Government & Politics

Open Forum, “I Wasn’t Going To Have One But Then My Head Exploded” Edition….

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

We just had an open forum a few days ago, so I was going to skip the Friday Forum. Then I read this, my head exploded, I already was struggling because I didn’t sleep at all last night, so I need some time to mop up and repack my head:

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Minnesota Wednesday for its laws that provide free and reduced tuition rates to illegal aliens. The laws, a DOJ press release contends, unconstitutionally discriminate against out-of-state U.S. citizens, who are not afforded the same privileges at Minnesota’s public colleges and universities….According to the lawsuit [“…which names Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and the Minnesota Office of Higher Education as defendants”], federal law prohibits states from providing illegal aliens with any post secondary education benefit that is denied to U.S. citizens….The lawsuit explains how a 2013 state law allows illegal aliens who establish residency in Minnesota to benefit from reduced, in-state tuition rates….Additionally, the DFL-controlled Minnesota Legislature established in 2023 a free tuition program for students whose families make less than $80,000 annually. Illegal aliens are eligible for the program. The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court to declare the laws unconstitutional and prohibit their enforcement.

“We are reviewing the lawsuit and will vigorously defend the state’s prerogative to offer affordable tuition to both citizen and non-citizen state residents,” a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said.”

KABOOM!

A few rueful points, and then you write about whatever you want…

  • Why are we just hearing about this now, when the knuckleheaded governor of Minnesota was running from August 2024 to November to be a heartbeat from the Presidency? Why didn’t Trump confront Harris with that insanity? Why did no one in the news media, Axis or not, report on it?
  • These laws are the equivalents of “Welcome, illegal immigrants!” invitations to break the law, with Minnesota being a “sanctuary state.” Minnesota citizens are that stupid, or in the alternative, that clown car crazy? How did they get that way? Can they be treated? 
  • What logic can possibly justify this?
  • Note that the Minnesota AG is still obfuscating, not having the honesty of integrity to call a metaphorical spade a spade. “Non-citizen state residents”! The state lies, cheats and steals under Walz, but this is what the Democratic Party now stands for. No wonder he thinks he has a shot at the Presidential nomination in 2028.

Back to brain clean-up…

Announcing a New Ethics Alarms Principal: The Jumanji Axe

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

As regular and long-time readers here know, Ethics Alarms is fond of useful analogies and metaphors from popular culture that illustrate regularly occurring ethics breaches, self-defeating irresponsible conduct, or the proper remedies or reactions to them, in society at large or various segments of it. Hence we have the Barn Door Fallacy, the Julie Principle, the Popeye, the Nelson (“Ha-ha!”), the Ripley, the Costanza, and quite a few others.

I was, just this morning, in a discussion with a bar ethics counsel regarding a serious problem in the legal world. It is a corrupt system that neither the legal profession nor the incompetent news media has let the public know about, one that amounts to a multi-level scandal that hurts everyone except the unscrupulous, greedy lawyers who participate in it. At one point she said to me, “You know, we have had the means available to address this all along, and it never occurred to us even when the solution was not only obvious, but right in our hands.”

And I thought of that moment above from “Jumanji.” At least the kid in the movie had an excuse, since he had been turned into a monkey….

Do you have some current candidates for an Ethics Alarms “Jumanji Axe”? Let me know about them in the comments.

Do You Have Any Clue Regarding Whether the US Bombing of the Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were Successful or Not? I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just heard President Trump at his press conference, rambling as only he can, declare that the news outlets claiming his surprise bunker-busters attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not as effective as the U.S. claimed were “losers” and liars. Meanwhile, a CNN article, followed by the New York Times, citing leaked classified documents, and thus unnamed sources of those illegally retrieved materials, announced that “Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say.” Reporters Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen wrote that “the US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.” It continued, “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.”

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Ethics Quiz: The Anti-American Professor

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I know, I know…there are a lot of these, probably many thousands, but most manage to pretend to not be likely to mold vulnerable young minds in to wanting their own fellow citizens dead. Georgetown Professor Jonathan Brown, however is special.

