Government & Politics

Ethics Dunce (Again): Georgetown University Law Center…and May I Add: KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

From Ethics Alarms, December 10, 2023…

Late yesterday,the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, resigned, and the school’s chairman of the board followed with his own resignation a couple of hours later. Magill was one of three elite college presidents who embarrassed themselves and their employers with offensive, legalistic answers to pointed questions from Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) regarding their school’s tolerance of anti-Semitism on their campus in the wake of the October Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, and their weak responses to demonstrations on their campuses that could fairly be called threatening to Jewish students.

UPenn’s situation became critical when alumnus Ross Stevens announced that he was withdrawing a gift worth around $100 million. That would be a significant loss even for Harvard, whose endowment exceeds the treasuries of many nations. The resignation immediately focused attention on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president of just a couple of months, whose responses to Stefanik’s withering cross-examination in the Congressional hearing were extremely similar to Magill’s. The resignation of all three women was called for in an unusual letter signed by 72 members of Congress, many of them Democrats.

I just received this message as a Georgetown University Law Center alumnus:

Dear Georgetown Law Alumni,

It gives me great pleasure to share with you that M. Elizabeth (Liz) Magill has been appointed as the next Executive Vice President and Dean of Georgetown University Law Center, beginning August 1, 2026. President Robert M. Groves’ announcement is linked here.

Professor Magill brings to Georgetown Law a wealth of experience leading some of our nation’s most prestigious universities and law schools, including serving as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Executive Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, and Dean of Stanford Law School. I am pleased to share that, in addition to her role as Executive Vice President and Dean, Professor Magill will join the Law Center as a tenured member of the faculty. And her Georgetown roots run deep—her father and three of her siblings are Georgetown graduates.

Professor Magill is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is an award-winning scholar of administrative and constitutional law whose research focuses on topics such as the separation of powers, standing, regulation, and judicial review. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Law Institute.

This is a critical time for the Law Center and the University. I am confident that Professor Magill is the right person to lead the Law Center into a new era marked by academic excellence, financial resilience, and national prominence. There will be many opportunities over the next several months for you to meet Professor Magill. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming her to Georgetown University and to the Law Center. 

Sincerely,

Joshua C. Teitelbaum
Interim Dean & Executive Vice President
David Belding Professor of Law

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Why No, I Didn’t Know That!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Free-lance journalist Michael Tracy pointed out on “X” that all of the “victims” who Rep. Jayapal demanded that Pam Bondi apologize to were adults at the time of their claimed victimization by Jeffrey Epstein. Tracy asked if any news organization bothered to mention that rather salient point, especially since the Left’s narrative connecting President Trump to Epstein rests on calling Trump a presumed “pedo”-by-association.

It seems the answer is no. I certainly assumed the hand-raising women at Bondi’s hearing were all sexually exploited as minors.

The Epstein obsession is such an Ethics Train Wreck, and such a dumb one my eye-balls hurt from rolling. If Democrats succeed in the mid-terms because of the duel mendacities of the Epstein innuendos and the even dumber “affordability” talking point (“How dare Trump not lower the prices our incompetence raised?”), I think it will be fair to say that the American public is no longer intelligent enough for a republic.

I recommend a conservatorship.

In an excellent Wall Street Journal piece (which I no longer can find) on what the Epstein files didn’t include, the author wrote that the news media and Democrats are focusing on Trump’s past denials that he ever knew or suspected what his fellow billionaire was doing, when what they should be focusing on was that he alone among the many names being exposed in the files “got the hell out of there,” as soon as Epstein’s teenage girls turned up.

But that wouldn’t be “advocacy journalism.”

The Fantasy Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I don’t want to dwell on the headline above from the Times, but this is just another example of how, as in democracy’s death of a thousand cuts, our journalists deceive, confuse and manipulate public opinion. They also think they are clever about it, just as they think they are smarter than they are.

“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet,” the Times piece begins. “The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.”

Well.

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Ethics Quiz: The I.C.E. Endorsement

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Sarai Jimenez, a special education teaching intern at in Pajaro Valley School District’s Watsonville, California-based MacQuiddy Elementary, endorsed the presence of I.C.E. officers in her town in a comment on Facebook last month.

“Yay!!! We need ICE in Watsonville!! It’s been getting out of hand,” Jimenez wrote, as you can see above. But the parents in Pajaro Valley Unified School District, where 84% of students are Hispanic and, given California’s sanctuary state aspirations, might belong to families with one or more illegal immigrants, considered Jimenez’s support for ICE….that is, enforcement of U.S. law…unconscionable. Many complained, and Jimenez was placed on leave from her job in Pajaro Valley School District. It appears that she will be fired, if she hasn’t been already.

