Government & Politics

The YouGov. Poll: Maybe Americans Are Just Too Stupid and Unethical For Democracy to Survive After All…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

All research indicates that the majority of Americans, not having the IQ’s of Pet Rocks, recognize that our bloated government is corrupt, inept and wasteful. Pew Research polling concluded that 56% of Americans felt that way last year. “Nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials, stated another survey. In January, A.P.-NORC researchers found that 70% of Americans believe corruption in the federal government is a serious problem.

Despite these beliefs, only 39 % of Americans polled gave DOGE a “favorable” rating in the latest The Economist/YouGov poll, with”unfavorable” at 36%, and the human slugs who chose “don’t know” came in at a whopping 25%. Another poll this month found only 49% approving DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts.

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Musk’s Email

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

There are many others, but two tells the Trump Deranged on my Facebook feed are displaying symptomatic of their malady are the ridiculous obsession with the name change to “Gulf of America,” and most recently, Elon Musk’s email to the Federal workforce.

Yesterday Musk tweeted out, “Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” And as night follows day, this email from Allan Smith was delivered as promised:

“Subject: What did you do last week?” “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”

Echoing my bizarre Facebook friends, Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, sent out a ludicrous statement that read: “It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life. Once again, Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have shown their utter disdain for federal employees and the critical services they provide to the American people.”

This should go into the “Methinks he doth protest too much!” Hall of Fame. As has become all-too familiar, the lazy resorting to ad hominem insults, the certifiably ignorant emphasis on an agent of the President being “unelected,” and the juvenile working class hero smear of a man who has strengthened and benefited his country and its citizens by his industry, boldness and public mindedness are all throbbing evidence of desperation. But throwing a fit because workers are asked to list five things they accomplished on the job in a week?

I doubt that I have ever had a week in my spectacularly varied, eccentric and often failed career when I couldn’t do that. Today is a Sunday. I can list three substantive work-related accomplishments on this single day, and I feel like I didn’t meet my self-identified goals.

If there is a principled, reasonable, logical reason to find that email threatening, demeaning or unfair, I’d love to know what it is.

Municipal Government Ethics Follies [Clarified]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you think the Federal and state governments have major ethics culture problems? Municipal governments say “Hold my beer!”

1. The city with the deadest ethics alarms in the U.S.? It might be Quincy, Florida…

Quincy hired Robert Nixon as its city manager. Now Quincy Commissioner Beverly Nash has called on the city commission to terminate Nixon, alleging the city violated its own guidelines and possibly state law by hiring him. Why, you well may ask?

Nixon had pleaded guilty to charges of embezzling government funds and served 21 months in prison. The 2010 criminal case was brought after Nixon and an accomplice schemed to pocket $134,000 in federal Housing and Urban Development grant money meant for Tallahassee-area small businesses. Nixon was the director of Florida A&M University’s urban policy institute when he stole from a grant fund-holding account at Florida A&M Federal Credit Union, where his co-defendant was president. The two tried to disguise withdrawals as consulting and administrative fees. They got caught red-handed.

Quincy has a population of about 8,000 and is located at the center of Gadsden County. “Technically we have gone astray and violated our own policies and procedures,” Nash said during a city commission meeting. “When adherence to policy slowly erodes, what is left? Wrong becomes right. The lines and boundaries are missing and blurred.”

The controversy is bogged down in a technical debate over whether or not it is illegal for Quincy to hire a convicted felon who has not had his right to hold official office restored. You can read the details of that irrelevancy here. It doesn’t matter whether Quincy can hire someone who had embezzled government fund as its city manager. Whether the city can or not, it is incompetent, irresponsible and stupid to do so. This is signature significance on metaphorical steroids. Nixon, predictably, is full of talk about redemption and second chances. “I had a debt to society and I paid it. I think it’s important that there is a pathway forward for people with felonies who want a second chance,” Nixon says. Sure there is a pathway: that path begins somewhere the felon does not have opportunities to steal his employer’s money.

The reality is this: nobody who is trustworthy embezzles government funds once or ever. Maybe a city could justify hiring a contrite former embezzler as its city manager after every candidate in the country who has not embezzled cash perishes from some China-planted ethics plague. Absent that unlikely scenario, the hiring is indefensible.

Here’s my favorite part of this astounding story: The Quincy city attorney was one of Nixon’s defense lawyers in the embezzlement case.

