Government & Politics

A Popeye: A Trump Derangement Note That I Have to Mention…[Corrected and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several readers have sent me this insane, hysterical post by a guy who claims to be “middle of the road” and it caused me to pledge not to keep posting on Trump Deranged outbursts: there are too many of them, they are embarrassing, and it doesn’t change anything. Then I see a post by an old freind, a tenured history professor at a major U.S. university, in which he writes, “106 years ago today (i.e., 02 Oct 1919), President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke. His wife Edith essentially took over running the White House for the rest of is term. The 25th Amendment was still 48 years away in the future. No particular reason for mentioning the 25th Amendment right now…”

You mean now as opposed to during the previous four years, when this same scholar saw no reason to make a comparison with Wilson when it was screamingly obvious that the President really was cognitively disabled and needed to be removed?

Of course this objective, trustworthy “expert” detected no parallels with Wilson while POTUS shambled around, got disoriented and had his wife handling him like a member of Visiting Angels, but now, as his successor displays staggering amounts of energy and purpose not just for a man his age but for anyone of any age (the correct parallel isn’t Wilson but Teddy Roosevelt), a credentialed historian thinks he can’t do the job, and that an elected President should be removed from office as “disabled.”

Translation: “Disabled”= “Not a Democrat.”

Trump won’t do the job the way that the batty American Left wants him to do it. That’s all.

I need some spinach…

Unethical Quote of the Month: Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

“Diversity involves recognizing, including, celebrating, rewarding and utilizing differences of gender, race, ethnicity, age and thought – sweetening and often strengthening the pot.”

—-The Georgia Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism in the document supposedly designed to give Continuing Legal Education trainers (like me) guidance in preparing seminars on “professionalism,” exemplary conduct that goes beyond the Rules of Professional Conduct to bolster public trust and the reputation of the legal profession.

What utter, illogical, embarrassing, unethical, woke garbage this is…and from a judicial commission no less! I dare anyone to defend it. The putative author is someone named Karlise Y. Grier, who is supposedly a lawyer, and lawyers are supposed to be trained in critical thought. Gee, I wonder if…[checking]….of course she is. Only the undeserved beneficiary of such nonsense could endorse it so fatuously.

I’m going to be teaching, not for the first time, a professionalism seminar for Georgia lawyers, who are among those in the few states that require special “professionalism” credits. I had to read, in due diligence, the guidelines for such programs in Georgia that almost took longer to read than the course will last (one hour) because it was full of bloated bureaucratic babble. It is a professional requirement for lawyers to write clearly, but most don’t, and this thing was a disgrace. Nothing was as bad as that paragraph above, though.

What does “recognizing” differences in gender mean, and what does it have to do with the ethical practice of law? (Hint: Nothing.) Lawyers should treat all clients and adversaries the same regardless of race, gender or other group characteristics. Is that paragraph saying that Georgia lawyers should be able to tell a man from a woman? Is this a problem in Georgia?

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Unethical Tit-For Tat: Great, Now The Trump Administration Is Playing “WrongSpeak” Games…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This revolting development was completely predictable to the extent of being virtually inevitable. Nonetheless, it is ominous, dangerous and disgusting, not to mention Orwellian, for the government to try to manipulate public opinion by banning words and phrases that can support opinions and beliefs authorities don’t want the public to hold.

The Energy Department last week added “climate change,” “green” “emissions” and “decarbonization” to its list of banned words and phrases at its Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The WrongSpeak/ThoughtCrime linguistic offenses already included “energy transition,” “sustainability/sustainable,” “‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ energy,” “Carbon/CO2 ‘Footprint’” and “Tax breaks/tax credits/subsidies.”

“Please ensure that every member of your team is aware that this is the latest list of words to avoid — and continue to be conscientious about avoiding any terminology that you know to be misaligned with the Administration’s perspectives and priorities,” the acting director of external affairs Rachel Overbey decreed.

