Above you see the President with a photo of the late, great, baseball slimeball doing the Nazi salute like Elon Musk, which I’m sure is what endears him to Trump.
Kidding!
Not kidding: between their various pardons, I’m pretty sure Presidents Biden and Trump have so degraded the status of the Presidential clemency power that it will never recover. Once, such pardons conveyed ethical values and legitimate justifications for a President’s compassion. This thobbingly stupid pardon should make the gesture an embarrassment forevermore.
Here is the President’s asinine, even by his standards, Truth Social post:
Ugh. Fisking this crap is too easy but noxious, like shooting dead rats in a barrel…
Of course, the corrupt news media sees no problem with this. As ABC helpfully points out, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information “adjusts weather data to account for factors like instrument changes, station relocation and urbanization, and it does so through peer-reviewed studies that are published publicly through its federal website.”
And factors like the need for climate scientists to show that the climate change apocalypse that they constantly predict for us is based on convincing data, when in fact it is based on flawed data, as the scientists admit once you cut through the jargon. For example, traditional glass thermometers have been replaced with more precise digital sensors warranting “adjustments” to accurately compare readings between the two instruments. Sea surface temperatures used to be taken manually from a bucket off of a boat, unlike the network of buoys and satellites that are used to gauge water temperatures today. Then there is the “urban heat island effect”: Cities heat up more than rural areas due to human activity, infrastructure and the concentration of buildings, roads and other heat-absorbing materials, causing higher temperatures in cities compared to surrounding areas. This can distort temperature data, making an area appear hotter than it is. So the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes adjustments to account for that too.
I worked for many years for a fascinating man, a brilliant negotiation specialist and consultant, Richard Halpern. My first thought yesterday after watching the astounding argument that broke out among the President, Vice-President Vance and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy was, “Boy, I wish Rich was still here to analyze what went wrong.” Rich died in 2009, but I learned enough about the art of negotiation from working with and observing him to be confident in how he would have reacted to what occurred on live television yesterday. My thoughts also reached back across the decades to the seminar I took on negotiation in law school with Adrian Fisher, then Dean of Georgetown Law Center after a career as a top arms control negotiator for the United States.
Both Richard Halpern and Adrian Fisher would have agreed that Zelenskyy was incompetent. I would add that he behaved like a deluded fool who had come to believe his fawning press notices.
First, Zelenskyy did not sufficiently research his negotiation partners, their preferences, their character, and their “hot buttons” that should never be pressed without sound reasons. Second, he did not properly prepare to insulate his own hot buttons from making him behave against his country’s best interests. Third, he did not comprehend why he was in the Oval office and what was expected of him.
Finally, he did not understand that as a supplicant nation seeking critical aid from the United States, he was not on a level playing field, particularly since he was in the U.S., on the President’s home turf. His job was to be respectful, compliant and non-confrontational no matter what occurredor was said.
The previous press conference with a foreign leader that President Trump had completed just the day before should have served as a guide. Keir Starmer was content to stay in the background and barely speak while the President rambled on in his inimitable fashion, and Great Britain has accumulated far more credits and greater good will with the U.S. than Ukraine. One commenter said that yesterday Zelenskyy failed to “read the room.” It was far worse than that: he failed to read the room, whom he was talking to, why he was there, and what he had to accomplish.
To my progressive friends (and I am proud to have many) who have been posting memes about boycotting on 2/28, I have a suggestion: Stop.
I mean it. Just stop. You’re revealing nothing other than your own ignorance of how money and commerce work. At best, you’re preaching to your own choir and changing no minds. You’re advocating tactics fifty years past their sell-by dates. I know this, because fifty years ago, I was a left-wing activist. We used the same tactics. They made us feel good. They didn’t work then, and they won’t work now.
More to the point, this boycott gag has been tried numerous times since and nothing ever happened. The companies you’re “boycotting” know they’ll get your money anyway, as soon as you need a tank of gas or a basket of cheap groceries. They don’t care when you buy. February 28, March 3, hey – it all fits neatly in the quarterly projections. First quarter, y’all. At minimum, time these things to the last week of a reporting quarter – that might make a minimal dent. Timing it this way is sheer ignorance.
You don’t like Trump? Fine, I get it. I don’t like him either. But consider that a plurality of the country thought that the agenda the Democrats advanced in the last four years is nuts, and voted accordingly. Consider that a plurality of the country rejected the previous administration and its patch job when it was clear that said admin was led by a puppet, and offered up a another puppet to replace him. From my perspective, a plurality of the country said “we may not like Trump, but he’s still better than what we’ve been offered.”
This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?
I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.
Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”
But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.
And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.
The Resurrection Church Oakland (PCA) held this event last week.
