced May 14, “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.”

The news media has been abusing its privilege under New York Times v. Sullivan with increasing boldness in recent years, and many have suggested (including me) that the standards for punishable slander and libel need to be re-thought in light of a profession no longer committed to honesty and independent public service. To be fair, it is jolly decent of the Times to eliminate any question that the paper is nothing less than a Democratic talking point propaganda organ. Democrats hate Israel and Jews now, or perhaps you haven’t noticed. The Times has, as I wrote here (#6), even doubled-down on Kristof’s evidence-free claims.

As CNN token conservative Scott Jennings wrote on “X”: “Dying on dog rape hill. What a choice.”

Comment of the Day: “What Exactly Are California’s ‘Values’? Can Anybody Explain?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sarah B, not to be confused with the other eminent commenter here with a similar handle, put together a two-part comment that provides an overview of the growing problem of sexual predator teachers. Ethics Alarms has done a lot on this topic, but not lately, perhaps because there are so many other things wrong with our education system. This may have been the most recent; I should have had a tag for “predator teachers.”

I should shut up now: it’s a long piece, and worth reading, Here is Sarah B’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What Exactly Are California’s “Values”? Can Anybody Explain?”

***

As much as I hate to defend California, this is hardly unique.  Wyoming has similar policies and we are about as red as they come.  A previous principal in my town harassed/seduced teachers and students who reached the age of 18.  Because all of his predations were of adults (even if only technically), he remained at his job for nearly a dozen years before enough complaints and the loss of too many teachers forced the school board to finally let him go.  Just this last couple of years, a special education teacher was arrested after sexually abusing lots of kids just a few towns over from us.  He had been skirting the edges of the law for years, but finally crossed enough lines that he could be arrested and fired, after abusing at least a handful of kids.

The other stories I know of are teachers who abuse students in other ways, not sexually, but I personally do not see much of a difference between a teacher who sexually harasses students and a teacher who beats students up, since children should be safe and unharmed in the school system if it were any good.  Therefore, I’m picking on a favorite story of mine involving my cousin, since I know many of the particulars that I might otherwise not know in detail.  He worked in one town and was fired for wrestling his students and put a few too many in headlocks.  After being fired for this, he was transferred to another town, where he rug-burnt a few handfuls of his students.  He got fired again, and was hired as the youth pastor at the local Baptist church.  He wrestled a few more kids harshly and is currently not allowed to be the only adult present when the youth group meets. 

Frankly, if one looks at the data, 38% of all students in 7th-12th grade receive sexual harassment/abuse in the public school system from adults, according to some studies in 2017.  I caution that these studies have broad definitions of sexual abuse/harassment, including things ranging from rape to cat-calling to inappropriate jokes and sexual comments.  Of course, the more minor offenses of inappropriate comments and commentary are far more common than the more serious ones.  Grooming behavior is reported separately, but is very common.  The adults also range from teachers to coaches, bus drivers to lunch ladies to janitors, and everything in between.  However, 63% of the behavior nationwide comes from teachers.

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Ethics Dunce: D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As I often say (or think) in such situations, “Yikes!”

I’m going to send you to a thorough exposé over at Signal, a conservative website, which means its thorough coverage of this example of irresponsible conduct in a position of trust as well as a stunning “bias makes you stupid” display will be brushed off by some as just a partisan attack. I’m certain some ideological hostility helped prompt the piece, but it is accurate, which means that Signal has flagged a genuine ethics problem. Good for Signal.

D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler has posted dozens of inflammatory, openly partisan, politically-motivated comments on social media for years,. He has mocked, insulted and attacked conservative Supreme Court Justices (but never the liberal minority). He has reposted with favor attacks on Donald Trump and Elon Musk (for his conservative views.) It appears someone finally told him, “Hey, moron, what are you doing?” and he’s taken down the worst of the tweets. The internet is forever, though. And Metzler has moved to BlueSky, the Twitter/”X” alternative for progressives who can’t tolerate people and opinions that don’t toe the woke line. I regard that as signature significance for Trump Derangement and partisan indoctrination.

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What Exactly Are California’s “Values”? Can Anybody Explain?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

ProPublica, an almost entirely pro-progressive, anti-conservative “independent public interest watchdog” organization, shockingly goes after our most progressive state (it’s a close competition), revealing that California allows teachers who have been caught sexually harassing students to keep teaching anyway.