The order applies to both public and internal communications and extends to documents such as requests for information for federal funding opportunities, reports and briefings. It’s obvious why the Trump Administration is going down this pro-indoctrination path. “It works!” as the late Harry Reid assures us from Hell. The ends justify the means, “They (the Democrats) did it first,” “Everybody does it,” yada yada yada: there are at least a dozen rationalizations on the list including #31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now” that will doubtlessly be resorted to by our current ruling censors. The practice is still unethical and the impulse is anti-American.

I believe that the linguistic attacks are encouraged by the reality that the news media is engaged in permanent pro-climate change hysteria propaganda. “Climate change is caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, which is driven primarily by burning oil, coal and natural gas for energy,” Politico states confidently while reporting on the new language edict at Energy. More:

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The Democrats’ Way: When The Facts Are Damning Just Make Stuff Up and Count On Your Complicit News Media To Have Your Back.

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Kamala Harris, the worst, most unqualified major party Presidential candidate since Horace Greeley, continued her ridiculous “It wasn’t my fault!” tour last week by telling Rachel Maddow on MS (MSNBC) that 2024 was “the closest presidential election in the 21st Century.”

It wasn’t. It wasn’t even close to the closest. Donald Trump beat Harris in the Electoral College 312-226. Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 by a tighter margin, 306-232. Trump beat Hillary Clinton 304-227 in 2016. also closer. Only two elections in the 21st Century have been decided by wider margins in the EC, 2008 and 2012.

The 2024 election wasn’t closer than most of the recent elections in the popular vote either. Bush lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College in 2000, as did Trump in 2016. Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Clinton in 2016, and Trump in 2020 all needed fewer votes to flip to win the Electoral College than Harris in 2024 too. In short, Harris’s claim had no basis in reality. At all. Whatsoever. Sort of like the claims that she ran a “flawless” campaign. Or the DNC’s spin that Harris lost because America is racist and sexist.

Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? He exaggerated the size of his inauguration crowd in 2017!

Yet there was Rachel Maddow, nodding and smirking away as Kamala flogged her fake history, helping to make her show’s viewers more ignorant and misinformed that they already were, which, he show being on MSNBC, was already considerable.

Nice.

Question: Will Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill’s Dual Military Scandals Cost Her Any Democratic Votes in the NJ Governor’s Race?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I guess the follow-up question is, “Should it?’

Republican Jack Ciattarelli almost won against current Governor Phil Murphy, who is now term-limited out in Blue New Jersey, considered a Democratic stronghold. Now Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill is running for governor against Ciattarelli. Sherrill has run on her military record both to get into Congress and now, but she also has two separate scandals that undermine her credibility and right to the public’s trust.

Scandal #1: like Tim “Knucklehead” Walz, she has claimed to have held a higher rank than she actually had. In more than 20 fundraising appeals during her time in Congress, her campaign referred to her as a retired lieutenant commander. Sherrill’s Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty form states otherwise: she retired from the service as a lieutenant. Sherrill attended the United States Naval Academy and served in the Navy until 2003. She was nominated for the rank of lieutenant commander, but was never confirmed. Never mind: she’s been advertising herself at the higher rank ever since. In 2021, Sort-of President Joe Biden referred to Sherrill as “lieutenant commander” during public remarks in her state, and Sherrill quietly accepted the promotion.

Democrats apparently don’t care about their elected officials lying about their military records. There’s Walz, of course, and Connecticut U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal won his seat (and re-election) despite years of claiming combat experience in Vietnam that he never had (he “misspoke”).

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James Comey Is Indicted. I’d Love to Say “Good,” But I Can’t

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

There is evidence that former FBI director James Comey leaked information to a third party to ensure that it reached the news media—a legal breach—and lied to Congress. Is it strong enough to meet a beyond a reasonable doubt threshold? Maybe not.

