Incompetent Elected Officials

The Prospective Pardons Are Legal But Unethical and Dangerous [Updated Twice]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

When Ethics Alarms decided what had been a close competition between Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden for “Worst President Ever,” I honestly thought all of the evidence was in. There were only eight days to go, after all; it had finally been made sufficiently clear that our so-called President was on his way to becoming a zucchini, and worse, had been transitioning for years under the protection of an Axis cover-up. But then came Biden’s endorsement of censorship and the most unethical exit speech in U.S. Presidential history, followed by Biden’s embarrassing announcement that he was ruling the 28th Amendment ratified when it was not. Today, I woke up to the news that Biden had issued prospective pardons to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who betrayed his country with unauthorized contact with China; Dr. Fauci, the perjuring, lying, Deep State hack who was significantly responsible for the disastrous response to the Wuhan virus, Trump Deranged former Representative Liz Cheney and all the other members of the Pelosi-rigged House committee that dragged out and manipulated a partisan investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.

The close call now is whether this last official act by Biden is the worst of the batch. It may well be.

To chase the metaphorical elephant out of the room, prospective pardons are legal, constitutional, and probably irreversible. Presidents have issued general pardons applying to groups of people involving many offenses yet to be proven, and many times. There have been at least thirty amnesties before puppet Joe entered the White House: Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson issued them during and after the Civil War to benefit Confederates, and Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for Vietnam war draft dodgers. My favorite was President Madison’s 1815 pardon of pirate Jean Lafitte and his crew, who joined Andy Jackson’s American forces at the Battle of New Orleans. Madison’s grateful proclamation covered all who assisted in the defense of Louisiana in the battle (that occurred after the War of 1812 had ended), granting “a full and free pardon of all offenses committed in violation of any act or acts of the Congress of the said United States touching the revenue, trade, and navigation thereof or touching the intercourse and commerce of the United States with foreign nations at any time before the 8th day of January, in the present year 1815, by any person or persons whomsoever being inhabitants of New Orleans and adjacent country, or being inhabitants of the said island of Barrataria and the places adjacent . . .”

The fact that this vague and general sweeping Presidential pardon was issued by James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, makes it about as irrefutable a precedent as one could ask for. And thus the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the pardon power “extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency or after conviction and judgment.”

Nonetheless, just because one can do something (or get away with it) doesn’t mean it is ethical, prudent, responsible or right. Biden’s pardons for alleged crimes never investigated or proven to individuals holding his favor stretches the existing precedents to the breaking point, or perhaps gagging point is a more apt description. After all, Jean Lafitte was a pirate; the Confederate soldiers fought against their country, and the draft-dodgers were, you know, draft dodgers. Even Richard Nixon, pardoned by President Ford in what may be the nearest thing to a precedent for Biden’s pardons today, was a President of the United States whose potential indictable crimes had only been uncovered in the course of a House impeachment inquiry. At that point, the precedent could have been limited by those not insignificant details. Then came Biden’s Once and Future pardon of his black sheep son for crimes he had been convicted of committing and anything else he might have done yet undiscovered, just in case darling Hunter has been a serial killer when he wasn’t high. Today’s pardons take us to the end of the slippery slope.

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Ethics Alarms Wants To Thank President Biden For His Continuing Efforts To Confirm Its Verdict That He Is The Worst U.S. President Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

…as with today’s idiocy, that “statement” above.

The President has no say whatsoever in when proposed Constitutional amendment have been ratified (or not). He can express his approval of one, and lobby for it with legislators, but he cannot make a ruling that the [completely superfluous, virtue-signaling] Equal Rights Amendment has been properly ratified (it hasn’t been). He might as well put out a statement that Barry Bonds should be voted into the Hall of Fame, or that broccoli is good for you. This is the President whose party made failure to uphold “democratic norms” one of its main Big Lies against Donald Trump, and Biden’s Presidency has ignored more norms than any Presidency at least since FDR tried to be President For Life. (Come to think of it, he succeeded!)

