Incompetent Elected Officials

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Why do communities keep electing officials who are ignorant of the law, history, and the U.S. Constitution?

Three days ago, North Las Vegas Mayor Pamela Goynes-Brown, (Guess which party!) announced on social media that her city would host a Black-owned business fair this coming weekend at the conclusion of Black History Month. The fest would feature local black vendors, community resources, an art corner and an area for children. Food trucks and live entertainment would enliven the proceedings. It would be a fun day of promotion for all participating—black-owned only!—businesses.

Who could have a problem with that?

Continue reading →

FIRE’s Annual Censorship Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

FIRE released its annual “Top Ten Worst Censors” list. They are…

As you see by the EA links, I batted just .500 in covering this topic, and some of the incidents described in FIRE’s report are clearly major ethics breaches that should have been discussed here. Personally, I blame Donald Trump for being a catalyst for so much unethical conduct by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (AUC)—the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media—as well as his own usual forays into the Ethics Twilight Zone that I missed other important matters. Or, as Joni Mitchell might have croaked, “So many things I might have done, but Trump got in my way….”

OK, I’m kidding. Sort of.

The most horrible story that I missed is a tie between the Mayo Clinic outrage and the Marion County Police Dept.’s gestapo act. In that one, FIRE explains,

Continue reading →

Second Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Cal)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was all set to designate Rep. Lee as the Incompetent Elected Official of the Month when I realized that this month, even more than most, President Biden had that honor locked up. So Rep. Lee only gets second place. The long-time California progressive has a substantial dossier at Ethics Alarms, much of it for her habitual race-baiting, but I hadn’t written about her much lately because of the Julie Principle: she’s an idiot, even most Democrats can see she’s an idiot, and thus there is not much to be gained by repeatedly pointing out that she’s an idiot. However, Rep. Lee is running for the Senate to replace the recently departed and slightly less-recently dementia-afflicted California Senator Diane Feinstein, who even at her most reduced mental state was a more trustworthy and responsible public figure than Lee on the best day of her life. Someone like Barbara Lee should be kept out of the Senate with razor wire, but this is California, so you never know.

Continue reading →

It’s Come To This: Snopes Spins Madly To Claim the President Doesn’t Look Ridiculous

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Presidents through the years have frequently allowed themselves to be photographed looking silly. My favorite example, which I first saw and giggled over at about the age of 10, is the famous shot above of dour Calvin Coolidge wearing an India headdress. Author Josh King wrote in “Dukakis and the Tank” that the first rule of political photo ops is “Never put anything on your head!” Before Coolidge put on the headdress while being named an honorary chief in Deadwood, South Dakota during a campaign stop in 1927, advisors told him he would “look funny.” “Well it’s good for people to laugh, isn’t it?” Coolidge replied.

I would like to think that President Biden had the same rationale for wearing his hard-hat backwards at a bar with some union construction workers…

…but I fear that in his current deteriorating mental state he could mistake Jill for a hat.

Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)…AGAIN

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Police were called to Miner’s Claim restaurant n Silt, Colorado two nights ago after Rep. Boebert and her ex-husband Jayson Boebert got into a physical battle at their table, police confirmed yesterday. I decided to give Marryin’ Sam and Li’l Abner an encore, because they were my first thought when I read about the latest example of Broebert’s trashy proclivities.

 The previous episode, when she got herself thrown out of a Denver theater for the kind of behavior that even a Dogpatch neighbor of Abner’s might have realized was inappropriate, was arguably worse, but together the two embarrassments are conclusive evidence that she doesn’t belong in Congress. She belongs in a trailer park.

Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: District 7 Boston City Council Member Tania Fernandes Anderson

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ohhh, yeah, Boston must have high expectations for THIS City Council member…

Back in the Home of the Bean and the Cod, where of-color Mayor Michelle Wu held an apartheid Christmas Party to which no white officials were invited, (in case you’re curious, yes indeed, Mayor Wu has attributed Claudine Gay’s demise at Harvard to “racial bias”), newly elected city councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson has to retake her oath of office after a video was circulated on social media showing that she neither said the words nor raised her right hand during this week’s swearing-in ceremony.

Fernandes Anderson was instructed by both City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune and the city’s law department to retake the oath, both verbally and in writing. The do-over was supposed to take place at 9 a.m. today, but though City Clerk Alex Geourntas arrived to swear in, she wasn’t there. The District 7 councilor’s staff told Geourntas at around 11 a.m., and again shortly before 1 p.m. that she was on her way, but Fernandes Anderson eventually called in at 3:15 p.m. to say she wouldn’t make it.

Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote Of The Month: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Imagine: this guy is on the House Judiciary Committee! Imagine again: here is what passes for rational, logical, responsible rhetoric on MSNBC.

Asked about the disgraceful performance of the three college presidents under questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik, Rep. Raskin pulled out every irrelevant anti-Republican talking point he could think of to avoid criticizing fellow woke warriors, beginning with saying he hopes a college president would take action when there are calls for genocide on campus because “lax Republican gun laws” mean “we’ve got to take very seriously” people making threats.

Yes, the debacle at the hearing was about gun control. Then he really got rolling:

Continue reading →

On His Way Out, Rep. Santos Kindly Demonstrates Why

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The House just voted 311 to 114 (with two cowardly members voting “present”) to make New York Congressman George Santos only the sixth in history to be deemed unworthy of an elected seat. The GOP members mostly supported the draconian punishment despite facing a tough race in the special election Santos’s disgrace now triggers. If I were a voter in that Long Island and Queens district, I’d be tempted to vote for the Democrat just to make the Republican Party pay for allowing a fraud and a crook like Santos to be its nominee. Of course, the Democrats and the local news media also share some blame for not doing due diligence to uncover important facts about a wildly unqualified candidate, but the GOP has to be first in line to be held accountable after Santos himself.

