Government & Politics

Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note, NPR Division

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is hack, bottom-of-the-barrel journalism at its worst.

The statistics show that the “The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher. “And the available evidence suggests that we’re going to go even lower this year,” he predicts based on the numbers and trend so far.

Here is how NPR starts its story:

“As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, it’s doing pretty well by at least one measure: the national murder rate.”

That’s not news reporting. That’s partisan damnation with faint praise, while also engaging in deliberate misrepresentation. The story states that President Trump has achieved the best result in reducing the murder rate since at least 1960. That’s not, by any reasonable use of the English language, doing “pretty well.” It is an extraordinary success, and should be reported as such.

Then there is “at least one measure,” because, you see, everything else is terrible, but NPR’s Trump Deranged listeners assume that, so a major Trump accomplishment has to be minimized in the reporting. The technique is called “poisoning the well” and it isn’t journalism, it is pure bias. NPR, like the rest of the Axis, can’t tell a straight news story fairly, directly or honestly without applying a negative spin if President Trump is involved. You can almost hear the sneers: the outlet might as well had written,

“Well, how about that, the asshole did something right!”

“Look! Trump lucked out this time!”

“Hey, I guess everything the President does can’t blow up in his face!”

“Even a blind squirrel will find a nut now and then!”

As Clarence Darrow memorably said at the end of his closing argument in the Sweet case,

“I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. I do not believe in the law of hate… I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred.”

So I am wrestling my brain to the ground to fight hating these awful, arrogant, unprofessional, smug and destructive people. They refuse to extend even moderate respect and decency to the President of the United States. They do everything in their power to distort facts, data, reality and analysis to confuse the public and turn it against their own leader. They will not give credit when it is due, and they will not assign responsibility where it belongs, if there is any way to twist the facts to impugn President Trump.

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Supreme Court Ethics 1: Birthright Citizenship Is Here To Stay

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

I didn’t venture an opinion on whether President Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship would fly with the Supreme Court (I did post about Justice Jackson making a fool of herself during oral argument), but I would have been surprise if today’s decision had turned out differently than it did.

The Supreme Court ruled today that President Donald Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional. The ruling was announced just as I was preparing commentary on earlier decisions this week: that post will arrive later today.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling. “If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design,” Roberts wrote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the result but dissented on the reasoning. Such concurring opinions are for professors and geeks, to be cited in law review articles and wild-hair judicial opinion dicta.

Justice Samuel Alito made some interesting points in his dissent about how birthright citizenship has very different, and potentially perilous implications today that never occurred to the Founders, writing,

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It’s Time To Play That Exciting Game Show, “How Stupid Do They Think We Are?”!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Hello everybody! I’m your host, Wink Smarmy! [APPLAUSE] Welcome to “How Stupid Do They Think We Are?,” the popular ethics game show where our panelists try to puzzle out just how stupid the usual suspects—we all know who they are, don’t we?—-think we are based on their lies, poses, flagrant misrepresentations and embarrassing efforts to deceive! [APPLAUSE] 

Welcome panel! And here’s today’s challenge…

UC at Berkeley has announced that it is launching a nonpartisan academic institute in the political science department will become a hub for research, teaching and civic engagement.

The Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy, or NPI, will be a hub for research, teaching and civic engagement rooted in a shared commitment to advancing the public good. Through faculty research initiatives, undergraduate courses and a visiting fellows program, the institute will explore what impedes progress and how best to solve political problems, from polarization to the future of artificial intelligence.

Chancellor Rich Lyons said the institute aligns with Berkeley’s commitment to fostering civil discourse, advancing democracy and preparing students to lead with integrity. 

“The purpose and impact of the NPI will be defined and strengthened by Berkeley’s ability to bring together world-class faculty and extraordinary students and by our commitment, as the country’s preeminent public university, to advancing the greater good,” Lyons said. “We intend to do more than simply study democracy; we are building this institute to strengthen it.”

Before I throw the challenge over to you, panel, let me ask our resident ethicist, Jack Marshall, just how stupid does UC at Berkeley think we are?