In related news, spectacularly unethical Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis sent an angry letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee today. She is furious that the committee is quite appropriately investigating the degree to which her part of the “Get Trump!” lawfare last year was orchestrated and coordinated with the Biden Administration.
“Rather than honor and uphold the oath you took, you have chosen to expend your time attempting to bully me, which is a complete waste of your time,” Willis wrote. “Might I suggest that instead of attempting to disrupt this office’s work protecting the people of Fulton County, that you celebrate Black History Month by visiting children in your district to teach them about the many contributions African Americans have made to this country—including those who have advanced democracy by successfully advocating that this nation live up to its ideals that everyone is equal before the law and everyone has the right to have their voice heard through exercising their right to vote. That would be a much more productive use of your time.”
The Trump administration announced today that it would choose which media outlets participates in the Presidential press pool.
Good!
“In announcing plans to hand-select the reporters who can ask the president questions at many events,” the New York Times intoned darkly, “the White House is breaking decades of precedent.” Oh NO! Another “democratic norm” breached!
Naturally, the White House Correspondents’ Association, which was delegated the job back when the entire journalism establishment wasn’t allied with a single party and dedicated to bringing down the administration of any elected President who didn’t embrace their policy preferences, attacked the change in the manner of a proverbial stuck pig. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” wrote Eugene Daniels, a Politico reporter and the president of the association. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the President. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
In a functioning democracy, journalists exist to inform the public, not to bend elections to the will of the news outlets. Calling the current news media independent insults the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the deterioration of journalism ethics, aka. honesty, fairness, transparency, objectivity, competence and independence, over the past two decades.
Also, any Politico reporters should be hiding his head under a bag after the revelations about how it accepted “subscriptions” from the Biden Administration while covering it, and mostly positively at that. Here’s the unbiased Politico headline of today’s announcement: “White House seizes control of press pool, will decide which outlets cover events with President.” Oooh, “seizes!” Scary! Sounds awfully Hitler-y doesn’t it? The White House didn’t “seize” anything: it has always had the power to decide who attends press briefings, and it is asserting it.
This was just reposted by a very astute and generally learned lawyer friend (who, I should mention, is a retired USAID employee who never returned to the land of her birth except for visits and who has lived abroad for decades). I could write about this screed for pages, but I’ll leave it to you.
I will only observe that Ethics Alarms commented critically on many of the incidents and statements listed when they occurred, while others are framed according to Axis media narratives (look at the sources) or are the kind of exaggerations and hyperboles that Trump critics call “lies” when he engages in the same techniques.
I will also observe that making this statement without considering who and what this admittedly flawed leader is opposing and the demonstrated values and conduct of the alternative is hypocritical, deliberately misleading, or, ironically, stupid.
As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.
“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”
All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.
That is one of several plaques around San Antonio that memorializes William Barrett Travis’s desperate but inspiring letter on this date in 1836 calling for assistance as the fortress Travis commanded found itself under siege by the Mexican army. Last year at this time, I’m ashamed to say, I was too preoccupied to write about the Alamo, its defenders and its importance in American history and lore. I’m just as preoccupied now, frankly, but also determined not to neglect my duty to give proper respect and acknowledgement to 220 or so volunteers who, by their courage, comradery and dedication to a cause, displayed the best of the American spirit. Travis, Bowie, Crockett, Bonham and the rest would have really gotten a kick out of Trump’s post-assassination attempt theater.
Meanwhile,
1. I won’t be using the History Channel’s daily history prompts from now on. It seriously hacked me off, first by insisting that I consent to an A&E “Consumer Agreement” and not making a way to consent to it evident, but worse, presenting me with this monster (skip to the end; for God’s sake don’t try to read it!)
I have lectured and written abut this before. No ethical lawyer should prepare such a thing which they know with 100% certainty that literally no one can or will read. That’s not informed consent. That’s chicanery. Nor should a consumers have to pay lawyers to explain what what they are agreeing to. If I were asked to advise a client about the propriety of inflicting such a document on anyone, I would a) end up charging them several thousand dollars for my time and b) tell them that if they couldn’t cut the agreement down to three pages while defining every legal term in it, I would regard it as signature significance for an untrustworthy company. Give consumers a video to listen to that explains what the document covers in simple English. Something…anything but that mess. This is how Disney ended up using the agreement to sign up for a free trial on Disney+ to try to dodge a negligence suit at EPCOT. Over the past year, as I have been digging out from a financial disaster, I’ve become really good at saying, “You know what? I don’t want or need this service enough to tolerate the way you manipulate and mistreat customers. Screw you.”
Ugh. Fisking this crap is too easy but noxious, like shooting dead rats in a barrel…
Ethics Alarms 