Government & Politics

The Congressional Black Caucus Walkout: Racial Bias, and Nothing But

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Of course, they would also be staging a walk-out if a white AG was being held in contempt.

The Congressional Black Caucus  plotted to walk out of Thursday’s contempt of Congress vote regarding Attorney General Eric Holder’s stonewalling regarding legitimate oversight of the deadly Fast and Furious fiasco, and did, taking most of the other Democrats along. In so doing, the CBC, as if there was any doubt, unequivocally demonstrated its virulent racial bias, which interferes with its ability to discharge its duties in a fair, honest and legitimate matter.

The CBC had circulated a letter explaining its supposed rationale, which oddly manages never to mention that Eric Holder is African American. Yet it is unimaginable that the Congressional Black Caucus would stage a walk-out if Holder was the white Attorney General appointed by a white President. This is politics, but it is also dishonesty and naked tribalism. It should not be, pardon the expression, whitewashed, or allowed to proceed without calling it what it is—racial bias in the halls of Congress, where none belongs.

Here is the offensive and disingenuous letter being circulated by the CBC—with some commentary by me in brackets: Continue reading →

The Supreme Court Upholds The Individual Mandate and Obamacare: The Ethics Opinion

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

This morning the Supreme Court announced its decision upholding the key provision in the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a Obamacare. It is apparently a huge and complex decision, and is now available in text form online here.

The political and legal analysis will be coming soon from others far more qualified than I [UPDATE: The legal dissections have begun, and you can’t do better than to start here] , and while I am deeply interested in them, that’s not my job. I won’t be able to read the opinions and the various concurring opinions and dissents, not to mention digest them, for quite a while, but some ethical verdicts are already evident from what I do know: Continue reading →

A Trivial But Vivid Case Study In Unethical Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Wait…did we leave out something from that story?”

Yes, I know: it’s another Boston baseball story (“Yoooouk!”), and I’m sure there are similar stories from other cities. And yes, I know that the journalists at issue are sports writers, which have traditionally been to journalism what a Big Mac is to gourmet cuisine. Nonetheless, this is an instance where some members of the Boston media have gone out of their way to misrepresent the facts of a story specifically to impugn the character of an innocent athlete and to rile up people  –in this case, Boston Red Sox fans, who often mutate into something far scarier than “people”—who depend on them for information, and who can be counted upon to over-react to everything.

Red Sox starting pitcher Clay Buchholtz recently ended up in the hospital and on the disabled list with a dangerous episode of internal bleeding. After a few days he was released, weak and medicated, and told that he could resume normal activities immediately. Baseball needed to wait a bit longer, understandably, and anyway, he isn’t eligible to play in a game for two weeks. Last night, he attended an event that he had committed to attend before his medical problem, a charity event to raise money for the Greg Hill Foundation. Lest there be any question, this is a good thing, and noble. Buchholtz could have begged off, for he was just hospitalized and surely doesn’t feel great, but he didn’t, choosing instead to assist a group that raises funds to help local families touched by tragedy.

And here is how this is being covered by some of the Boston sports media: Continue reading →

Jay Carney: How to Destroy Your Credibility Pointlessly

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I have great sympathy for White House spokespeople like Jay Carney. It is almost impossible to avoid coming off as a weasel. You have to face the press and fend off questions, never revealing more than the White House chooses to reveal, seldom being fully candid, always being governed by talking points. Of course, being in such a role for an Administration that promised, in the person of its leader, to be transparent above all others shouldn’t be quite so hard, but we all know that this promise lies molding in the Trash Heap of Cynicism, buried by Guantanamo Bay, the  waivers of conflicts for lobbyists, the Obama Super-Pac, and especially the recent assertion of executive privilege. Eventually all Presidential spokesmen reach the point where they are barely believed and no longer trusted, which is all the more reason not to rush the process and savage one’s credibility by uttering stupid and pointless lies that are both unbelievable but also easily disproved. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: DC Radio Talk Show Host Chris Plante

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“(MSNBC host) Chris Hayes is like (MSNBC host) Rachel Maddow, but with a smaller penis.”

—-WMAL syndicated conservative radio talk show host Chris Plante, riffing on the anti-Fox MSNBC’s new star, Chris Hayes.

Gee, Chris, do you REALLY want to emulate Bill Maher?

As someone who often talks extemporaneously for a living, and who has slammed both legs up to the hip into my mouth more than once, I am genuinely sympathetic to the perils faced by radio and TV talk show hosts who have to be edgy, insightful and witty for three hours a day without a script, knowing that words, once out of their mouths, are irretrievable, and can lead to career meltdowns with the speed of Chernobyl. It’s a tough job that is akin to walking a high wire over a pit of crocodiles, and I usually have great sympathy for those who fall.

But there is no excuse for this. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Glenn Logan scores the Comment of the Day with his answer to the questions I posed in my open letter to Colbert King, the anti-corruption Washington Post columnist who nonetheless regards Congress’s inquiry into a possible Fast and Furious cover-up as trivial. He also penned a worthy candidate for ethics quote of the week: watch for the last sentence, which I bolded. Love it, Glenn!

I’ll have some additions to Glenn’s thoughts at the end; meanwhile, here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King.” Continue reading →

“Obamaphone” Paranoia

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Oh NO!!! It’s OBAMAPHONES!!!!”

The fevered delusions of the Rapid Right are even more wacky than the corresponding hallucinations of the Angry Left, and I can only stomach a limited dose of either until my mind shuts down and I find myself wanting to watch back episodes of “My Little Pony.” The recent hysterical column by bona fide Tea Party wingnut Gina Loudon, however, held special interest for me, first, because it is such a wonderful example of partisan paranoia gone to Cloud Cuckoo Land, and second, because it singles out Ethics Alarms. I’m so honored.