Making this presumptuous and gratuitous endorsement even worse is the fact that everybody knows now that Biden is in no shape to declare anything of substance, especially a matter of constitutional law debate. This isn’t Biden talking, it is some phantom activist in the White House using Biden’s name and office to advance a personal agenda.

Since his historic, DEI VP was selected by his party’s oligarchs to run for President without any components of the modern nomination process (and I doubt that Harris would have even survived the old-fashioned “smoke-filled room”) Biden—-that is, his puppeteers—has set an all-time Presidential spite record by filling his final months with obstructions for Donald Trump, as well as leniency for murderers, civilian honors for despicable civilians, more unethical student loan waivers, obstacles to U.S. energy independence and climate change grandstanding. Then there was this week’s head-exploding call for censorship in his Orwellian farewell speech.

Meanwhile Ruy Texiera, a generally objective, fair, and honest analyst, is having none of the obsequious claims from the Axis that Biden, in addition to being a figurehead President, was somehow also a good one who will be vindicated by history. On his substack “The Liberal Patriot” he authors a much more exhaustive description of Biden’s failures than I did in selecting poor Joe as “The Worst President Ever,” as well as chronicles Biden’s betrayal of the voters who thought they were voting for a moderate in 2020. (They also thought they were voting for a cognitive functioning leader rather than a marionette.)

It’s a superb piece, and you should read it.

Even if Biden puts out a statement saying that you shouldn’t.

10 Ethics Observations on the White Judge’s Email

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Caroline Glennon-Goodman, a Cook County judge, shared a meme that depicts a smiling black boy and a black child’s leg with an electronic monitor on it, a fake ad for “My First Ankle Monitor.” The judge wrote “My husband’s idea of Christmas humor.” It was supposed to go to a friend, but she sent it to the wrong person, another judge ( #@!%^!& autofill!) Oopsie! That judge reported her and the post became public.

Glennon-Goodman has been reassigned by the Circuit Court’s Executive Committee, and ordered to undergo bias training and will face a state disciplinary investigation. The executive committee wrote that Glennon-Goodman’s alleged actions “may violate the Code of Judicial Conduct” and it said it was temporarily reassigning her and referring the matter to the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board “to promote public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”

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The Country’s In the Very Best of Hands! Reps. Mace and Crockett Disgrace Themselves, Congress, and Nation

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

During the debate over the House bill to stop males “transitioning” to glorious womanhood from injuring female athletes while cheating their way to taking their scholarships, records, championships and safety, two of the worst female members of Congress—and that’s quite an achievement, given the competition— showed (again) why the public no longer trusts its republic. The two women showed themselves to be ethics dunces, incompetent elected officials, disastrous role models and, to get technical about it, assholes.

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Ethics Alarms Will Now Be Kind To Kamala…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I always feel for the losers in Presidential elections. It has to be one of the most crushing career failures that any human being has to endure, certainly in politics.

In “Inherit the Wind,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s famous play based on the Scopes Trial, the wife of “William Harrison Brady,” the character who is a thinly veiled version of William Jennings Bryan, has a moving speech about how no one can imagine the pain her husband has suffered losing three Presidential races, as Bryan did (a record). In modern times, losing just once usually ends a candidate’s political career, no matter how young they may be or how close the election.

I think that it is highly unlikely that Kamala Harris, the DEI Vice-President who had no business running even once, will break the recent pattern. She will sign a book deal, cash in, and fade into obscurity, a bad memory for Democrats, a living joke to everyone else. Unfortunately for her, Harris is still our Vice-President, and cannot start fading away yet.

Yesterday she was again the object of derision and mirth on social media and on the conservative websites for her very Harris-like performance during an unscripted Oval Office briefing on the Palisades fire crisis. It was this section, a trademarked Harris “word salad,” that attracted the ridicule:

“It’s critically important that, to the extent you can find anything that gives you an ability to be patient in this extremely dangerous and unprecedented crisis, that you do.”

