Government & Politics

Addendum To “Return of the Faithless Legislator”: What If…?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m hesitant to put this in print, but the idea has kept me awake much of the night. I meant to mention the idea in yesterday’s post about state legislators flipping their party affiliations after an election, but but, as too often happens, I was rushing because I had other responsibilities to fulfill and left it out.

I wouldn’t call this post an Ethics Quiz; I’d say it’s a thought experiment. Here it is:

What if Donald Trump either announced that he was no longer a Republican, or threatened to do so?

There is nothing stopping him from switching parties, or declaring that he is President under the banner of his own party, whether he called it “MAGA” or something else. The Constitution didn’t have a word about parties, and the Founders generally thought they were something to avoid. Trump could even cloak his radical decision in the spirit of the Founders. “I am not a President for Republicans or Democrats, but for all Americans!” he could say in the announcement, a national address. What would happen? The mind boggles, or at least mine does. Here are some thoughts and questions…

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Final 2024 Ethics Round-Up, 12/29/24: Of Jawbreakers, ‘Thinflation,’ Weasel Words and Prison Sex

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(You’re going to have to wait until the end to learn who that is in the photo above….)

I’ve been trying to figure out an ethics angle for the best news story I saw today; the best I can come up with is “life incompetence.” The headline was “Woman Breaks Jaw After Biting into Jawbreaker Candy.” Apparently Canadian student Javeria Wasim wondered if someone could bite through a giant jawbreaker, and took it on as a challeng. She barely made a dent in the candy when she felt a pop followed by piercing pain in her lower jaw. Yup, it was a jawbreaker, all right! She had fractured her mandible in two places and also loosened her top and lower front teeth. Now her jaw is wired shut.

1. You’ve noticed “shrinkflation,” but have you picked up on ‘thinflation’? It appears that clothing manufacturers are using thinner, lighter fabric for such staples as T-shirts and chinos. “Pretty much everything is lighter and thinner,” Sean Cormier, a professor of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told Slate. He said chinos that used to weigh 8 ounces per square yard of fabric might be only 6 ounces today.

“It’s a trend in the industry, and not one that’s sustainable, because obviously the thinner the garment, it’s not going to last as long,” Cormier says. Two decades ago a T-shirt might have weighed 8 to 10 ounces per square yard of fabric. Today, experts report, it’s half that. Clothing doesn’t last as long as it used to, fabrics are generally thinner, and the quality of clothing has decreased. Not the prices, however. The garments also don’t have as much “covering power,” meaning that not only wet T-shirts but the dry ones too are revealing.

2. Apparently some people have a problem with this statement. Not me! An Illinois homeowner’s surveillance camera detected motion on the side of the home and he spotted two masked men. After instructing his wife to seek cover, he grabbed his gun. Then he shot shot and killed Jorge Nestevan Flores-Toledo, a 27-year-old from Mexico with a long criminal record. The second man, an illegal immigrant, aka. “a visitor” skedaddled but was tracked down by K9 dogs and arrested a few blocks away. Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said, in describing the incident, “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.” I don’t see why you shouldn’t expect to be shot when you want to break into anyone’s home in any state.

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Oh No, Not This Again: Return of the Faithless Legislator

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Broward County Rep. Hillary Cassel announced yesterday that she will leave the Democratic Party and join the GOP, becoming the second state lawmaker to do so this month. Hillsborough County Rep. Susan Valdés also announced this month that she had joined the Republicans.

Ethics Alarms has covered, and deplored, this behavior before. Doing what Cassel and Valdés have done is unethical, and the identities of the political parties involved don’t matter. By doing this, the two women have committed a fraud on the electorate. Democrats voted for them based in part on their status as members of their party. Their election victories were achieved by misrepresentation. Cassel, ran unopposed for her second term in November; if she had flipped before the election in a timely fashion, she may well have had opposition. Her rationalization for this unethical reversal, as posted on “X”:

Aww, that’s nice. The ethical way to handle a sudden epiphany when one has been elected by the partisans of one party and now suddenly wants to join the opposition is to resign, and run again under the new banner so voters have not been deceived and know who and what they are voting for. This was how former Texas U.S. Senator Phil Gramm handled the problem when he changed parties from Democrat to Republican as a Congressman. He resigned, then ran for his vacated seat and won again. Perfect.

As for the Florida Republicans, good luck with these two converts. They are as trustworthy as the husband who marries the second wife he was cheating with during the first marriage.

In a Fascinating Though Risky Experiment, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul Decides To Test If Anything Can Make Voters Reject The Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I confess, I don’t know what to call this post, how to define NY Gov. Kathy Hochul at this point, or how to explain American citizens who would put up with her.

She’s had quite an exciting December. On the same day and just two hours after a psychopathic illegal immigrant set a sleeping woman on fire in a New York City subway train, Hochel sent out this…

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 16: Those Harris-Walz Bitter-Ender Lawn Signs

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are still a lot of Harris-Walz lawn signs up in my neighborhood. I find the one above, the “obviously” sign, especially obnoxious, and I know the nice people who have been displaying that thing now for almost four months. I am trying mightily not to think, “What jerks these people are,” even though they brought me some leftover taco fixings right after my wife died.

I remember a lot of bitter-enders keeping their Gore-Lieberman lawn signs and bumper stickers displayed in 2000 after the Great Hanging Chad Recount and Gore’s appropriate (if short-lived) concession. That was also obnoxious, though at least somewhat understandable given the false narrative being hammered at by the biased left wing news media that Gore had really won the popular vote in Florida and that a partisan Supreme Court had unethically handed the Republicans the Presidency. But today’s out-of-date signs, apparently aiming at virtue-signaling to like-minded deluded progressives, have no plausible justification whatsoever. And what virtues do they think a sign like that signals?