“Thank-you, Wink. I have to say,  to answer your question, so stupid I’m having trouble processing it. To begin with, Berkeley is one of the most left-leaning institutions in the country, as well as one of the most egregiously partisan. One landmark study by “Econ Journal Watch” found that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans at UC Berkeley by a ratio of roughly 9.9 to 1. 

“But putting that beside, Nancy Pelosi was one of the most partisan Speakers of the House in U.S. political history. She green-lighted two impeachments against a Republican President purely because she had Democratic votes to do it, though the intent of the Constitution’s provision envisioned non-partisan consensus regarding actual “high crimes and misdemeanors.”  Later, she violated both House rules and Congressional norms by rejecting Republican nominations to participate in the so-called “J-6” Committee, ensuring a purely partisan witch hunt constructed as a political weapon. Pelosi is the only House Speaker to deliberately show disrespect to a President, ostentatiously ripping up his State of the Union speech on camera.

“Calling an institution “non-partisan” that is named after Nancy Pelosi is head-explodingly cynical. Who could possibly believe that, except someone who is completely ignorant of recent political history, or someone who would lose Scrabble game to a mollusk?”

Thank you Jack. I see your point. In light of that, panel, let me re-frame the question a bit. Fill in the rest of this sentence: “Claiming The Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy is non-partisan insults the public’s intelligence as much as….

Jack, do you have an example to get us started?

“Hmmm. Okay, Wink, how about this: Claiming  The Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy is non-partisan insults the public’s intelligence as much as The Kristi Noem Institute for the Ethical Treatment of Pets?

Perfect! OK, panel, now its up to you! how stupid does UC at Berkeley think we are? Answer by finishing this sentence: 

“Claiming The Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy is non-partisan insults the public’s intelligence as much as….???

Good Luck! You have 30 second to come up with the best answer! The clock starts…NOW

This Ethics Story Is Bad Enough, But The Conservative Media Ignoring It Is Worse

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Times “breaking news” story from the weekend begins, “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit: An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the President and the Commerce Secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.”

You can read it all here, at a gift link. From my reading, the story seems well sourced and fair, though it is the Times, and the Times has been doing everything in its power for over a decade to undermine Donald Trump. The Times isn’t the only one reporting the story, though: The Nation pounced on it with glee; I’ve also found the story reported by Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, MSN, India Today, various leftist substacks (Paul Krugman loves this story), Yahoo Finance, Mediaite, the Financial Times, and more obscure platforms. I expect CNN, PBS, MSNOW and the alphabet networks to be along any minute.

What I can’t find is any reporting on this apparent conflict of interest and Trump family self-dealing by the conservative media. (As of this moment it is also missing from news aggregator “memeorandum,” I assume because this partisan site is so excited about the Supreme Court upholding the $5 million jury verdict against the President regarding the E. Jean Carroll affair.)

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A Fine Example of “Legal But Unethical”: Gwar’s Trump Massacre— The Justice Department Should Know the Difference

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Gwar, an American heavy metal band, has been contacted by the Secret Service because it held a mock execution of President Trump onstage. A theatrical “science-fiction musical project” formed in 1984, the satirical band has been doing this kind of thing at its concerts for decades. Fake Trump was “killed” during the group’s performance at Warped Tour in Washington, D.C. this month. There’s a video: someone in a Donald Trump costume walks onstage and is disemboweled by the band, fake blood spurting.

The Band’s mock murders of public figures have offed such prominent figures as former President Barack Obama, former President Joe Biden, Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, and Kanye West, and others. This is clearly non-partisan sick humor.

Trump’s Justice Department does itself, Republicans and conservatives no favors when it engages in dumb abuses of process and power like this. It is even more futile and less defensible than arresting James Comey for posting a numerical threat to President Trump written on the beach in sea shells. Demonstrating a sense of proportion as well as humor would be wise as well as endearing. I mean, Gwar’s manager is named Sleazy P. Martini. Reacting with fear as if a theatrical bad joke is a genuine threat makes the Administration and the President look weak, thin-skinned and foolish.