He is still an ethics villain. Comey managed to make hash out of the 2016 election, first refusing to charge Hillary Clinton for a crime that he—falsely—claimed other, lesser officials had never been charged with, and then tried to make up for handing Hillary a “Get out of the negative headlines free” card by opening a new investigation even closer to the election sparked by the appearance of some of Hillary’s emails on her assistant’s boyfriend’s computer. Comey was the epitome of the “Deep State” embedded foe of President Trump—you will recall that he recently approved of the legend 8647, as in “Kill President Trump,” in a social media post. A a fan of ethical government and democracy, I am not sorry to see some adverse consequences coming Comey’s way. As a legal ethicist, I am dubious about the indictment.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“If it’s totally stupid, you don’t go along with it…”

—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in comments at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as he explained why he thinks the traditional reverence for Supreme Court precedent (stare decisis) makes neither legal nor logical sense

In discussions with some of my more fair and rational progressive lawyer friends about the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, several of them admitted that Roe was a terrible opinion, badly reasoned and sloppily written. This has been the consensus of most honest legal analysts since the 1970s, but never mind, Roe declared the right to kill unborn children for any reason whatsoever a right, so for abortion-loving feminists and their allies (including men addicted to promiscuous sex without responsibility), Roe was a “good” decision. But my colleagues who knew it was not just a poor decision but a terrible one condemned anyway, because, they said, it violated stare decisis, the hoary principle that the Supreme Court should eschew over-turning previous SCOTUS decisions even if they were outdated or clearly wrong, in the interests of legal stability, preserving the integrity of the Court and insulating the institution from the shifting winds of political power.

Like many principles, that one sounds better in the abstract than it works in reality, and Roe is as good an example as one could find short of Dred Scott. Roe warped the culture and turned living human beings into mere inconveniences whose lives could be erased at whim. How many millions of human beings don’t exist today because of the ideological boot-strapping logic of that decision, which bizarrely equated the right to contraception to the right to kill the unborn?

Reverence of bad decisions as beyond reversal is also a handy political weapon: as several wags have noted, stare decisus is mandatory when the precedent at issue is progressive cant (like Roe), but when the Left passionately believes a SCOTUS decision was wrongly decided, it’s time for an “exception” to stare decisus. In his recent appearance at D.C.’s Catholic University, where he taught at the law school until protesters against Dobbs in his classes forced him to stop, Justice Thomas pointed to Brown v. Bd. of Education, the landmark decision that overturned a well-established Court precedent holding that “separate but equal” was a principle that allowed segregation in the public schools as he neatly eviscerated the intellectually dishonest position that SCOTUS precedent must be sacred.

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The Trump-Epstein Statue Mini-Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[Before I return to my own blog after circumstances beyond my control left me unable to post for most of yesterday, I want to thank the EA commentariate for coming through with a stellar performance on yesterday’s emergency Open Forum. I expected nothing less, but the range of posts and topics was dazzling.]

I missed the Mall statute controversy until this morning. Here is the statue, which was only on display for a day before the National Park Service took it down:

Nice.

A permit for the thing was approved on September 16, and originally authorized the disparaging statue to remain on display at the National Mall until 8 p.m. ET this coming Sunday. A plaque beneath the bronze figures of the late convicted pedophile and sex trafficker and the President of the United States read: “In honor of friendship month, we celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend’ Jeffrey Epstein,” followed by a silhouette of two hands making a heart shape. The stated purpose of the artwork was “to demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery.” That was deceit. The purpose of the statue was to promote the desperate Axis talking point that President Trump was involved in Epstein’s criminal activities, of which there is no evidence whatsoever and has never been any evidence.

Again, nice.

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Sunrise Open Forum & a Few Topics To Consider [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

I’m in Richmond, preparing to do a 3 hour legal ethics CLE seminar for one of my last remaining live presentation clients since the stupid Wuhan virus lockdown ruined my business, along with oh, so much else. (Thanks, CDC! Thanks, teachers! Thanks, Democrats! Thanks, “science.” Thanks, fear-mongering news media! Assholes….) I barely have time to wake up after a long drive in the wee hours last night from Alexandria, so I’m going to have to rely on you, dear readers, to keep things lively while I am otherwise occupied.