“You can’t just tell the world how you feel and not expect repercussions from people because of how they feel about I.C.E.,” local parent Jorge Guerrero said. If I were awake completely, which I’m not, I would compose several alternate versions of this statement with provocative substitutes for “I.C.E.”

Jimenez tried to save her job by groveling a politician-style denial rather than an apology,“I’m sorry that the comment was taken out of context,” she told reporters. “But my actions speak so much louder than all those hateful bullies’ words.” The hateful bullies are the ones who bombarded her with threats and insults until she took down her Facebook page. “You are a shameful disgraceful disgusting woman,” one critic wrote.

Predictably, though apparently not by the interning teacher, the school administrators sided with the bullies if not their methods (although firing someone for supporting law enforcement is a lot more harmful than insulting her).

MacQuiddy Elementary Principal Sara Pearman said in a statement that Jimenez’s comment “does not reflect the values” of the school or district.

Hmmmm…

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

Is it ethical to fire Jimenez for expressing support for law enforcement officials doing their jobs?

I think this is a close call. Some points:

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Ethics Observations On Atty. Gen. Bondi’s Appearance Before The House Judiciary Committee

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I will stipulate here that Bondi is unethical, unprofessional, incompetent, and a hack attorney who was arguably the worst of Trump’s Cabinet appointments once Matt Gaetz withdrew. Nothing that occurred at today’s embarrassing (to everyone, including me) hearing altered any of that. Furthermore:

1. Being rude and confrontational to members of Congress is demeaning to our government, however much our terrible elected representatives deserve it. Bondi’s boss might enjoy a “fiery” hearing, but it is disgraceful and unnecessary. Being cool under fire is what Americans should expect from their top lawyer. If Democrats like Rep. Jayapal and Rep. Raskin want to act like hyper-partisan assholes as they so frequently do, the best way to expose them is by contrast.

2. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! CNN actually had the gall to write, “It seemed Bondi was playing to the “audience of one” — Trump. But that came potentially at the expense of appealing to an American public that really does want answers.” If the public “wants answers,” it is incumbent on Congress to run hearings that are substantive and involve genuine matters of concern, rather than throttle a contrived scandal that was supposed to embarrass President Trump but that has behaved more like a boomerang. The Democrats on the committee seemed to only be interested in “gotcha!” questions, attacking the President, and deflecting from their own President’s absolute inertia on the same matter they were criticizing Bondi for her lack of zeal regarding. Had the committee members delivered a fair and professional inquiry, or even attempted to hold one, CNN blaming Bondi for failing to sufficiently enlighten the public would be valid. But they didn’t, and it isn’t. The CNN commentary once again just proved again that the news media is interested in partisan advocacy above all else.

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Ethics Dunce and Unethical Quote of the Week: John Kasich

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I confess: there was a time when I considered supporting John Kasich to be the 2016 GOP nominee for President (anyone but Trump…well, okay, and Dr. Ben Carson). Then I started listening to him. After he wiped out in the primaries, Kasich became a committed NeverTrump fanatic like the revolting Lincoln Project scamsters, left politics after being a wishy-washy Governor of Ohio, and then began being an anti-Trump “contributor” on Fox News, then CNN, NBC and MSNBC (the tell: he’s a liar) during the first Trump administration.

Kasich enthusiasticly supported Joe Biden in 2020, saying, in an endorsement that has aged as well as Walter Donovan in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”..

….“I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat. They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that because I know the measure of the man. It’s reasonable, faithful, respectful.”

The tell: Kasich is an idiot.

This diagnosis was proven spectacularly correct when Kasich tweeted, following the NFL’s cynical Bad Bunny halftime show:

“Love the halftime show which celebrates the wonderful Latino culture. Great pick and great show. Bad Bunny hit a grand slam home run!”

Apparently the ” wonderful Latino culture” is celebrated with lyrics like these…

…which Kasich either sat there getting aroused by because he’s a dirty old man, or had no freaking idea what Latinos were hearing. I tend to think that he didn’t even watch the half-time show but defended it anyway because Kasich hates Trump to pieces, so he has done so often in the past decade, Kasich proceeded to make a fool of himself.

There are some admirable aspects to Hispanic culture indeed, like devotion to family, entrepreneurism,a strong work ethics and religious faith, but twerking and a crotch obsession arenot among them. Kasich praised Bud Bunny because Trump Derangement has eaten his brain, such as it was.

Oh…and the tweet also proves Kasich is a dork. Who but a dork uses a baseball term to describe a Super Bowl half-time show?

Gee, Who Could Have Ever Predicted That Marijuana Use Would Become a Problem? Me, For One…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I really try not to get emotional over ethics stories, but the current Editorial Board declaration in the New York Times headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem” makes me want to run screaming naked into Route 395.