I can’t say anything nice about the idiotic content of that statement, for telling people whose houses are burning to be “patient” is about as tone-deaf as a political figure can be. However, I finally have figured out why she keeps issuing those “word salads.” It isn’t because she is a dullard, although she is. The reason for her malady should have occurred to me earlier when I considered giving her a permanent Julie Principle pass on them.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: CNN’s Brian Stelter

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here is Brian Stelter, making a fool of himself, and CNN, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct, again:

This is the depth to which this cosmic hack will stoop to bolster his propaganda-spewing pals in the Axis. Censoring free speech is the equivalent of putting out deadly fires! Brilliant, but telling. This is CNN!

And this is CNN: CNN “factchecker” Daniel Dale rushed to try to defend the incompetence of L.A. and California Democrats, saying “There is no shortage of water in the LA area,” and babbling that reports of fire hydrants being dry were due to “technical logistical infrastructure,” whatever that means. You can’t check facts before the facts are known: a major investigation will be required to determine exactly what went wrong, what public officials were at fault, and what factors were in play regarding the devastating Palisades fires. Never mind, though: to those brave factcheckers, a lack of facts won’t dissuade them from rushing into debates and drowning opinions that might singe the Woke and Wonderful.

Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that the fire response put immense strain on the water system. That would seem to suggest a shortage of water, no? Or the fact that many fire hydrants were dry, according to the firefighters who tried to use them. The Santa Ynez Reservoir the Pacific Palisadeshas been out of commission since February 2024, meaning 117 million gallons of water was missing, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, desperately saying anything he could come up with to preserve his presumed status as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 Presidential nomination, told NBC News that the state’s reservoirs are full. He also said, more accurately, there will be an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

It should come as no surprise that these essential public servants, the Axis factcheckers, didn’t choose to factcheck shameless Biden paid liar Jan Psaki, now a paid liar on MSNBC, who told viewers. completely without facts, that the California fires weren’t the fault of anyone in California at all, but Donald Trump for not doing enough to combat climate change. The Axis of Unethical Conduct (that’s the “resistance,” Democrats, and the left-biased mainstream media for those unfamiliar with the Ethics Alarms term) sense that accumulated incompetence and bad progressive policies on display as homes burn might be a tipping point for ridiculously woke California, causing millions of voters to suddenly slap their foreheads and exclaim, “Why have we been voting for these liars and idiots?” I have my doubts that anything short of mass deprogramming can achieve that result, but still what we are getting from Stelter, Psaki and others reeks of panic and desperation.

Comment of the Day: “The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ contributed a well-reasoned and researched resolution of the Ethics Alarms series “The Worst President Ever?” after the penultimate installment, which I posted last month. At the time, I still wasn’t certain how the Wilson-Biden contest would come out, and since (spoiler!) his analysis came down to the same final two, I resolved to hold this obvious Comment of the Day until I had finished my final installment, which went up (finally!) last night. Steve’ alternate analysis is excellent, as all of Steve-O’s historical epics are.

Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on “The Worst President Ever? Part 6: The Final Field.”

An interesting list, certainly. I believe that if you asked 100 people who the worst presidents were and why, you’d probably get 100 answers that would all differ at least slightly, although some common threads would run through them, and you’d get one group from conservative folks and another from liberal folks. I’m not sure I 100% agree with this list, but it’s the list you’ve given us to work with, so here are my thoughts:

Franklin Pierce – Had a life-long problem with alcohol, to the point where other military officers (yes, believe it or not he is one of the ten presidents who was a general) called him the “hero of many a well-fought bottle.” Tragic family history, and let grief and drink paralyze his single term in office.

James Buchanan – Took almost no steps to stop the Civil War from happening. Started to dislike the office to the point where he told Lincoln that if Lincoln was as happy upon assuming the presidency as he was upon leaving it, he was a happy man indeed.

Andrew Johnson – Never meant to be president, put on the ticket because he was a Democrat and a southerner. Couldn’t control the radical Republicans. Was impeached (probably unfairly) and came the closest any president ever came to removal from office. Also had the hardest act of all to follow.

