Incompetent Elected Officials

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Incompetent Elected Official): Vice-President Kamala Harris, Part 2: Harris Has Directly Violated California’s Legal Ethics Rules

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

There is another aspect of Kamala Harris’s attack on the Supreme Court majority on Dobbs that bears noting.

In most jurisdictions, a lawyer may not publicly impugn the integrity of a sitting judge, and certainly not a Supreme Court Justice.

Here is the relevant rule in California, one of the jurisdictions with the duty to oversee her conduct. California’s position is that a member of its bar is subject to California rules no matter when the lawyer violates them.

Rule 8.2 Judicial Officials – State Bar of California:

(a) A lawyer shall not make a statement of fact that the lawyer knows* to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge or judicial officer, or of a candidate for election or appointment to judicial office.

Comment “To maintain the fair and independent administration of justice, lawyers should defend judges and courts unjustly criticized. Lawyers also are obligated to maintain the respect due to the courts of justice and judicial officers.”

If there is a California lawyer reading who wants to take a stand for the integrity of the ethics rules, a formal complaint to the would be apt and appropriate.

[The graphic above represents my assessment of the likelihood that the California Bar would ever enforce its rules against a good, abortion-loving Democrat for attacking the U.S. Supreme Court.]

Unethical Quote Of The Month (And Incompetent Elected Official): Vice-President Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

“How dare they?”

—Vice-President Kamala Harris on June 24 referring to the U.S. Supreme Court on the anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. ruling that finally overturned Roe v. Wade.

This wasn’t the usual infantile babbling that characterizes most of Harris’s public appearances: Ethics Alarms has pledged to skip most of those in fealty to the Julie Principle. That quote is far worse, more significant and sinister. It’s so unethical and outrageous that I initially didn’t believe she could have been referring to the Supreme Court: most of the mainstream media accounts and even the edited videos left out the context of that outburst, so, giving the Vice-President of the United States the benefit of the doubt and assuming that surely, surely, she could not be framing a duly rendered majority ruling on the U.S. Constitution by the independent branch of the government charged with that duty by the Founders in such an ignorant, misleading and inflammatory manner.

She was, however. In fact, she had made the same fatuous, irresponsible and obnoxious statement before, a year ago, and is apparently so proud of her demagoguery that she deemed it worthy of an encore. I thought, and hoped, that her “How dare they?” was at least in the context she placed it in this past January, but no. (That is also an unethical and despicable bit of demogoguery, notable for Harris’s characterization of the famous statement in Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece as “A promise we made in the Declaration of Independence that we are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Huh. Sounds funny. Isn’t there something missing there? Something that unborn Americans might think is important? I’m sure I’ll think of it in a minute…

But no. I could find no news report that placed this “How dare they?” in the context Harris placed it last week, but a video I can’t embed, available here on the Washington Post website, makes it clear.

In order to make such a dangerous statement, Harris has to also mislead the public into believing that, as she falsely said in January and periodically since, the United States Supreme Court “took away… a fundamental right, a basic freedom from the people of America.” Whatever one thinks should be the law or laws regarding abortion, it was never “a fundamental right, a basic freedom.” It was a Court-made right, and the Supreme Court isn’t empowered to make rights. “Fundamental rights” are the enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights and the subsequent amendments, passed by Congress and the states, in the Constitution. Roe was a bad, political, incompetent decision that most legal scholars, even those who favor abortion, admitted was wrongly decided. (If she ever had chosen to be candid about the issue, it is likely that even the sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized this.) Roe survived for so long because a parade of Justices lacked the votes and guts to overturn it.

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“God Save The Queen, Man!”: An IIPTDXTTNMIAFB And An Integrity Test

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Remember Plan E? That was the designation on the Ethics Alarms list of resistance, Democrat and news media impeachment or removal plots for the 25th Amendment theory, which was that President Trump was mentally disabled and thus should be declared incompetent. The catalysts for this intellectually dishonest effort were Trump-hating hack author Michael Wolf and now-fired Yale psychology instructor Bandy Lee, but many in the “Get Trump!” mob quickly embraced their nonsense, as Ethics Alarms discussed here. I wrote, “Ethics Dunce is too mild a name here. We have the mainstream news media proclaiming to the world that the President of the United States is mentally deficient based on tweets, gossip, leaks, unethical diagnoses by discredited professionals, an author who has admitted making things up and lying to the White House to get access, and Steve Bannon.” Prominent among the 25th Amendment-pushing journalists, if you can call him that, was CNN’s fake media ethics watchdog, Brian Stelter. Of course, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends were also convinced that Trump had dementia.

Last week, as he ended his remarks at a “gun safety summit” in Connecticut, President Biden said, for no apparent reason, “God save the Queen, man!” The video was instantly all over social media.

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Ethics Dunce: Ireland

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Boy, if Ireland thought they had mad cows before….

Ireland’s government is reportedly seriously considering plans to destroy 200,000 cows to meet its mandatory climate change targets from the nutsy-cuckoo European Union. Farmers will be offered financial inducements participate in the bovine holocaust. Thus the collateral damage of net zero emissions insanity, a sub-category of The Great Stupid, is extending to cows, just as AOC wants it to in her “Green New Deal.”

There shouldn’t be a lot to argue about here: killing 200,000 Irish cows now will have exactly no effect on the climate even if the most apocalyptic and hysterical scientific models are correct. It’s like the Biden and Obama killing pipelines: it’s just climate change theater and virtue-signaling, except that the pipeline decisions just killed jobs and brain cells of rational people thinking about them.