When I saw the one above this morning walking Spuds around my mostly “blue” Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood, my mind immediately flashed to an entry yesterday on The New Neo’s blog, “What was Kamala thinking?” The post began by quoting this story:

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien….discussed his union’s historic decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in nearly 30 years. O’Brien said Harris finally agreed to sit with the Teasmsters for a roundtable after President Biden dropped out of the race, just to only answer a quarter of their 16 questions. Other candidates, including Trump, answered them all. “On the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me — ‘This will be the last question.’ And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time it was going to end,” O’Brien told [Tucker] Carlson. “And her declaration on the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ he recalled.”

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Ken Wells

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“So imagine, instead of embracing the Great Satan narrative, we covered Trump—warts and all—as an extraordinary American political phenomenon perhaps not seen since the populist presidency of Andrew Jackson. Do not mistake this as a call to absolve Trump of any actual wrongdoing or to go soft on the reporting. Instead it is a plea to instill some sense of balance and fairness in the coverage. Surely, I’m not alone in believing this approach would have given readers and listeners a far more nuanced and valuable view of the American mood and Trump’s appeal and staying power—and perhaps helped to stanch the public’s corrosive loss of trust in our craft.  And at any rate, if the lopsided coverage of Trump was, in fact, a strategy to destroy him, well, it’s proved a huge flop. Trump won. Much of the media was or should be embarrassed.”

—–Retired Wall Street Journal editor Ken Wells in A Retro Proposal to Restore The Public’s Trust in Media,” his guest column in “Ethics and Journalism.”

The “retro proposal”? Journalists have become “blinded by their inability—or worse, unwillingness—to see past their biases. This is not journalism. It’s propagandism.” Therefore, he says, “I invite journalists to re-embrace our agnostic roots. We need to return to being the adults in the room, unabashedly reaffirm our role as the honest broker. No political party, business interest, government entity or activist group owns the truth. Everybody has a motive and an agenda, sources and leakers especially. Truth-tellers can sometimes lie and liars can sometimes tell the truth. Our job is to sort through the noise and bickering, the claims and counter-claims, the data and the chaff, to parse issues honestly without regard to whom it may offend or please or what the dominant narrative insists upon.”

I think Wells means what used to be called ethical, responsible journalism. Gee, what a concept!

Read it all, but here are a few more excerpts from an excellent essay:

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

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There have been three Crocketts elected to Congress in U.S. history (one of theme was Davy), and to say that the current Crockett, Jasmine, is the worst pf the trio and a blight on both the House of Representatives and the House of Crockett is an understatement.

In fairness to Matt Gaetz, I need to catch Ethics Alarms up on one of the most revolting members of Congress on the other side of the aisle, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx), a proud Dunning-Kruger victim, one of those people with a law degree who is under the delusion that critical thinking skills come with a J.D. I don’t know how she got admitted to law school and I don’t know how she graduated, but few members of Congress have said so many offensive and stupid things in so short a period time: she only was elected in 2022.

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The Matt Gaetz Ethics Committee Report

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The House Ethics Committee report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz was released today and concluded that there was “substantial evidence” that the recently resigned Florida Congressman paid many women, including at least one minor, to have sex with him, in addition to his likely violating House Rules and other standards of conduct “prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.” The 37-page Committee Report is here. Read it and weep, as the saying goes.

Gaetz is clearly what is technically called “a sleazeball,” but we knew that, didn’t we? I found it particularly notable that he wasn’t even defended by his own party, which is what we usually see in the “dissents” in such ethics reports. Gaetz’s defenders on the committee only objected to the report being released despite its subject’s leaving the House, which is not the typical course but is not unprecedented either. The report’s dissenters even goes to the trouble of admitting that they have no objections to the report’s conclusions.

The report was published in full by the House Ethics Committee on Monday morning after the panel secretly voted earlier this month to release it. Gaetz, was investigated for four years by the committee over various allegations.

Of course Gaetz has denied doing anything illegal, while admitting that he was just a wild and crazy guy in his younger days. Lying is small change for someone who has engaged in the conduct described in the report. It does appear that the statutory rape episode was the result of him not knowing how old his sex partner was, which is understandable since he appears to have run through sex partners like they were Tic-Tacs. The committee’s report found that Gaetz had also engaged in more typical ethics violations like accepting gifts in “excess of permissible amounts,” including a trip to the Bahamas in 2018. Even then he “engaged in sexual activity” with at least four women on the trip, giving them money as “gifts.”

The report also alleges that there was “sufficient evidence of Representative Gaetz’s intent to derail the investigation.”

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Post Script To “Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the previous post I wrote,

“I am sure someone will do research into who the order has spared, and we will see other multiple murderers, people who killed without remorse and with extreme cruelty, vicious psychopaths who killed for the fun of it, or who murdered children, or who slaughtered their victims after rape or torture. These don’t warrant executions, Biden says on behalf of the Wonderful Woke who refuse to acknowledge that there is a point where an individual has forfeited the benefits of civilization, but the single factor of “hate” elevates murder from really, really bad to intolerable.”

No sooner had I posted than Not The Bee posted exactly what I expected; it popped up in my email, in fact. Among those the President’s mass commutation today saves from the fate they all richly deserve:

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Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As was anticipated after reports that were issued over the weekend, “President Joe Biden announced” today that he has commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers, thus taking them off federal death row. They will now serve out life sentences in prison, being housed, fed, given medical attention and more at taxpayer expense. This was done deliberately to foil the announced intention of President-elect Donald Trump to carry out the verdicts of juries and the courts.

“Biden’s statement”—this is in quotation marks because he didn’t write it, probably doesn’t understand it and quite possibly never read it or approved it—reads,

“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss. But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Ethics observations:

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