Woodrow Wilson – Biggest racist ever to sit in the White House. Also probably one of the 3 or 4 most arrogant presidents. Led us into WW1 when we might not have needed to go, then alienated the world with his attempt to impose his own morality. Also alienated most of his political allies back home and was a willing participant in hiding that he had had a debilitating stroke from the country.

Richard Nixon – Popular president who didn’t trust his own popularity to take him past the finish line and overreached, then tried to cover it up.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: President Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about. We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. We want to tell the truth.The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we’re not gonna fact check anything,’ and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff. Anyway, I think it’s really shameful.”

—-President Joe Biden, attacking Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decision’s to end its biased, censorious fact-checking system that relied on partisan propaganda operations like PolitiFact and Snopes.

What’s shameful is a President of the United States advocating speech censorship. Like many of Biden’s brain-addled outbursts lately, however, he has committed the cardinal political sin of saying what he and his puppeteers really believe out loud. So now we know, at least those of us who weren’t paying attention before and couldn’t read the metaphorical neon signs flashing before our eyes, Joe Biden and his entire party advocates the censorship of free speech on social media, including opinion, adverse positions and anything that might expose its rotting proto-totalitarian party for the threat to democracy it has become. Thanks, Joe! But it was pretty obvious already.

I’m glad that I have waited to post the resolution of the “Worst President Ever” inquiry until tomorrow, because so much applicable information has been flowing regarding just how awful Joe Biden has been. I think all who have read the series carefully have figured out that the finals are going to come down to Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson and Biden, and it doesn’t take a PhD to guess who the last two competitors will be either. Once I thought the ultimate “winner” was clear-cut, but Joe is fighting for the title to the bitter end.

He and his fellow censors circulated lie after lie before and during the Presidential campaign (among them that only Donald Trump lies) yet Biden has the astounding brass to talk about wanting to tell the truth. You know, truth like Biden being sharp as a tack. “Truth” like the border being secure.

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Snow Day Ethics Warm-Up, 1/11/25

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It’s another snow day in Northern Virginia, but that isn’t stopping climate change hysterics and progressive public policy incompetence apologists from blaming California’s latest wildfire catastrophe on global warming—not L.A.’s incompetent mayor, not the inadequate fire department budget, not the arsonists who may have started the fires, and not LA’s DEI water head, who left a crucial reservoir disconnected, resulting in fire hydrants not functioning.

Department of Water and Power (LADWP) CEO Janisse Quiñones was hired at a $750,000 salary in May, double that of her predecessor. To be fair, she had a background in California fires: she was previously a top executive at electricity company PG&E, a senior vice president at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from 2021 to 2023. That’s the company with the power lines that sparked responsible for the second-largest wildfire in California history, Dixie, in 2021. Before that, the company’s involvement in the 2018 Camp Fire resulted in PG&E paying a $13.5 billion legal settlement, although its liability for causing fires was estimated at $30 billion when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. It exited bankruptcy in 2020, just in time to hire Quiñones. Hey, but it’s all climate change!….Meanwhile, the discussion over at the Friday Forum (again, sorry for posting it late) about pet peeves and my late wife’s particular objection to using “that” when “who” is correct reminded me of a brilliant limerick that I had almost forgotten.

My strange friends back in Arlington, Mass. used to play a limerick game in which one of us would come up with a first line, the next would add the second line, the third would complete the third and fourth lines that have to rhyme, and my dear, brilliant, witty friend Jay Sylva would always come up with the final line, because he was so good at it. I specialized in first lines, and this time offered, “The man who had eaten my face…” (it wouldn’t have scanned with “that’). The subsequent additions left us with…

The man who had eaten my face…”
Had the nerve to come back to my place.
I said, “Stay a while!
If you’ll cough up my smile…

To which Jay immediately added, to applause and his eternal glory,

I’ll forgive you for not saying grace!”

On to today’s early list…

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This one is too easy.