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The Pope’s Views On When Wars Should Be Fought Are Irrelevant To Reality And Not Just Useless, But Harmful

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

Once again, the position at EA is that the Pope—it doesn’t matter which Pope—is unethically abusing his authority and serving as gum in the works while fostering confusion when he presumes dictate national policy based on idealism and utopianism

A guy I never heard of who was an executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter and who, we are told, “directed coverage of the conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV,” was awarded an op-ed in the New York Times (Gift link, though it’s not much of a gift) to explain why he thinks the Pope thinks that “the age of artificial intelligence undermines the moral criteria for just war.” Ramalama ding-dong! Why is anyone listening to guys who have the luxury of dealing with the abstract and never having the responsibility of keeping a nation and a population safe and secure as they pontificate about the right way to do it? Why is anyone reading the analysis of an obscure functionary who has also never had to face the harsh human, military, geopolitical and practical realities of war as he rationalizes the basis for a Pope’s irresponsible interference with serious international matters?

The New York Times has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is fully committed to undermining President Trump, his policies and his popular support. The “just war” blather, another phase of arguing how many angels can gather on a pinhead, suddenly became useful to the Axis of Unethical conduct when it wanted to root for a murderous, anti-Christian Islamic regime while it was fighting the United States of America. Popes never support wars, and it isn’t news when the Vatican condemns one. Infamously, the Vatican refused to take sides in World War II, or take any substantive steps to try to end the extermination of Jews in Europe. Now the Pope doesn’t think a war that has among its goals making as certain as possible that Iran doesn’t have the ability to do what it has been promising to do for decades—destroy Israel— is a “just war,” or to be more precise, that we should redefine “just war” to eliminate Israel’s and the U.S.’s justification for neutralizing Iran.

There’s a damning consistency there, no?

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Now THIS Really Couldn’t Happen Here (With Rueful Ethics Observations…) [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is the EU Commission in Brussels. “It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont told POLITICO, making a justifiable analogy since the upper floors, where housing commissioners worked, kept their air conditioning running while the proles in the lower floors sweltered

Americans wouldn’t stand for this.

Not yet, anyway.

1. Could there be a more throbbing example of the unethical “Let them eat cake!” attitude, though it is more like “Let them jump into rivers and drown!”?

2. Why would anyone trust the EU if its leadership could even consider something like this? Yet this is the same orientation that Communism inflicted on its populations. I saw the end results as well as the brainwashing of the public it required when I had (and I do mean had) to be in Moscow in the Nineties for two weeks.

3. Bernie Sanders honeymooned in Moscow. What does this tell you? And he’s being credited with remaking the Democratic Party, along with fellow useful idiot AOC.

4. Yet young voters in droves rushed to the polls in New York to elect exactly the kinds of candidates who hold the “government knows best” and “Know your place, serfs!” world view that is antithetical to American traditions, values and thought.

5. The Democratic Party, now being increasingly dominated by socialists and Communists, is counting on Trump Derangement to let it triumph in November, while its policies, and the even worse policies supported by the Democratic Socialists, are ostentatiously irresponsible and anti-American. Good plan!

Bravo! Ethics Hero Sen. Fetterman Civilly Points Out That Trump Deranged Ethics Dunce Larry David Is An Asshole…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Perfect!

Larry David, who has managed to make millions with the meta stunt of portraying himself as a toxic asshole on HBO when he in fact is a toxic asshole, dug deep into his warped character and told “Variety” the White House Flag Day UFC event was a “travesty.” “What else can you say about it?” the “Seinfeld” co-creator added. “It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed to be an American.”

TMZ ’s Jacob Wasserman tracked down Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa) on Capitol Hill yesterday and asked his reaction to David’s outburst.

“I’d say ‘Lighten up, Francis,’” Fetterman replied. That’s a 1980s film reference to the cult Bill Murray comedy “Stripes,” making Fetterman a man after my own heart. In a famous scene the ridiculous recruit named Francis (played by Conrad Dunn) tells his fellow soldiers he wants to be called “Psycho” and that he’ll kill anyone who calls him by his right name. He then tries to demonstrate his psycho creds by running off what he would consider justifications for murder.