The U.S. had a marijuana problem a half century ago, when an earlier wave of The Great Stupid washed over the land and all manner of important lessons a healthy and functioning society needed to remember and institutionalize were deliberately tossed away because a lot of passionate, anti-establishment assholes were sure that they knew better than anyone “over 30.” I fought this destructive development from college, when I watched one of my room mates suffer short term memory loss from getting stoned morning and night; in law school, when the student running my lightboard for a production of “Iolanthe” erased all the light cues that we had taken six hours to set up because he was higher than the moons of Jupiter, all the way onto this blog. I put up with the mockery of classmates and dorm mates over the fact that I would not “try” pot (“It’s illegal” wasn’t a winning argument, so I settled on “It’s stupid and destructive.”). I drew a line in the sand with my addiction-prone wife, a former pot-head who was already an alcoholic. My fellow lawyers quickly learned not to get stoned around me because they knew I regarded buying and selling pot when it was illegal grounds for reporting them to bar authorities and respected my integrity enough to have reasonable doubts that I might not pretend that I didn’t know what I knew.

I carried the battle onto Ethics Alarms as the relentless pro-stoner propaganda was heading to victory, resulting in the legalization of the drug, the inevitable result of which the assholes who edit the New York Times have the gall now to tell us “Oopsie!” about after being a significant part of the mob mentality that inflicted it on the public, probably forever.

Back in 2011, I drafted a post that I never finished titled, “To My Friends the Pot-Heads: I Know. I’ve Heard It All Before.” It began:

“I take a deep breath every time I feel it necessary to wade into the morass of the Big Ethical Controversies, because I know it invites long and fruitless debates with entrenched culture warriors with agendas, ossified opinions, and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. War, abortion, religion, prostitution, drugs, torture, gay marriage…there are a lot of them, and all are marked by a large mass of people who have decided that they are right about the issue, and anyone disagreeing with them is stupid, evil, biased, or all three. Contrary to what a goodly proportion of commenters here will write whichever position I take, I approach all of these issues and others exactly the same way. I look at the differing opinions on the matter from respectable sources, examine the research, if it is relevant, examine lessons of history and the signals from American culture, consider personal experience if any, and apply various ethical systems to an analysis. No ethical system works equally well on all problems, and while I generally dislike absolutist reasoning and prefer a utilitarian approach, sometimes this will vary according to a hierarchy of ethical priorities as I understand and align them. Am I always right? Of course not. In many of these issues, there is no right, or right is so unsatisfactory—due to the unpleasant encroachment of reality— that I understand and respect the refusal of some to accept it. There are some of these mega-issues where I am particularly confident of my position, usually because I have never heard a persuasive argument on the other side that wasn’t built on rationalizations or abstract principles divorced from real world considerations. My conviction that same-sex marriage should be a basic human right is in this category. So is my opposition, on ethical grounds, for legalizing recreational drugs.”

Instead of finishing and posting that essay, I posted this one, which used as a departure point a Sunday ABC News “Great Debate” on hot-point issues of the period featuring conservatives Rep. Paul Ryan and columnist George Will against Democratic and gay Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former communist Labor Secretary Robert Reich. [Looking back, it is interesting how all four of these men went on to show their dearth of character and integrity. Ryan proved to be a spineless weenie, rising to Speaker of the House but never having the guts to fight for the conservative principles he supposedly championed. Frank never accepted responsibility for the 2008 crash his insistence on loosening mortgage lending practices helped seed, preferring to blame Bush because he knew the biased news media would back him up. Will disgraced himself by abandoning the principles he built his career on in order to register his disgust that a vulgarian like Donald Trump would dare to become President. Reich was already a far left demagogue, so at least his later conduct wasn’t a departure. I wrote in part,

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Thinks Mayor Brandon Johnson Is Brilliant. I Think He’s an Unethical Lying Idiot…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald didn’t know Chicago’s incompetent and dishonest Democratic mayor (the latest one, Brandon Johnson), but nonetheless: anyone who witnessed Johnson’s recent example of holding two opposed ideas in what he optimistically calls his mind must conclude that 1) Johnson is far from brilliant, being an advocate of the “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts” school of logic; 2) the Mayor believes that Democrats are dummies, which on the topic at hand, illegal immigration and law enforcement, is a good bet, and 3) Fitzgerald wasn’t all that swift either.

Mayor Brandon Johnson went on MSNOW’s “The Weekend” yesterday to opine on President Trump’s remarks to reporters at the White House that Trump’s actions had lowered crime in the Windy City. “We just had numbers from Chicago where Chicago crime has gone down pretty good,” the President said, ungrammatically. Wrong, said Johnson. “Where ICE and federal agents were present, we actually saw an increase in violence. In other words, the tension and the chaos that federal agents bring to cities in America, it actually is counter-productive.” 

