Government & Politics

Well, I Think This Definitively Answers Any Lingering Questions About the Competence and Critical Thinking Skills of the Nation’s Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

A Morning Consult poll released this week reports that 34 % of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday’s shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, and less than half, 45 %, agreed that the conspiracy theory is not credible at all.

Be proud, Democrats!

You can read here about various theories, reasons and comparisons regarding this idiocy: I really don’t care. I know idiots when I see them. This tells us that less than half of all registered Democrats have the critical thinking skills of the average meat loaf.

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Ethics Hero: Jack Black

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I took a while to research this story before awarding Black, an actor/comic/ musician with a reputation for being a genuinely good guy, an EA Ethics Hero designation. After checking various sources, I am now persuaded that he deserves it.

Black has apparently made enough money as a movie actor that, like Kevin Bacon, Gwyneth Paltrow and a few others, he can indulge his musical inclinations and modest talents and get people to pay to see him performing with a band. That would be Tenacious D, a comedy-rock duo Jack Black shares with Kyle Gass. Tenacious D was in Sydney as part of a tour, and Black brought out a cake at the ICC Sydney Theater on Sunday to celebrate Gass’s 64th birthday. He asked Gass to “make a wish,” and Gass said, “Don’t miss Trump next time!”

The video of the crack went viral. Black, who appeared to laugh at the line (he’s been featured at Biden fundraisers), had a statement posted on social media two days later saying he “was blindsided by what was said at the show,” and that he “would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form.”

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More Weird Tales of The Great Stupid: Post-Debate/Post-Assassination Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

It is astounding what obvious garbage one can hear and read officials, journalists, pundits, activists and academics state in public for popular consumption these days…

1. In an interview shortly after her Secret Service failed its mission and disgraced itself, Kimberly Cheatle actually said that one of her top priorities was to attract more diverse applicants to the agency.

Ethics Note: The interviewer, a standard issue hack, naturally didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question: “Why is diversity a priority at all in an agency with the assignment of the Secret Service? Who cares what gender, ethnicity or color the agent is who saves the life of a President? Why does it matter? If every agent was a 6’4″ black man who can run a 4 minute mile, dead-lift 400 pounds, score 160 on an IQ test and shoot a wing off a fruit fly at 300 yards, why would the director feel that isn’t an ideal force for the job her agency is committed to do?”

Her only priority should be ensuring that the Secret Service has competent and well-trained agents, and she’s failed at that.

2. Kamala Harris said that J.D. Vance was picked to be a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s “extreme agenda” and that “he will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country. If elected, he will help implement the extreme Project 2025 plan for a second Trump term.”

Ethics Note: One would think that Harris, having been Vice-President, might be aware that the VP has no power to “rubber stamp” or even help implement anything. Every Vice-President is completely loyal to the man who chose them as #2: I can find no example in history of a Vice-President not working, for whatever good it does, to accomplish the President’s polices. (I don’t count Pence refusing to try to stall the 2020 election certification, which was the equivalent of Trump asking him to fly to Jupiter by flapping his arms.) Meanwhile, Harris, as a VP who actively deceived the public—you know, our country?— regarding Biden’s fitness to serve is ethically estopped from complaining that anyone else might put loyalty to the President over duty to country, especially a Marine like Vance.

“Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong,” Harris told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, a Jumbo for the ages.

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Today’s “Nah There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” (Or “Nah, The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want to Rig The Election!”) Note Of the Day…[Expanded and Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

From Axios…

Nice.

There have been a lot of iconic or otherwise memorable photographs of Presidents over the decades that placed a sitting POTUS in a positive or sympathetic context. They were all liberally used to promote that President’s leadership and popularity. Such as…

and…

and

and…

and…

and..

and…

and…

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Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.

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There Is Hope! Another Incompetent “Squad” Member Is Headed For Defeat

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Above is one of “Cori Bush’s Greatest Hits,” the time in 2021 that she “explained” why she had taxpayers fund a security detail for her so she could advocate de-funding the police. This won her the Ethics Alarms title of “Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Year, Decade, Century, And Eon” at the time. Bush, a Democratic House member from the Missouri district occupied entirely by the brain-damaged, isn’t just an “idiot” in the sense that Ethics Alarms usually uses the word. No, the college drop-out and former nurse is a genuine, clinical idiot and an ignoramus to boot. Naturally, she is a member-in-good-standing of The Squad, where being the dumbest in the batch—dumber even than the recently defeated Jamaal Bowman—is quite an achievement.

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Ethics Dunce (Professional Singer Division): Ingrid Andress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.

Just listen to that caterwauling!

I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?

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Is J.D. Vance Qualified To Be Vice-President of the United States of America?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘qualified’ is.”

The Vice-President has only two clearly defined jobs. The first is to preside over the Senate, and that’s a job even Joe Biden could do in his current state of confusion. The second job is to be the President’s back-up, insurance policy, and stunt-man. That’s a bit trickier, and as Kamala Harris has proven, it’s too challenging for some people. Still, paraphrasing Woody Allen, “Ninety percent of success as Vice-President is just showing up.”

I have this idealistic notion that a VP candidate should be at least minimally qualified to be President, since 9 out of 45 Presidents got the job when the top of their ticket couldn’t perform his duties any more. That’s 20%, one in five. Despite these ominous odds, most Presidential candidates choose their understudies without any concern about their fitness to be President, not to say that most of the choices weren’t at least theoretically qualified. Joe Biden was, in my view, one of the least qualified VPs ever, and look where he ended up.

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Trump-Deranged Asshole Media Headline of the Day: The Economic Times

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I had to wrestle with myself about whether to post this first, or the next post.

Here’s the headline from The Economic Times:

“Trump’s Raised Fist: What the gesture means which is widely used by fascists, socialists, and communists”

…yeah, and also Rocky, Norma Rae, the much-lionized protesting American runners at the Olympics on the winner’s platform, baseball players after they have hit game-winning home runs, my Vietnam War protesting fellow students at Harvard,

and, oh, just about everyone in the past few centuries or so who wanted to symbolize defiance, victory, strength and resistance to forces that would abuse and persecute them.

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Ethics Quiz: The Biden Campaign Model

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

This one fascinates me the more I think about it.

Above is the model at the Official Biden-Harris Campaign Store advertising the Biden-Harris T-shirt. There are three other models to be seen at the home site: a kind of wimpy male-of-indeterminate-color modeling a “Free on Wednesdays” T-shirt (I don’t know what that means), a butch-looking female model who might be a stand-in for Lia Thomas, and a chunky middle-aged bespectacled guy, also of-some-sort-of-color, holding a “Color-Changing Mug.” This is clearly a DEI campaign site: apparently white models need not apply. But the model above is strikingly unattractive as well as sexually ambiguous. Unless the marketing industry no longer operates according to the Cognitive Dissonance Scale, the idea in advertising is still to connect the product with positive images.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

What’s going in here?

I could see the same model being used in a satirical ad put out by the Trump campaign. Is this flagrant virtue signaling? (What’s the virtue?) Pandering to radical feminists? DEI madness? Gross incompetence?

Oh…here are two of the Trump campaign’s models:

Yeccchh.