If anyone really wants to know why the United States has yet to elect a female President, all that is required is to look at the talent pool. Members of Congress who have no executive experience are usually unqualified to take on the toughest leadership job in the world, so women with a background at least theoretically justifying a run for the White House must have shined as a state governor or a big city mayor unless their entire case for being elected consists of “I’m a woman.” When Gretchen Whitmer is the only female governor ever mentioned in the same breath as “President,” that tells you how deep the state house talent pool is…and then we have the female big city mayors. London Breed in San Francisco, a slow motion car wreck. Uber-woke mayor of Boston Michelle Wu. The Black Lives Matter worshiping mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser. Lori Lightfoot was so inept and obnoxious in her term as mayor of Chicago that she was defeated in a landslide by a Marxist.

But the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, makes all of those look like Fiorello La Guardia in a pants suit. In a classic of bad timing, Bass cut her city’s fire department budget for this fiscal year by more than $17.5 million. Then, the National Weather Service warned that Los Angeles would be in peril in the next few days with this announcement:

“..LIFE THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, WIDESPREAD WINDSTORM TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY MORNING FOR PORTIONS OF LOS ANGELES AND EASTERN VENTURA COUNTIES– WITH LONG DURATION OF RED FLAG CONDITIONS INTO THURSDAY– POSSIBLY EXTENDING INTO FRIDAY… …RED FLAG WARNINGS IN EFFECT FOR LOS ANGELES COUNTY AND MUCH OF VENTURA COUNTY—SEE TIMINGS IN HEADLINES BELOW… ……Offshore winds are now expected to develop rapidly early Tuesday morning, leading to an earlier start time of the Red Flag Warning for many areas. Confidence is high for a life threatening, destructive, widespread windstorm with dangerous fire weather conditions Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning, especially focused on the San Gabriel mountains and foothills, San Gabriel Valley, San Fernando Valley, Hollywood/Beverly Hills, coastal areas adjacent to the Sepulveda Pass, Simi Valley, and Santa Monica mountains into Malibu. Strong mountain wave wind activity will likely impact many of these areas, resulting in very strong, erratic, and damaging wind gusts, capable of widespread downed trees/powerlines, as well as widespread power outages. This windstorm will likely be as destructive as the 2011 windstorm that impacted Pasadena and nearby San Gabriel Valley foothills. This is a high end Red Flag event. Any new fires will have a high risk for very rapid fire spread and large fire growth, extreme fire behavior, and long range spotting.“

So, forwarned, the next day, Bass took off for Ghana as part of a Presidential junket. When the fires started raging, it took her more than 24 hours to return to do her job. (Ghana has exactly no relationship to being mayor of L.A. at all.) By the time she arrived, more than 5,000 homes were burned or burning, as fire hydrants ran dry because water demand was so high it drained the city’s reserve tanks. She returned to face pointed questions about her leadership, or lack of it as the crisis loomed. Bass chose to shift into political BS boilerplate, saying,

“Let me just say first and foremost, my number one focus—and I think the focus of all of us here—with one voice is that we have to protect lives, we have to save lives and we have to save homes.”

Asked about Bass’s performance, Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, explained that Bass’ specialty is building legislative consensus behind closed doors “Her skills are building coalitions and working with people,” Grose said of Bass, who is in her first term. “This moment demands a true executive who will stand up and say, ‘this is what we’re going to do.’” Yeah, it’s that thingy called “leadership.” Building consensus is a stereotypical form of female management, but it’s not enough. if the stereotypical male leadership style of taking change and giving everyone confidence that there is someone in charge who knows what to do is too confrontational and icky for female mayors, the White House is going to be a loooong way off.

After she crashed and burned in interviews when she finally arrived on the smoky scene, Bass said, “When the fires are out, we will do a deep dive. We will look at what worked, we will look at what didn’t work, and we will let you know. Until then, my focus is on the TV screens behind you that are showing devastation that has continued. Thank you.”

The tone deafness and absence of leadership instincts that such a statement represents is mind boggling. “Don’t worry! After everything has burned down we will do a thorough analysis!” Just what citizens whose houses are in flames want to hear….