2. Oh no, flags again…

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I checked: this is quite an accomplishment. Rep. Crockett has been named an Ethics Alarms Incompetent Elected Official of the Month twice within three months; just think of all the idiots in Congress we have endured who still couldn’t achieve that. Jasmine is clearly something special, as the rapidity with which she has accumulated a provocative EA dossier will attest: she’s been serving barely two years, and already has made it clear that she is an arrogant, opinionated, loud-mouth idiot who is under the delusion that she is worth listening to. Do you want evidence that the Democratic Party is in deep, deep trouble? Here it is: Crockett is regarded as a “rising star.” Yikes.

This rising star has been so prolific in making stupid and offensive statements that she is already edging into Julie Principle territory, meaning that we have ample reason to believe that saying dumb things is what she does, she can’t help it, and it is boring and futile to keep complaining about it.

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Guest Post: Revisiting the Promises and Realities of Obamacare

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

By AM Golden

[I’m grateful to AM Golden’s guest post for many reasons, among them the chance to revisit (above) the moment when the late Senator John McCain‘cast a petty and unethical vote to save the Affordable Care Act, which he had opposed, from repeal just to spite Donald Trump. I am also glad, I guess, to have AM remind us of the decietful manner in which it was passed, with Democrats insisting that the ACA was not a tax, then later defending it before the Supreme Court on the grounds that it was a tax. JM]

One of the government expenditures I’d like to see looked into by DOGE is the cost and usefulness of the Affordable Care Act, particularly the tax subsidy

Full disclosure: I work for a nationwide health insurance company. 

Not long ago, I commented how taxpayers are often gouged when the government spends our money.  We’ve seen inflated prices by government contractors.  We’ve read about the massive fraud perpetuated by those who got loans during the Pandemic to allegedly keep their businesses afloat.   I suggested in that earlier comment that the availability of student loans has doubtlessly caused tuition rates to rise.  The temptation of bottomless coffers of cash is hard to resist.  I suspect it has resulted in higher costs for medical care submitted through Medicare/Medicaid.  I noted then that government-paid health care would cause medical costs to go even higher.

It isn’t that U.S. citizens aren’t sympathetic to people who are sick, especially to those severely injured in accidents through no fault of their own or born with congenital conditions.  In the 1990’s, government regulations established, among other things, requirements that health insurance carriers offer two of their most popular plans as Guaranteed Issue plans for those who could not get insurance elsewhere.  These plans were expensive, but they put the onus for paying on the policyholder and not the taxpayer.  It was a step, but, like other attempts at helping sick people get coverage, it didn’t address the cost of medical care. 

And neither would the next attempt.

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Gee, I Wonder Why Hooters Is Declaring Bankruptcy?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

BEFORE DEI HIRING…

AFTER…

and…

Huh. Well, I guess dining out habits in the U.S. have been evolving since the pandemic, as today’s news stories astutely observe…

Hooters, famous (or infamous) for a crude play on words and its mandatory attire for waitresses, is preparing for a potential bankruptcy filing as it works with creditors on a plan to restructure its operations, according to Bloomberg News.

What a surprise.

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On the Eric Adams Prosecution and the Sassoon Letter

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I admit it: I’ve been avoiding this large, stinky elephant in the ethics room because I have nothing good to say about any side of the controversy.

It’s all very depressing. The organization I belong to consisting of just about every legal ethics teacher, lawyer and consultant in the country immediately showed (again) how Trump Deranged and biased the membership is. After the resignation letter of February 12 from then S.D.N.Y. U.S Attorney Sassoon to U.S.AG Pam Bondi refusing to carry out the DOJ’s directive that she move to dismiss the then pending corruption indictment against NYC Mayor Eric Adams (Quote: “It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment….Such an exchange…violates common sense beliefs in the equal administration of justice, the [DOJ’s] Justice Manual [for federal prosecutors], and the Rules  of Professional Conduct.”), the listserv was immediately awash with comments like this one: “Once the rule of law cease, so does democracy. A client has the right to instruct an attorney; the attorney may seek to be relieved if the client’s directive is offensive. But what do we do when a “client”, or anyone, seeks to end democracy?”

Riiiight: not continuing with what looked a lot like a politically-motivated prosecution of Adams by the Biden Administration threatens democracy.

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Jeez, Somebody Tell Him!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I subscribe to the oxymoronically-named Ethics & Journalism newsletter. After the featured piece in today’s edition, I will be reconsidering that commitment.