And yes, in this case, just seriously considering such an obviously wasteful policy is sufficient to justify Ethics Dunce honors even if ultimately rationality prevails. Even pondering such idiocy is signature significance, as when grandpa says, “Yeah, I was thinking about flapping my arms and flying out the window to visit Neverland, but decided it was too far away.” You call the rest home and double quick, even if Gramps had seemed lucid before.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-NY)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Amazingly, this is the first time New York’s communist wacko Congresswoman, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been designated an Incompetent Elected Official of the Month. Since her election, re-election and re-re-election, she has been honored here with (let’s see…) two Ethics Dunces, two Unethical Quotes, three Unethical tweets, and an over-all assessment as an ethics villain when she could have scored an Unqualified Elected Official, Ethics Dunce, Unethical Tweet, Unethical Quote, and a KABOOM! with a single blazingly moronic tweet. Ethics Alarms did award her a special Incompetent UNelected Official Of The Month in July of 2018 when she was first running for office. This was after she uttered the kind of brainless nonsense we are now accustomed to, saying that “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.”

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So It’s Come To This…

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Now there’s a well-reasoned, articulate, rational, persuasive argument! My rule of thumb is that when advocates have to descend into chanting, shouting and sloganeering, they have no legitimacy, and neither do their positions. (If a position’s advocates can’t do better than that, their position is a fantasy.) They have also forfeited respect and the right to be taken seriously.

Another “Great Stupid” Milestone: Mayor Adams’ Plan To Stop Shoplifting

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

If you are not fully informed in Ethics Alarms lore, the term “The Great Stupid” for the ridiculous period Western Civilization is trying to survive came from a lucky conversation your host had many decades ago with futurist Herman Kahn, then generally regarded as the smartest man alive. One of the topics we discussed was the Sixties, and Herman observed that throughout history there have been periods where whole cultures suddenly forgot the lessons of the past. This resulted in what in retrospect looked like extended periods of stupidity, with people and governments engaging in destructive conduct and embracing wildly foolish policies until they re-learned what they had forgotten, usually after catastrophic results. I am quite confident that Mr Kahn would agree that this is just such a period.

New York City mayors have been major players in the most recent descent of stupidity across the land, and while Mayor Eric Adams couldn’t be a worse mayor than his predecessor if he just lay on his office rug twitching, he certainly tries. Recently, as his city (like so many Democrat-run metropolises) grapples with an exploding crime rate, Adams announced the following plan to deal with rampant shoplifting:

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Cal)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That clip from yesterday has “gone viral,” as it should. It is also signature significance for an incompetent member of Congress and a party with no ethical standards.

First of all, why the Democrats think it is responsible or wise to treat FBI whistleblowers with the kind f contempt usually reserved for pedophiles, human traffickers and Klan members is a mystery. Then there is the grander question of why the news media is supporting the Democrats in this: after all, at issue is a corrupt and out-of control law enforcement agency.

Second, and most embarrassing of all, is the ineptitude of Rep. Sanchez and her staff, which obviously was ordered to do a deep dive into the social media accounts of the whistleblower witnesses in the Weaponization committee hearings to find dirt that could be used to discredit them. They found the wrong Twitter account, and yet Sanchez, adopting the accusatory approach and tone of Joe McCarthy, used a tweet from it anyway, demanding to know if the witness “agreed” with the mystery tweeter’s sentiment. Then Sanchez ended her self-humiliating questioning as if she had proven something other than the fact that she is an unapologetic fool.

What she should have said, when the witness told her she had the wrong account, was “I’m sorry,” then shut the hell up. I was immediately reminded of the memorable line delivered by Albert Finney (as attorney Ed Masry) at the end of “Erin Brockavich.” I wish the witness being abused by Sanchez had slightly rephrased it, and asked, “Do they teach members of Congress to apologize? Because you suck at it!”

Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT.)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The Democrats have quite an array of incompetent U.S. Senators, though some of them have excuses. Diane Feinstein is so old she makes Joe Biden look quick, and John Fetterman is brain-damaged. Senator Murphy, however, is special. He hates the Second Amendment almost as much as he hates Donald Trump. His preferred method of persuasion is bullying and fear-mongering. (All of those links are from the extensive Ethics Alarms dossier on Murphy.)

It is fine that Murphy doesn’t like the Second Amendment, but he has no choice but to follow it. He doesn’t get that, it seems. It is fine that he wishes that the Supreme Court wasn’t around to stop Congress and the President from violating the Constitution to, but he doesn’t understand that either. Thus he says things like this, to NBC’s Chuck Todd during Sunday morning’s broadcast of “Meet the Press”:

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Minnesota State Sen. Calvin Bahr (R)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Stay classy, Senator.

Minnesota lawmaker Calvin Bahr took part in a Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor Zoom meeting that was streamed on YouTube yesterday. For some incomprehensible reason, he couldn’t be bothered to put on a shirt. When the time comes for him to vote on something or other, Bahr appears bare-torsoed with a School House Rock “I’m Just a Bill” background behind him, then the camera quickly switches off to show just his name on a black screen.

He appeared to be lying on his side. Maybe he’s sick: it doesn’t matter. He had an obligation to make an effort to be professional. He represents the citizens of Minnesota.

A few weeks before he died of cancer, John Wayne got out of bed, pulled on a wet suit to wear under his tux so his weight loss wouldn’t be so obvious, and appeared as a presenter at the Oscars. He got dressed because he respected the institution, his industry, and the American public he knew would be watching. Senator Bahr could have mustered the energy to pull on a damn shirt. That he appeared this way in an official meeting with his colleagues demonstrates an absence of dignity, decorum, respect and common sense.