He is a full professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University [above] and the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization. He is clearly the campus cheerleader, one of them anyway, for Islam, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I would personally have Brown frisked for strap-on bombs if he was ever a guest at one of my dinner parties, however. Fortunately, I am as likely to ever be in a position to hold a dinner party as I am to clone a passenger pigeon.

On Twitter/X he wrote last week, among other things, “I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops…I’m surprised this is what these FDD/Hasbara people have been auto-erotically asphyxiating themselves for all these years…Ironically, the main takeaways (in my non-expert opinion, and I’m happy to be corrected) from all this have nothing to do with a US attack: 1) Iran can take a licking; 2) if Israel attacks Iranian cities, it gets fucked up pretty bad. I mean I’ve been shocked at the damage Iranian missiles caused; 3) despite his best efforts, Reza Pahlavi HVAC repair services still only third best in Nova.”

When his post came to light and some harsh criticism began coming his way, Brown quickly made his account private so nobody but fellow Jihadists could see what he’s thinking, and wrote, “I deleted my previous tweet because a lot of people were interpreting it as a call for violence. That’s not what I intended. I have two immediate family members in the US military who’ve served abroad and wouldn’t want any harm to befall American soldiers” Brown later deleted that post too.

Imagine anyone thinking that his published hope for an Iranian strike on a U.S. base was a call for violence! What’s the matter with these people?

Fox News did some journalism and revealed that Brown is married to a journalist for the television network Al Jazeera and that her father was deported to Turkey for supporting and aiding an Iranian terrorist organization.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Should there be any adverse consequences to Brown, or any similarly behaving professor, for his social media outburst?

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Yes, This Democratic Norm Should Not Be Breached…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Presidents of the United States should not say “fuck.” Ever. It doesn’t matter how “angry” they are.

Recalling this much linked post from a decade ago…an some of its offspring, like this, this, and this among others.

Ethicists, however, can say “fuck” when justified.

Fuck.

Harvard Tries To Save Face; the Problem Is That It Is the Ethics Villain Here, Not the Trump Administration

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

We are learning that in spite of its grandstanding and feigned defiance of the Trump demands that it stop engaging in left-wing indoctrination, allowing an anti-Jewish environment to fester on campus, and engaging in viewpoint discrimination in hiring (along with other unethical conduct), Harvard is quietly (it hopes) negotiating some level of reform along the lines of the Trump Administration’s letter of April 11.

Quietly, because Harvard’s overwhelmingly leftist, totalitarian-tilting, progressive activist faculty wants to have their campus advance only one world view, the “right” one, and because of the sinister influence of that faculty, its student body overwhelmingly believes likewise. In the Trump Deranged world where most academics, scholars, journalists, lawyers and, of course, Democrats dwell, publicly deriding and defying the President of the United States is simply opposing fascism and the forces of darkness, even if the least intellectually crippled of them recognize deep down that President Trump is on the correct side of an issue. He is on the right side of this one.

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Popeye Time: I Am Finally Forced Into Responding To Woke Nonsense on Facebook…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

A genuine, respected and dear friend re-posted this on Facebook:

Dr. Kristina Rizzotto created that thing; she is apparently a professional musician, so her doctorate isn’t in philosophy, public policy, law, or, clearly, linguistics. Shut up and play, Kristina.

Like Popeye, that was all I could stands ‘cuz I can’t stands no more, and I finally posted, after a good ten minutes of self-wrestling, this in response:

“Ugh. I don’t even want to wade into this, but come on. DEI is not the equivalent of three ethical virtues in a vacuum, and sure, diversity is nice; not not necessary or necessarily beneficial: the NBA doesn’t seek out white and Asian players to make it more “diverse,” because diversity doesn’t win basketball games. “Equity” means fairness, but the nation is built on equality of opportunity, not guaranteed equality of results, which is what “equity” means in the context of DEI. “Inclusion” is also nice, if it means the absence of deliberate arbitrary exclusion. If it means inclusion for the sake of inclusion, who said that’s virtuous or sensible? Who made that rule?