One thing to look forward to:EA will launch a new regular column authored by our alien philosopher, Extradimensional Cephalopod! We have had two other attempts at a regular column to inject diverse (ooo, that word!) ideas and opinions here beyond the guest posts and Comments of the Day, both evaporating for various reasons, in the case of the most recent contributor, incipient insanity. “Curmie’s” Trump Derangement proceeds apace: in his latest post, he declares that “There is no such thing as free speech if a state employee can be fired for saying something someone in power finds distasteful.” This is nonsense, as the Curmie I knew would have quickly pointed out. “Distasteful” is a deliberately and deceitfully vague term: any 12-year-old could probably imagine dozens of “distasteful” comments that a government employer could justifiably decide are intolerable from an employee. The courts agree, you know.

In other news, France and other U.S. allies decided to make terrorism great again, rewarding Hamas for its October 7 attack on Israel by “recognizing” the non-existent Palestinian state. President Trump correctly excoriated those nations at the U.N.

Meanwhile, in more important news, Major League Baseball announced that the new robo-strike calling system will indeed be instituted next season. It’s about damn time. In the game I listened to on the way to Richmond (Boston defeated Toronto, 4-1), the announcers admitted that the home plate umpire was missing calls all through the game. “Well, that pitch was well off the plate, but that’s how he’s been calling strikes all night!” Boy am I sick of that.

Finally, a “The Unabomber was right” note. My new Apple smartphone wouldn’t allow me to set an alarm for this morning as insurance against the hotel skipping my wake-up call until I signed up for its “health app,” which took 8 screens, and ended up telling me that I shouldn’t get up when I wanted to.

Well, wish me luck. I have about 150 Virginia lawyers to make ethical this morning, only 14 of them in person. %$#@!& lockdown….

Added: Oh, I forgot: Disney relented and let Jimmy Kimmel back on the air last night. Oh, so what? If ABC wants to have a late night show hosted by a not-too-bright, occasionally funny, progressive scold lose money, that’s their choice. The President should shut up about it; he just gives Kimmel significance and attention that his meager talent doesn’t justify. And threatening ABC for its broadcast content is beyond stupid, as well as unconstitutional. Trump’s thin skin regarding criticism is a serious weakness, but as with the others, he appears incapable of ameliorating it.

Ethics Quiz: The Lawyer’s Facebook Post

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Insurance litigator Bradley Dlatt was fired by law firm Perkins Coie and has been erased its website after he posted on Facebook,

“Charlie Kirk got famous as one of America’s leading spreaders of hatred, misinformation and intolerance.The current political moment—where an extremist Supreme Court and feckless Republican Congress are enabling a Republican president to become a tyrant and building him a modern-day Gestapo for assaulting black and brown folks—is a result of Charlie Kirk’s ‘contributions’ to American media and politics. Hell, Kirk would likely be flattered by the underlying claim. His Turning Point USA began as a sort of Misbehaved Young Republicans and eventually overshadowed traditional right-wing organizations like CPAC in dictating the shape of American conservatism. Not to diminish Donald Trump’s media instincts, but when polls suggest young men turning more conservative helped get Trump to this point, that’s all Kirk. And he can take credit for all that flows from that, including the current Supreme Court making a straightfaced proclamation that forgiving student debt is executive tyranny and then deciding that sending people to South Sudan without due process is just “practicing executive authority the right way.” It’s not “celebrating” a murder just because you decline to whitewash Kirk’s legacy by acting like he “was practicing politics the right way” as Ezra Klein belched out onto the pages of the New York Times. Klein apparently believes saying that the guy who tried to murder Paul Pelosi with a hammer should be bailed out by some “patriot” or responding to the murder of George Floyd by calling him a “scumbag” is “the right way.” It’s a stunning display of pathological centrism brain: a compulsion to champion an angle that almost no one in the real world shares and then preen as though being an outlier is a sign of genius. Because while liberals didn’t think Kirk practiced politics the right way… neither did conservatives! If they’re being honest with themselves, the highest compliment conservatives give Kirk is that he broke politics. He saw the dusty, genteel norms of the post-War political divide and tossed them aside to build a following. He took Rush Limbaugh’s model and pushed it beyond its limits. That said, no one in this country should be murdered for their political speech. Wishing comfort to his wife and children in this difficult time. “

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