Here is the beginning of the essay titled “Fostering a Culture of Newsroom Independence: How to fight anticipatory compliance,” authored by the director of this NYU project, Stephen J. Adler. Hold on to your head!

Media self-censorship, anticipatory compliance, capitulation, bending the knee. Whatever you call it, it represents one of the most insidious means by which people with power can squelch news reporting that doesn’t serve their interests. You don’t have to arrest or fire reporters—you just have to make them increasingly afraid that you will.

Donald Trump’s second term—and the ascendancy of billionaire press antagonists—has already created an environment in which journalists feel more pressure than ever to self-censor or soften their coverage to ensure that they stay on legally and politically safe ground. How does a reporter, or a newsroom full of them, guard against sheltering in such truth-killing safe harbors?

To some degree, long-standing newsroom ethical guidelines can help stiffen reporters’ spines. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics has it right: journalists should “deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors, or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.” I also like this from the Boston public media station WBUR:

“Decisions about what we cover, how we do our work, and what we report are made by our journalists. We are not influenced by those who provide WBUR with financial support.… We are not swayed in our journalistic mission by those in power or those who attempt to manipulate our journalism.’”

But even more important than adhering to ethics guidelines, I believe, is preserving the culture of journalistic independence that thrives at countless successful newsrooms and has shone at some of those now under the most pressure, such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and CBS News. Maintaining such a culture—and thus summoning the courage to practice independent journalism in the face of any threats—has been a hallmark of these institutions for generations….

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Ethics Hero: “Landman” Creator and Writer Taylor Sheridan

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Billy Bob Thornton star vehicle “Landman,” following the stressful life of a West Texas “landman” and operational executive for an independent oil company in West Texas, has a lot going for it, mostly Thornton, who is one of our most interesting and versatile actors. The Paramount streaming series is already better, in my view, then the last two oil dramas I watched, the over-rated “Giant” and the relentlessly unpleasant “There Will Be Blood,” in great part because as with all of his roles, Thornton brings a great deal of humor to the proceedings.

I have not finished the series’ first season (I sure hope there is a second), but I was struck by the long scene above in which Tommy Norris (that’s Billy Bob) gives a quick primer to his company’s attorney on the facile conventional wisdom of the anti-fossil fuel lobby. The rant begins (at the 57 second mark), as Tommy denies the “cleanness” of wind power, and he takes off from there. It was an instant classic that quickly went viral on social media: as soon as I heard it I knew I could find the speech on YouTube and resolved to post it today.

There are also a lot of rebuttals to the speech on line, and that’s great: the ethics point is that for once Hollywood isn’t stuffing smug 21st Century woke politics into its audience’s brains, but is presenting a dissenting analysis. More more amazing yet, this one comes from a series’ protagonist and an appealing one at that.

Taylor Sheridan, who created “Landman,” cast Thornton and wrote and directed the speech deserves thanks and credit for packaging a provocative point of view that is sure to spark debate. Debate is ethical. What isn’t ethical is cultural indoctrination, which is how Hollywood has mostly been approaching the oil issue for decades.

Not surprisingly, the Wikipedia entry linked above states that the series contains “misinformation about renewable energy… “exposed as common propaganda tropes by Big Oil.” This is why Wikipedia should be considered a member in excellent standing with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. If Democrats had won another term in the White House, we would probably see “Landman” forced to include a disclaimer on Tommy’s speech.

I Don’t Understand the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

My woke Facebook friends have been fulminating about evil President Trump causing the cancellation of a “Pride” performance at the Kennedy Center by the D.C. Gay Men’s Chorus because he fired most of the D.C. venue’s woke board and assumed the post of chairman himself. It turned out that the performance had been cancelled before the President turned his sites on the Center, which, as I noted here earlier, asked for its slap-down after its partisan and disrespectful treatment of Trump during his first term.

Never mind: some talking heads on CNN and MSNBC have been trying to blame that Toronto air crash on Trump, so this kerfuffle is just more Trump Derangement in action.

The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C, reacted to the cancellation by saying in a statement: “We believe in the power of music to educate and uplift, to foster love, understanding, and community, and we regret that this opportunity has been taken away. While we are saddened by the decision, we are committed to this work and to our mission of raising our voices for equality for all. We will continue to advocate for artistic expression that reflects the depth and diversity of our community and country. We will continue to sing and raise our voices for equality.”

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