Government & Politics

A Federal Judge Gets Benchslapped For An Unethical Times Column

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On May 24, 2024, while Supreme Court Justice Jackson was dreaming of playing “Medea,” The New York Times published an op-ed entitled, “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” by Senior Judge Michael A. Ponsor of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.  Judge Ponsor addressed the flying of an upside-down American flag and the “Appeal to Heaven” flags outside homes owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a controversy covered thoroughly on Ethics Alarms.

The ethics verdict here was that the controversy was contrived, and that the attack on Alito was politically motivated, biased, and wrong. Judge Ponsor, however, opined that “any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have” recognized that the flag displays were improper because they could be perceived as “a banner of allegiance on partisan issues that are or could be before the court.”

Let me inject here, “Sure, by an idiot!” “The appearance of impropriety is a reason-based standard. “Hey, this SCOTUS judge’s wife flew the same flag that began the HBO John Adams series: that must mean that her husband is in the bag for President Trump!” is not a reasonable perception.

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On the ABC $16 Million Libel Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ABC News agreed last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” broadcast in March, in which he repeatedly said, while interviewing Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had, in fact, been found liable for sexual assault but not rape, and this had been well-publicized at the time.

Trump sued ABC, and I assumed it was a nuisance suit made for effect rather than in expectation of winning. In fact, I regarded it as this close to being frivolous. That it wasn’t was proven by the settlement.

News media fans (I am not one) and journalism advocates are apoplectic over the settlement, believing that it weakens the “power of the press” to distort, lie and manipulate public opinion as the news media has been doing increasingly and shamelessly in one direction on the ideological scale for more than two decades. Good. The news media is careless, reckless, arrogant and unprofessional, as well as unaccountable. If the ABC defeat makes them a little bit more wary and careful to be sure of their facts, it is to everyone’s benefit, including journalists.

It couldn’t have happened to a better target than Stephanopoulos. He is a partisan hack, and never should have been allowed to pretend to be a journalist after serving as one of Bill Clinton’s henchmen. The Times v. Sullivan case requires that a journalist must demonstrate actual malice toward a public figure before a defamation suit gets past the First Amendment, and in most cases miscreants like George are saved by their own incompetence. I was certain that he would be saved this time— ah, rape, sexual assault, tomato-tomahto, who cares, what’s the difference. Of course, everyone knows except maybe Ethics Alarms vigilante press defender “A Friend” that Stephanopoulos and about 90% of his colleagues are hostile to Donald Trump, but general antipathy is usually not enough to show malice.

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Justice Jackson’s Broadway Adventure: Double Ethics Standards…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Here come de judge!”

Above are some examples of SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson making a spectacle of herself in her Broadway turn last weekend in the musical “& Juliet,” a LGBTQ adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Jackson portrayed Queen Mab, described as a “she/her” character on a production poster, in two scenes written especially for her. “I just also think it’s very important to remind people that justices are human beings, that we have dreams, and that we are public servants,” Jackson told“CBS Mornings” prior to the performance. One of her dreams was apparently to be an actress, long ago. (She made the right choice going into law.)

Except that judges, and especially Supreme Court justices, don’t have the option of doing whatever they feel like or dream about, as least if they are conservative justices. All of the criticism of the Roberts Court in the past few years has been over alleged ethical violations by the Justices making up the 6-3 conservative majority. The Justices appointed by Democrats Obama and Biden are, of course, as pure as Ivory Soap. And yet…

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Vanity Plate Ethics, 2024 Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It looks like this is going to be one of those topics that I have to revisit every couple of years or so. In 2018, Ethics Alarms challenged the ethics of a state denying permission for drivers to have whatever vanity plates on their cars that their egos, senses of humor, or general sophomorishness dictated. Then I wrote,

“Utah, for examples, bans vanity plates with profanity, “derogatory language,”  drug references,  sex talk, references to bodily functions, “hate speech,” targeting a particular group, or advocating violence advocates, as well as alcohol references and the number combo “69.” Ethics verdict: None of their business. These are words and numbers, and the state is declaring content and intent impermissible. When I see a car with an obnoxious vanity plate, I’m grateful. This is useful information. Racist or vulgar plates translate into ‘I am an asshole, and want you to know it!'”

The issue came up again in 2022. Illinois, in its infinite wisdom, had banned plates reading HATER, COVID, BYOB, and, perhaps on the theory that it meant “drooling basket case,” BIDEN. This time, it is that bastion of free speech repression (one way or another), California, that has decided certain combinations of numbers and letters should be censored as too painful for human beings to bear. The plate was issued and read LOLOCT7. I’ll give you a minute to figure out what the alleged offense was…

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Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Week: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, aka. “The Knucklehead”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“How in the world did we lose to a billionaire or a venture capitalist, when we were making the case of a country attorney and a high school teacher?”

—-Failed Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.  Jeez, somebody tell him…

Thus does the Gov. of Minnesota and the most embarrassing major party Vice-Presidential nominee in recent history (yes, even worse than Kamala and Joe Biden) demonstrate the fealty to group identification and bias over substance, ability, and merit as the basis for success in our society.