Then, seconds later, he said, “Yes, we saw a 30 % reduction in homicides, shooting, shooting victims, all down.”

Johnson did not explain that the so-called increase in violence due to I.C.E. being present was entirely due to illegal interference with and attacks against the federal immigration officers from Chicagoans interfering with law enforcement as a result of being incited by elected officials like Illinois Governor Pritzger and others calling I.C.E agents Nazis, Gestapo, and “occupiers.” Johnson had claimed Trump “literally declared war on American cities.” Literally! Ah, how I remember POTUS signing that declaration of war in the Oval Office….

The likelihood that removing criminal illegal aliens from Johnson’s “sanctuary city” while clearly sending a message that the jig was up, in stark contrast to the previous administration’s policies, had something to do with the reduction in violent crime never occurred to the Mayor. Yet in 2024, Chicago earned the title of America’s homicide leader for the 13th year in a row. 

Naturally, nobody at NSNOW cared to point out that Johnson’s argument was self-refuting, or even ask him if he was a Fitzgerald fan. And so they all beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past…

The N.F.L. Is Helping Chuck Klosterman’s Prediction Come True [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

I was going to get this up before the Super Bowl, but it turns out that the issue was further crystalized by the game itself. As happens approximately 50% of the time with this annual spectacle, the game was a yawn, and much of the news coming out of the contest involved the NFL’s deliberate transformation of what was once considered a unifying family cultural event, like Fourth of July fireworks, into a partisan, progressive statement about how America sucks, with expensive TV ads extolling capitalism and patriotism at the same time. That’s message whiplash, and ethically irresponsible.

As the New York Times explained, without criticism, the NFL took a hard turn Left when it put Barack Obama pal Jay-Z, the rap star and impresario, in charge of the Super Bowl halftime show after the 2018 Super Bowl had triggered anger from fans over players “taking a knee” during the National Anthem. The Times, spinning as usual, says that the kneeling was intended to “draw attention to police brutality and social justice issues.”

As Ethics Alarms pointed out at the time, none of the kneelers, including its cynical originator, over-the-hill quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ever explained coherently what they were kneeling about. What “police brutality”? Oh, you know, Mike Brown, whom Black Lives Matters still says was “murdered” on its website. What social justice issues? Oh, you know: it’s time for white people to be discriminated against to make up for slavery. The left-turn was a greed-induced mass virtue signal to blacks, clueless young fans, and Democrats. (It helped that President Trump vociferously attacked Kaepernick and Co., so the kneeling appealed to the Trump Deranged too. (See Dissonance Scale, Cognitive)

The Times:

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Ethics Observations on the President’s Response to His Obamas-As-Apes Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 REPORTER: “Mr. President, you frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted is on your social media.”

 PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I know what’s going on a hell of a lot better than you do! You don’t know what’s going on! I know what’s going on.  No, Joe Biden didn’t have a clue, but we know everything. And when you look at what’s happening with our economy, think of it, we’re way years ahead of schedule. We have thousands and thousands of businesses being built right now, so Joe Biden had no clue. If Joe Biden were elected or if Kamala were elected, we wouldn’t have country right now. We won the election because of minority voters.”

 REPORTER: “Does this post maybe hurt Republicans with, you know, Black voters after the…”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You know, I was, look, we did criminal justice reform. I did the historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. Nobody has been, and that’s why I got a tremendous, the highest vote with male Black voters that they’ve seen in many, many decades. I’ve done great with them. Black voters have been great to me. I’ve been great them. Black voters has been great me. I’ve been great to them.  And I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned. We have — I’ve had a great relationship. Think of what I’ve done. Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could do it. Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could do. Clinton couldn’t. They actually went the other way. They went into a very bad thing for African American people, Black people. They went to a — they did very bad things. I did very good things. But criminal justice reform, and then I funded the universities, which nobody else was willing to do. They were going every year, they’d come back to Washington and they’d be begging for money, begging. I got to be friendly with some of the heads of the schools and they would come back and they would literally tell me they’re forcing us to beg. I’m the one that got them long-term financing and more than they were looking for.  So there’s nobody that’s done more. And I think maybe more than anything else was criminal justice reform. They’ve been trying to get it for years. And I’m the one that got it done, so nobody can tell me about that.”

 “That somebody posts, the staffer posts, you know, posts. And I knew it was all about, if you take a look at that, and see the whole thing, it was a small section at the very end. But that was about fraudulent elections, which we have, a lot of them. We’re gonna get it stopped. And I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on.”

Observations:

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