“Dr. Kristina is ducking the issue with intellectual dishonesty. Inclusion should be based on merit. Excluding anyone who would qualify for inclusion on merit, based on their sex, ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation or physical characteristics is per se bias and illegal discrimination, and playing word games to deceive the inattentive and gullible into thinking otherwise is unconscionable. Similarly, black lives matter, but Black Lives Matter is a racist movement and a scam organization. Do better, Dr.”

I’m sure I’ll regret it.

And Another “Good Illegal Immigrant” Sob Story From the Times…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I feel constrained to post this after someone suggested that in the Bret Stephens essay I was bestowing Ethics Hero status on the Axis media’s top propaganda mouthpiece. The op-ed by professional illegal immigration romanticizer Isabel Castro (above) is a far more representative piece in a genre the Times is particularly fond of: demanding sympathy for individuals facing deportation entirely because of their own choices and conduct.

The title is a hoot: “How the ICE Raids Are Warping Los Angeles.” It is like a Chicago paper during the Prohibition and Capone’s zenith publishing a column called “How the FBI is Warping Chicago.” A sample..

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Ethics Hero: Surprise! NYT Columnist Bret Stephens

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I did not see this coming. Has any New York Times pundit ever written anything regarding Donald Trump that wasn’t pure venom? Has there ever been a Times opinion piece that said, “Wow! President Trump handled this problem perfectly”? If so, I must have missed it.

True, if any one of the Axis-biased Times stable of progressives, Democrats and the Trump Deranged were capable of such a composition, it would have to have been Stephens. Along with David Brooks he is one of the token sort-of conservatives on the staff usually displaying symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome. Brooks is beyond hope now, but Stephens is at least unpredictable. He’s a weird sort of conservative, having opined once that the Second Amendment should be repealed, and he takes part in annoying transcribed anti-Trump snark-fests with Gail Collins, which reads a bit like what the old “Point-Counterpoint” would have been like if Shauna Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick were secretly boinking each other. (Gotta get THAT image out of my brain, quick.) Still, I am pledged to give credit where credit is due.

Today Stephens’ name was under a column headlined, “Trump’s Courageous and Correct Decision.” It begins,

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Lest We Forget: This Was the Most Unethical and Indefensible Partisan Act of 2025 So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The Democratic Party seems hellbent on self-destruction, but the Axis media burying, under-reporting and generally spinning its worse transgressions may slow the process a bit. This week, there was a scantly reported act by the party that cannot be defended—-if you have a defense to propose, please send it in—but it came in a week so saturated with consequential news both ethical and otherwise that I’ll wager most Americans missed it.

Senate Democrats refused to participate in the first Congressional hearing regarding the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline while in the White House, the question of whether his “autopen executive orders” and appointments were valid, and the potential Constitutional breaches these represent. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) attended the first Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the topic this week. Then almost immediately Durbin, the ranking Democratic member, walked out in protest with Welch behind him, with a lame and cynical whataboutist call for the committee to investigate President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to respond to illegal immigration enforcement rioting in Los Angeles. (The courts took care of that one, Dick, despite the attempts of your party’s captive judiciary.)

Then Durbin blathered, “The Republican majority on this committee has not held a single oversight hearing despite numerous critical challenges facing the nation that are under our jurisdiction.” Desperately, he cited the assassination of a state lawmaker in Minnesota, now pretty authoritatively proven to be the act of a lone wacko, and last week’s handcuffing of Sen. Alex Padilla at a DHS press conference, when the grandstanding jerk was properly treated according to Secret Service protocols. “Apparently, armchair diagnosing former President Biden is more important than the issues of grave concern, which I have mentioned,” Durbin said.

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