Salem Snow is a social worker running for Congress in Philadelphia as a Democrat. He’s a Black Lives Matter fan, and describes himself as a “Leftist” and “aggressively pro-worker.” Of course he includes his pronouns in his Twitter profile. That’s all dumb enough, but he also tweeted this:
You watch: he’ll probably get elected. Is this a great country, or what?
Incidentally, it’s unethical to look that smug in a photo when you write something as stupid as that tweet.
Lizzie Marbach, a former Ohio GOP official and currently director of communications at Ohio Right to Life, tweeted ,
This upset Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), who is Jewish, so he tweeted, twice,
Ugh.
Ethics Observations: Continue reading
Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, the interview is a public service and raises too many ethics questions to count.
It is nicely paired with this revelation…
Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, the interview is a public service and raises too many ethics questions to count. Is the previous chief of the Capitol Police (full disclosure: the current occupant is an old friend) a completely reliable, objective and unbiased source of information regarding the January 6, 2020 riot? Of course not. Nonetheless, the lack of interest in his perspective displayed by the January 6 Star Chamber and the mainstream media is both indefensible and suspicious.
Your reactions should be both helpful and illuminating.
In fact, “unethical” doesn’t do her justice.
A courtroom security camera caught Lincoln County (Oklahoma) District Judge Traci Soderstrom during a murder trial as she paged through her iPhone, checking Facebook, surfing the web, and texting as the trial went on, supposedly under her supervision. This continued for hours. The case involved the brutal murder of Braxton Danker, 2, who was beaten to death by 32-year-old Khristian Tyler Martzall. Soderstrom ordered the jury at the outset of the trial to turn off their phones. “This will allow you to concentrate on the evidence without interruption,” intoned the judge. Then she had her own eyes glued to her phone screen during opening statements and witness testimony.
After the video was discovered, the judge dealt with the scandal by having camera moved rather than try to explain or apologize for her behavior.
I choose “disgusting.” The GOP Georgia representative embarrasses me as an American. And she’s incompetent and unethical.
A member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. Greene thought it was appropriate to use her allotted time during a hearing to display nude photographs of Hunter Biden in various situations that could not be put on non-porn television (except, in this case, C-Span, as in the photo above). A member of Congress was displaying graphic shots of the President’s son engaged in sexual acts with alleged prostitutes. “Here is proof Hunter Biden paid prostitutes through his law firm, OWASCO PC, and trafficked his victims across state lines in violation of the Mann Act,” she tweeted. “Not only that, IRS whistleblowers confirm Hunter Biden committed tax fraud by deducting payments to prostitutes from OWASCO’s taxes.”
The photos “proved” neither. In a trial, they would be excluded as prejudicial and irrelevant.
“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. That was thoughtful. The obscene photos shed no light whatsoever on any of the matters regarding the President’s sad and corrupt son that are legitimate topics of Congressional attention: whether he engaged in influence peddling with foreign governments that benefited his father or influenced his actions, and whether he has been shielded from the legal consequences a non-Presidential family member would face who engaged in the same activities. Greene claimed the photos were important supporting evidence regarding a tax fraud coverup and special treatment that resulted in Hunter cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.
Oh. Huh?
I almost missed this kerfuffle completely. Of all people, one of my most reliably Democrat-supporting friends raised it, beginning by saying. “I know this is not something a good progressive is supposed to say or think, but….
…why in the world is it ‘racist’ to say ‘colored people’ but politically correct to use the term ‘people of color’ when by the undeniable rules of English, they mean exactly the same thing?”
She continued, “And how can anyone belonging to an organization called ‘The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’ accuse someone of being a racist for saying it?”
Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane was arguing for his amendment to the defense budget and policy bill, as he wants to prohibit the Pentagon from requiring participation in DEI training or the use of ” race-based concepts” in the hiring, promotion or retention of individuals. In the course of debate, Crane said “My amendment has nothing to do with whether or not colored people or black people or anybody can serve, okay? It has nothing to do with color of your skin… any of that stuff.”
Recognizing a “gotcha!” when she saw one, black Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, an enthusiastic member of the racist Congressional Black Caucus, demanded Crane’s words be stricken from the congressional record. “I am asking for unanimous consent to take down the words of referring to me or any of my colleagues as “colored people,'” said the dues-paying member of the NAACP. Crane wanted to amend his comments to “people of color,” but Beatty insisted that she wanted his words stricken. Censorship is, after all, her party’s way, and no Republicans had the guts to object.The chair ordered Cranes entire statement stricken by unanimous consent.
Beatty then worked to exploit the gaffe for all it was worth, writing on Twitter: “I am still in utter and disbelief that a Republican uttered the words ‘colored people’ in reference to African-American service members who sacrifice their lives for our freedom… I will not tolerate such racist and repugnant words in the House Chamber or anywhere in the Congress. That’s why I asked that those words be stricken from the record, which was done so by unanimous consent.” Then the Ohio Democrat told CBS that Crane’s explanation that he “misspoke” was a lie. “He didn’t misspeak,” Beatty said. “He said clearly what, in my opinion, he intended to.”
In other words, he intended to use a racist slur.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
I don’t understand. The Biden Administration has declared that opponents of his policies are threats to democracy. The current Justice Department has sought extreme and excessive punishment for the protesters and rioters at the Capitol in January of 2021 while ignoring the violent and disruptive acts of the George Floyd Freakout rioters and demonstrators. The Democratic Administration sought to intimidate parents who were critical of woke school boards seeking to inject sexual politics and CRT ideology into public school curricula. And yet when Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu admitted that her staff compiled a list of her most vocal critics and protesters to hand to local law enforcement authorities, the public, which in Boston is primarily Democratic and progressive, howled in outrage.
This is how their increasingly totalitarian party operates in 2023. This is what they voted for. What are they complaining about?
It demonstrates a critical lack of integrity to claim you believe one thing when addressing the community that elected you and to privately say the opposite. It is also irresponsible and incompetent to assert positions your supporters would object to in less-than-reliably private forums, like social media. As an extra layer of incompetence, two Oregon mayors were active on social media behaving like this when they clearly didn’t understand the perils of social media (though I bet they do now).
First let’s take the case of Dean Sawyer, the three term mayor of Newport, a city of about 10,000 residents in Oregon. A 30 year police force veteran, he joined a private Facebook group called “LE (that is, Law Enforcement) Only in2016, two years before he was elected mayor. All these years, while he has been extolling “diversity” and celebrating LGTBQ+ “pride,” he was mocking both, as well as progressive sacred cows like illegal immigrants, in his posts, often with particularly vulgar and juvenile memes. (During “Pride Month,” for example, Sawyer posted a photo of disgusted-looking, scantily clad women in a dressing room with the legend, “Strippers waiting for EMS to untangle the new girl’s balls from the pole.”) his luck ran out as it usually does with reckless social media users. Somehow Oregon Public Broadcasting got a tip and managed to track down Sawyer’s politically incorrect and wildly hypocritical posts. Then it wrote, in a special report headlined, “For years the mayor of an Oregon Coast city has posted hateful memes on Facebook”...
Since 2016, Sawyer has posted racist memes mocking Mexicans and endorsing former President Donald Trump’s hardline policies on immigration. One post in April made fun of trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Several mocked Bud Light, which has drawn the ire of Republicans for the company’s business relationship with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Both Thomas and Mulvaney have been targets of right wing smear campaigns and online harassment.
Ethics Alarms 