Will somebody try to explain to Walz, who might look in the mirror if he wants to understand “how in the world” the Democratic ticket lost, that in the United Sates of America it is what people do, say, accomplish and believe that matters, not whether their occupations and labels are the “right” ones. Do include in the probably hopeless attempt that being a “country lawyer” ( Is that what Kamala Harris is?) and a high school teacher suggest no likely acumen at leading a nation. I do give Walz some credit for picking “billionaire” as his label for Trump rather than “convicted felon” or “adjudicated rapist,” the labels that his party worked so hard to slap on Trump using a politicized, unethically manipulated justice system, or the ever-popular “reality TV star.” (The appropriate description was “former President of the United States.”)

“I thought it was a real flex when the Wall Street Journal pointed out that I might have been the least wealthy person to ever run for Vice President,” Walz told MPR News. You did? Then you’re an idiot.

On Trump’s Fight Fight Fight Perfume

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

No doubt about it, one of the “norms” that President-Elect Donald Trump is shredding, stomping on and setting on fire is the tradition of Presidents not using their office, visibility, popularity and influence to sell products, with their names as brands. I’m not sure doing this had even occurred to previous White House residents; it certainly never occurred to the Founders…or me, to be honest.

Naturally, because it’s Trump, the usual Axis snipers are horrified. A particularly stinky response issued from New York Times Trump-hating columnist Frank Bruni‘s poison keyboard, titled “Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks.” [Gift link! Ho Ho Ho!]This is what the Axis propaganda machine is left with: playground-level insults for the elected President before he can even take the oath. Honeymoon? Respect? Good faith? Patriotism? Unity? Bi-Partisanship? Nah! What are they?

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Comment of the Day: “From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[Source: Health System Tracker]

In his useful Comment of the Day on the recent essay about “wanted” posters going up around New York City to target health industry executives, Chris Marschner examines some of the factors underlying the high cost of staying alive in the U.S.

I worked on health care costs and the various schemes to keep them down in the 1980s at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Then, the big panacea was going to be HMOs. The cruel reality was that they were over-sold: HMO’s were great if you had something very simple or something very serious: in between, the care just wasn’t any good, as I found out when I first started suffering from chronic gout. Unless there is some incentive for the health care consumer to minimize costs, insurance helps make health care more expensive. Personally, I blame Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist theory that Americans should be guaranteed “Freedom from Want,” meaning guaranteed housing , jobs, a “living wage,” and cradle to grave health care. If people are not sufficiently motivated to avoid unnecessary trips to the doctor or emergency rooms because they won’t have to pay for the consequences of their life choices, medical costs will keep going up. Thus Obama’s “Affordable Care Act” was even less effective at keeping health care affordable than Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was at reducing inflation.

Here is Chris Marschner’s Comment of the Day on “From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:”….

***

These posters would be, in my humble opinion, incitement to violence and immediate threats to the individuals identified. As such, claims of free speech cannot be defended.

I read an interesting article on the history of health insurance from PubMed A (Brief) History of Health Policy in the United States – PMC. While it outlined the historical development it fails miserably with respect to why health care costs have risen so dramatically. The primary reason for health care inflation is that insurance decouples the patient from the provider when it comes to making choices. If health care providers were not compensated based on a fee for service model it stands to reason that the number of services would fall which would allow greater access to health care when actually needed. Having your primary care physician have you make an appointment every 3-6 months just to evaluate you is an appointment that cannot go to someone in need resulting in long wait times.

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At the University of Michigan, A Controversy Reveals Dishonesty and Hypocrisy Underlying the DEI Fad

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

If Donald Trump accomplishes nothing more in his next four years than ending the nation’s tolerance to open borders while fawning over “good illegal immigrants” and driving a metaphorical stake through The Great Stupid’s DEI fad, electing him will have been worth all chaos that will come along with it.

DEI thrives as a hypocritical way to discriminate against white men and shift to a society based on rewarding achievement, diligence and ability to one based on group membership. That makes it un-American to the core. At the University of Michigan, the “director of the university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives”—you know, DEI—spoke out at a conference of such officers the university to opine that her university was “controlled by wealthy Jews and that because Jewish students are “wealthy and privileged” the don’t need diversity services. “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” Rachel Dawson was quoted as saying.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story? And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself. Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes,’ your flagship program that you’re an anchor of, without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting. Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic…”

—Megyn Kelly, who has become considerably more quotable since abandoning news broadcasting for her podcast, responding to Leslie Stahl’s lamenting that “legacy media” media may be dying, that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault, and that she doesn’t know what to do about it. “I have some suggestions,” Kelly began.

Megyn was just riffing off the top of her head, of course. She could have gone on and on, as could I.

What do you call the insistence of Axis media defenders that while they may make “mistakes” (doesn’t everyone?) our journalists are noble, hard-working, objective truth-tellers who deserve our trust and respect? What is that? Denial? Delusion? Gaslighting? Outright lying? Insanity? Blindness? Stupidity? What?

What is the difference in effect between a state-run press, which is what the Founders devised the freedom of the press to prevent, and news media that voluntarily aligns itself with a single party and ideology and abuses its special status to manipulate the public, society, and elections?

Answer: There isn’t any.

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To Defenders of the Biased Mainstream Media: Ethics Alarms Challenges You to Find An Innocent Explanation For Why the NYT and WaPo Don’t Regard This Story As News [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Heck, even CNN reported it (but not MSNBC). Crystal Mangum, the exotic dancer who in 2006 accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape launching an ethics train wreck that ended up costing the city of Durham damages, derailed the academic careers of the three students, got the lacrosse team coach fired, and resulted in a rare instance of a prosecutor being disbarred, finally admitted what everyone should have figured out by now.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum announced on the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Oh.

What?

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