Sgt. Hulka (played by Warren Oates) deflates the rant by saying, “Lighten up, Francis.”

Wasserman proved himself culturally ignorant by not getting Fetterman’s allusion, so Fetterman had to spell out his meaning. “Hey, I’m proud to be an American, and if you are embarrassed or whatever because of a UFC thing, get over yourself, dude!” the Senator said.

Such a light, civil way to tell David “You’re an asshole”!

“It Can’t Happen Here”? Brazil Gives Us A Glimpse Of What The Woke Passionately Wish For America

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In April, Brazilian father and mother, Audato and Ieda Denardi were found guilty of the crime of “intellectual neglect” and were sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their two daughters without sufficient instruction on“gender and sex education” or “tolerance and diversity.”

The court also found that the girls, aged 15 and 11, not enjoying popular Brazilian musical genres such as “trap” or “sertanejo” was evidence of a criminal deficiency in their cultural education.

Even though the prosecutors in the São Paulo trial requested an acquittal after concluding that the minors were not suffering from any neglect and were demonstrating appropriate academic and social development, the conviction was handed down. It is currently under appeal before the Seventh Criminal Court Chamber of the São Paulo State Court of Justice. The Christian legal organization ADF International is representing the family, and it denounced the case as “a grotesque abuse of criminal law.”

Ya think?

Despite the fact that both girls are pianists with advanced training and are fluent in several languages, the judge accused the parents of “using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle, subjecting them to a form of unregulated education, the effectiveness and quality of which lack adequate metrics within the Brazilian legal system, while completely excluding the state’s involvement.” Julio Pohl, legal counsel for Latin America at ADF International, neatly pointed out the obvious: to be concise, the verdict is crackers.

“An independent educational psychologist found no sign of neglect. The girls themselves described rigorous daily education,” Pohl said. “The judge convicted anyway because a fifteen-year-old said she finds some music lyrics morally questionable, and because the curriculum didn’t include state-approved content on gender. A parent has been sentenced to prison not for failing to educate her children, but for educating them according to her own values. This is a grotesque abuse of the criminal law, and we will not let it stand.”

Let’s go through the occupants of Congress, the Senate, state houses and mayors’ offices and speculate which of them secretly (or not so secretly) would like to see similar “justice” in the United States. Do we even have to speculate on the how the leadership of the teachers unions would regard the Denardi case?

Update: “There Is So Much About This Story I Don’t Understand Except For The Basics…” (The Trash-Dumping DEI Morgan Exec)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Above is the résumé of the woman discussed in today’s earlier post. With this, I have no sympathy for JP Morgan at all. Or Angie, though it can’t be pleasant having your worst moments (or at least one of them) splashed all over the web.

I have done a lot of hiring in my time, and I have vetted a lot of résumés. That one would have set off all my “B.S.” alarms like the Chicago fire, and adding to the things I don’t understand about this mess is that Angie was hired in the first place. Her education credentials are beyond weak, and the stated markers of skill and accomplishment are pure puffery. In cases like this, not only should the employee be fired but whoever hired her should be dumped too. All right, I’ve sometimes taken a flier on applicants who seem to have a certain spark, “un je ne sais quoi” as the French say when they aren’t too hot, and I’ve suffered for it on occasion. However, when someone gets a job and the hiring supervisor says, “OK, I’m going to take a leap of faith with you, but you better not let me down,” that employee has to be on notice that, for example, engaging in public theft during basketball fan riot is not consistent with the admonition. If ever a hire pulsed with a DEI-hire-to-fill-a-DEI-job vibe, this is it.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan seems to have a bit of a culture problem with its personnel decisions, no? Have you been following this story, the viral lawsuit by a JP Morgan employee who alleges that his JP Morgan manager, 37-year-old Lorna Hajdini, drugged him and turned him into a sex slave?