What?? Indeed this seems to be the case. The investigative reporting website states in part, after relating the tale of a teacher named Agan who after an independent panel convened by the state to hear his case deemed him “unfit to teach” based on multiple complaints by students, hired by two other schools prompting sexual harassment accusation by students a

“A broad look at California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing by KQED and ProPublica shows a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that have allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other misconduct of a sexual nature. Agan’s case is one of at least 67 in which the state has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct, according to a review of available records from 2019 through 2025 obtained by the news outlets. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools, and of those, at least 12, including Agan, still work in education, according to a review of school websites and employment records provided by schools.” Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the state automatically revokes teachers’ credentials when they are convicted of sexual criminal offenses, but not necessarily when a district determines they have committed sexual misconduct. She said the state Legislature — not the licensing agency — determines the type of misconduct that results in automatic revocation. The agency appoints a committee to assess noncriminal cases of misconduct, she said. Agan has not been accused of a crime.  “The Commission’s authority balances protecting students as well as the legal rights of educators who have been accused but not convicted of specific crimes,” Fitzhugh said in a written statement.” 

Yikes. What’s going on here? That key question in ethics inquiries seems to be this: California’s kinder, gentler, incompetent approach to enforcing even minimal personal responsibility appears to have resulted in a bizarre calculation that puts children at risk. See, Agan, and many other teachers, haven’t criminally assaulted students or at at least can’t be proved to have done so beyond a reasonable doubt. So as long as the unprofessional, emotionally damaging, conflict-ridden sexual harassing conduct doesn’t rise to the level of a felony, California appears to be satisfied to let bygones be bygones, and a male teacher who leers and drools over and even touches female students get second and third chances to change their ways.

I assume that the teachers unions have a great deal to do with this disconnect that and the fact that the now fairly dead-in-the-water #MeToo movement disgraced itself by turning into a willing DEI weapon. Like so much that goes on in California while alleged adults stand mute and passively by, I don’t get this at all. What does California care about, besides catering to illegal immigrants and environmental virtue-signaling? What value system does a state embrace when it shrugs off sexual misconduct by its teachers?

The Israelis Have Trained Dogs To Rape Hamas Prisoners of War! Right. “A Bias Makes You Stupid ” Classic From the NYT’s Nick Kristof

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Wow. I used to think Nick Kristof was the best and most trustworthy in Times’ generally unethical stable of pundits. Now I learn that he is nuts, or so biased against Israel that his brain sneaked out of his skull while he was sleeping.

This insane “report,” which his paper dutifully published because it no longer operates as a professional news source when politics are involved, is based entirely on second hand sources that have been anti-Israel and pro-Hamas from the beginning of the 2023 war Hamas began with a surprise terror attack on Israel’s civilians. Kristof cites only the claims of Palestinians, and sources that base their reports on the same. His main source is Sami al-Sai, a “free-lance journalist who has been painting Hamas and Gaza as victims of “genocide” since the war began. That is not an independent source. Neither is the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, also an anti-Israel group, or the United Nations, which has supported Palestinian propganda since the war began. At one point, Kristof even writes, “There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” There is also no evidence that the alleged rapes occurred.

There is definitive evidence that the Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women, however. Kristof’s fantasy appears to be a deliberate rationalization (#2. Whataboutism, or “They’re Just as Bad“) to excuse Hamas/Gaza/ Palestinians for starting the bloody conflict. Coincidentally (?) an extensive, genuinely sourced report was released today documenting Hamas’s attack, including the rapes, and sexual assaults against the kidnapped hostages. One commenter on “X’ wrote, “If you do not believe @nytimes knew EXACTLY what they were doing with the timing of the Kristof “opinion” piece [ie, trying to preempt justified outrage at Hamas’s sexual crimes by suggesting that Israel similarly engages in such crimes] I have a nice bridge to sell you.”

The Kristof piece seems like smoking gun evidence that the Times is filled with anti-Semites, or, in the alternative, people too stupid to put on their shoes after their socks. At very least, I would expect the Times to find a dog training expert to explain how the hell you would train a dog to rape a human being. Spuds (above) laughed when I told him about the article.

As Jack Nicholson says in “A Few Good Men,” this isn’t funny, it’s tragic. The American Left is embracing anti-Semitism to an extent that hasn’t been seen since the Thirties. David Bernstein wrote today, after an attack on a Jewish neighborhood in New York City, which elected a pro-Hamas mayor, “We are getting closer to an actual pogrom like Crown Heights 1991. Seriously time for Brooklyn Jews to arm themselves.”

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