Let me try to explain this without giggling. There is a federal program that provides discounts on basic cell phone service to the indigent under certain conditions, and it has been around since the Clinton Administration. Some Tea Party zealots got the idea that the phones were an Obama Administration hand-out, and spread the rumor while calling them “Obamaphones.” Rush Limbaugh picked up the charge, and turned it into a rant on his radio show, saying… Continue reading →

Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Dear Colbert King…

Dear Mr. King:

I am writing to see if you can help me understand your attitude toward the Fast and Furious scandal, as laid out in your recent weekly column in the Washington Post.

I can’t bring myself to make you an Ethics Dunce, because few journalists in any community have led such a relentless and powerful crusade against unethical government and corrupt public officials. Your columns have eloquently condemned the culture of corruption that has crippled the District of Columbia, and rallied the indignation and activism of citizens against the legacy of Marion Barry and the tolerance of public betrayal that he sowed and nurtured. You have cataloged, in shocking detail, the ethical rot that has infested the nation’s Capital, marked by lawlessness, cronyism, incompetence and greed. I respect you. I trust you. I think of you as the most credible and objective media advocate for good government that I know.

So I need to understand why you think it is fair and appropriate to call Rep. Issa a “devil” for insisting on transparency, honesty, accountability, and transparency from Attorney General Holder regarding the Fast and Furious fiasco, which left one American and untold Mexicans dead. It is the duty of Congress to exercise oversight over the U.S. government, and if there was ever an episode demanding oversight, this was it. The U.S. Department of Justice allowed the law to be broken, permitted dangerous automatic weapons to cross the border into Mexico and arm the most dangerous thugs in that country (without receiving the permission of Mexico or informing it), and then lost control of both the scheme and the weapons, with fatal results. You always write about maintaining the trust of the public in Washington, D. C. What is more fatal to trust than a law enforcement agency that intentionally allows laws to be broken without accountability? Don’t you believe that public trust in a nation’s Justice Department, its agents, policymakers and leadership is as important as public trust in the D.C. City Council? If you do, why is Issa, in your words, “engaging in cheap political opportunism” by insisting, along with others, such as the scrupulously fair Sen. Grassley, that Holder explain what happened, who was responsible, and what measures have been taken to make sure such an outrageous operation never happens again—beginning with, <gasp!>, firing somebody? Continue reading →

Don’t Tell Us The Public “Doesn’t Care” About Incompetence and Corruption. It Has to Care.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The Washington Post broke the ethics story of the weekend, documenting a blatant conflict of interest on Capitol Hill that has many members of Congress making decisions on legislation directly affecting companies in their stock portfolios, and trading the stock contemporaneously with those decisions.

Based on the depressing dialogue on the Sunday public affairs shows regarding the Fast and Furious scandal—-especially the dialogue issuing from panelists who have obviously received and memorized received the Obama Administration and Democratic Party talking points—-I would assume that the American people can’t be bothered with this matter, and think it is a waste of time. After all, according to panelist after panelist who was either a mainstream media pundit or an Obama surrogate, all the American people care about is the economy and jobs. The fact that the U.S. Justice Department may be run by incompetents and law-breakers—who cares? The fact that nobody gets fired for approving a policy that breaks laws and gets innocent people killed—so what? The American people are, we are told, one-track mind morons, unable to focus on more than one problem at a time, and incapable of seeing the interrelations between problems. I wonder–might the fact that Congress may be corrupt and the Executive Branch, including Justice, may be irresponsible and inept have any bearing on the ability of the government to oversee the economy effectively? Don’t be silly, former New Mexico Governor and Clinton acolyte Bill Richardson told us yesterday. The public isn’t that sophisticated. The public doesn’t care about who’s cheating, who’s breaking the law and who’s incompetent! The people only want to talk about jobs! So, apparently, that is all the journalists and pundits should talk about, and all that policymakers should spend their time on.

No wonder none of those Sunday shows spent any time on this Post front page story: Continue reading →

The 77% Lie: Just Because a False Statistic Is Useful and Traditional Doesn’t Make It Less Unethical To Keep Using It.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Sure, lie to us, Mr. President. As long as its for a good cause.

In 2000, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw used the statistic that “women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar men receive for the same work” in a question to Joe Lieberman during the Vice Presidential candidates debate, prompting me to turn or the TV and write a letter to CNN. The statistic had long been debunked as misleading and inaccurate for years by every objective observer who examined it. The unspoken assumption that figure is meant to convey is that this supposed gap reflects sexism in the workplace. It dates from the early days of NOW and the feminist push for the Equal Rights Amendment, an activist-concocted lie, like many of the global warming “facts” mouthed by Al Gore, designed to simplify a complex phenomenon into something unequivocally persuasive. For Shaw, a journalist, to repeat a false and misleading statistic as fact in a nationally televised debate was inexcusable, and irresponsible journalism.

Did I mention that this was in 2000?

The 77% stat is one of my two pet fake statistics (the other being the statement that 50% of all U.S. marriages end in divorce, used by culture warriors on both the left and right), and I have vowed not to let either pass without a red flag until I either drop dead or people stop lying. So I don’t care to hear, thank you, about how I’m picking on the President Obama when Mitt Romney has been using some misleading facts too. I know he has. But when a President of the United States whose supporters laud as a genius and scholar, and who pledged not to mislead the American people promotes his campaign with a widely publicized statistic that he has to know misinforms the public, I believe that’s alarming, insulting, and infuriating.  The fact that Democrats and feminists have been using the same lie for over three decades doesn’t make it less offensive, but more. Continue reading →