Yesterday, facing his likely humiliation, the biggest phony ever elected to Congress put his essential sliminess on full display, vowing revenge on his party and, like so many villains in movies about conspiracies and corruption, swearing that ‘if I go down, I’ll take all of you down with me!’

“I will do the same thing that members did to me and go to the Office of Congressional Ethics, all throughout today and tomorrow and report, everything that I think is relevant to the committee for them to look into,” said Santos. He’s already promised to file a complaint about the ridiculous Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Mad Fire Alarmist. Yes, Bowman should be sanctioned, but compared to Santos he’s John Quincy Adams.

Santos’s reaction to being expelled is a stinking pile of rationalizations, as discussed here. His pledge to get revenge is another bit of signature significance. If Santos had any ethical instincts at all, any concept of why he was being kicked out of Congress, any flicker of conscience, dignity, responsibility or decency, he would have exited with a statement expressing his regret for his past actions, apologizing for soiling (well, further soiling) the reputation of the body he was elected to serve in, and promising to devote his future activities to honorable public service, while acknowledging that there is, at this time, no reason to believe him. Then it might have been said of his leaving Congress, in the manner of Malcolm’s description of MacBeth at his execution,

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

But George Santos doesn’t possess those character traits: he’s a throbbing sociopath, and unlike more successful sociopaths in our government, he’s not smart or wily enough to hide it.

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Week: Rep. Roger Williams (R-Tx.)

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

George Santos, the lying, fraudulent, criminal Congressman from New York who was elected to Congress by almost completely fabricating his résumé, is likely to be expelled from the House at the end of this week in a bi-partisan two-thirds vote. Good.

Santos will be the first House member to be jettisoned without having first been convicted of a crime or being a supporter of the Confederacy. The bi-partisan effort is even more remarkable because House Republicans have so small a majority including Santos. But George is special. He is an embarrassment to the party, his district, New York, the House, the nation and his species.

Some Republicans, however, don’t comprehend that “integrity of the institution” stuff. Meet Roger Williams of Texas, who explains why he is not inclined to vote against Santos. noting that he has serious reservations about voting to remove a fellow member and saying, “I think we set a really not a good example if we can just pick and choose who comes and who stays. I don’t agree with what he’s been accused of, but at the same time it’s not our job here in Congress to decide who the congressman in some state or some district is. I just don’t like the idea of that.”

This is the quality of analysis offered by an elected official who helps make our laws. Ugh. Let’s see…

1. Congress isn’t picking and choosing “who comes and who stays.” Congress, like all institutions with any integrity and respectability, is enforcing minimum standards for its members. If it won’t do that—and it usually doesn’t—it forfeits the trust of the public.

2. Not only will Congress be setting a good example by ridding itself of an unqualified, dishonest phony who was elected under false pretenses, it is an essential example that should be repeated more frequently. All Americans, the unfortunate districts that elect unqualified representatives, and Congress itself are harmed when sociopaths like Santos are elected. Citizens should be on alert that if they vote irresponsibly and end up with a toxic representative, he or she might end up being rejected. I can think of at least 10 other members of the House—none quite as bad as Santos, of course—who would benefit Congress by their absence. It’s ridiculous that so few Representatives have been expelled in three centuries.

3. “I don’t agree with what he’s been accused of…” Can you be any more equivocal, Congressman? Santos’s lies about his background are a matter of record. The scathing report from the House Ethics Committee earlier this month concluded after a thorough investigation that he “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” The fact that Santos also has more than 20 criminal charges pending against him doesn’t even need to come into consideration.

4. Congress isn’t deciding “who the congressman in some state or some district is.” Santos’s New York district will do that in a special election after Santos is metaphorically kicked out the door and down the Capitol steps.

Williams’ rapier-like analysis reveals him as a dim, dim bulb, but at least he might be honest…unlike Rep. Santos.

Irony: The Washington Post Telling CVS How To Handle Rampant Shoplifting

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

…when it is the extreme anti-police, anti-law enforcement ideologues the Washington Post supports and slants the news to assist that are the reason shoplifting is out of control in D.C. and other cities.

The photo above that accompanies the laughable Post editorial shows the infamous CVS Pharmacy at 14th and Irving streets NW. There, in recent months, roving mobs of thieves have staged “smash and grab” mass raids resulting in the store having empty shelves and the local neighborhood having little access to needed supplies. “Shoplifters ransacked this CVS over two days early last month, and it hasn’t been restocked since,” the concerned editorial board wrote. “Weeks later, there’s still hardly anything to buy — or steal. The CVS at 14th and Irving symbolizes extreme retail theft and the harms it can engender. Distressing and inconvenient to ordinary people, threatening to businesses and livelihoods, and repellent to tourists, unchecked shoplifting can corrode a community’s spirit.”

The Post, which has never uttered a metaphorical “boo” regarding its woke, black Democratic mayor directing a huge, block letter “Black Lives Matter” message to be painted on a downtown street two years ago, is engaging in outrageous hypocrisy. “Black Lives Matter,” of course, means “Police Beware” and “Enforce the Law At Your Own Risk.” In related news, the Supreme Court today turned down Derek Chauvin’s last ditch appeal to get his unfair trial declared what it was; I’m assuming they don’t need the grief. They have to work in D.C. after all.

Continue reading →