Journalism & Media

“Dear Ethics Alarms: I Am An Advice Columnist Who Is Ignorant And Phobic About Guns. When I Get A Question About Guns, What Should I Do?”

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

Bullets, shmullets, what’s the difference?

“Ask Amy,” authored by Amy Dickinson, is one of the mid-level practitioners of the syndicated advice columnist’s craft—not consistently brilliant like Carolyn Hax, not as persistently wrong-headed as the now mercifully retired Emily Yoffe at Slate.

A recent letter to Amy read,

Dear Amy: This week, I discovered that my intelligent, hard-working, responsible 24-year-old daughter (who lives with me) is a gun owner! And it’s not a normal gun, either — it is a 40-caliber semi-automatic, and she has hollow-point bullets to go with it. Amy, this is the kind of weapon a criminal would possess! She says it is for emergencies. There have only been two home invasions in our neighborhood in the last 11 years. I’ve given her three choices: She can either give her weapon to me, sell it or move out in three weeks. I love my daughter and would be so sad for her to move into a place that she would hardly be able to afford, but now I have to lock my bedroom door at night because I don’t know what she’s going to do. Now she says that I don’t trust her, and is barely speaking to me. How can I convince her to stop endangering us?—Dumbfounded Father

Let’s make a couple of observations right away.

  • The father has every right to refuse to let the daughter keep a gun in his house; she is his guest. Nor was it respectful, fair or honest for her to bring a gun into the house without telling her host. I don’t know what the writer thinks is a “normal gun,” but a 40-caliber semi-automatic is certainly one in this day and age.

The writer is apparently frightened by the scary “semi-automatic” part, which just means he is unfamiliar with firearms that wouldn’t be used by Hopalong Cassidy.

  • “Amy, this is the kind of weapon a criminal would possess!” is free-floating anti-gun hysteria.

It’s also a gun a law-abiding citizen would possess, except that such a  gun would be possessed legally. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/18/2019: Nauseatingly Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Gooood Morning, and Ick.

1. Illegal immigration battles update:  a) The Empire State’s governor,  Andrew Cuomo,  signed legislation granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants—NBC calls them “undocumented immigrants, which is unethically deceptive —right after the measure passed the state Senate. New York is now the 13th state to take this unconscionable  course, creating an incentive as well as a reward for breaking U.S. laws and defying its borders.

There is no justification for ever rewarding lawbreaking  through public policy, unless the objective is to eliminate the law. Yet the Democrats who rationalize these measures still say that their party doesn’t want open borders.  How long can sentient individuals believe that? The existence of these laws, as well as sanctuary cities, prove otherwise. As idiotic and suicidal as it is, an open borders position should at least be honestly proposed and debated, since that is what progressives are really pushing for. I could have some respect for that approach. This one–lying about the intention while undermining immigration laws–is indefensible as well as cowardly.

b) In that vein, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez described the unavoidable detention facilities at the border as “concentration camps.” “I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something,” she said in an Instagram rant yesterday. Calling the President  a “fascist” (This will be today’s Big Lie entry, as the directory continues), she went on, “I don’t use those words to just throw bombs,” she said, throwing bombs, “I use that word because that is what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist and it’s very difficult to say that. The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”

How many blatant misrepresentation and lies are in those statements? Well, how much time  ya got? Detention centers are unavoidable. They aren’t concentration camps, and the Holocaust comparison is ignorant, inflammatory and obnoxious as well as false. (“What happened to people in concentration camps?” asked OtherBill, who flagged this for me). The President is bound by his oath of office to see that the rule of law remains intact, and to protect the Constitution. A growing hoard of illegal immigrants breaching the law and established procedures to get over the border and then vanish into sanctuary cities creates a threat to both.  The Nazis put their own citizens into concentration camps (you know, like FDR did with Japanese Americans? ), and then murdered them. The illegals at the border are not citizens, they are not legally refugees until we say so, and the U.S. has no obligation, legal or otherwise, to accept what has become a cynical excuse to flout our laws. Continue reading →

Reality Check: There Is Nothing “Stunning,” “Immoral” Or Illegal About A Presidential Candidate Receiving Damaging Information About His Opponent From A Foreign Source, PART 2

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

[Part I is here]

As usual with most of the “It’s outrageous that the President would say/do that!” freak-outs, this one is rife with amnesia, double standards and hypocrisy.

III.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired a British operative to gather anti-Trump dirt—most of which appear to have been rumors and lies, but that doesn’t matter here–from Russian sources. This is indistinguishable legally, ethically and morally from accepting offered intelligence. A candidate’s agent—by law, the same as the candidate herself–sought and received adverse intelligence from foreign nationals. In truth, this is worse than the conduct Trump hypothesized to George, which involved a foreign national approaching him.

That is, however, not all. In July 2016, the Obama administration, in all respects supporting and favoring the candidacy of Hillary Clinton,  accepted unsolicited information from Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat who also helped arrange a $25 million government donation to the Clinton Foundation years before. Downer said that he had witnessed a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, bragging about some dirt that the Russians supposedly had on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The Obama administration gave this to the FBI which, in turn, used it to justify opening a counterintelligence case against the Republican nominee for president.

Summary:  The Democratic administration accepted dirt from a foreign friendly and used it to justify investigating its GOP rival. Continue reading →

Reality Check: There Is Nothing “Stunning,” “Immoral” Or Illegal About A Presidential Candidate Receiving Damaging Information About His Opponent From A Foreign Source, PART I

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Preface.

Just when I think that  ultimate absurdity and peak hysteria have  been reached in the contrived effort to focus hate, fear and distrust on the President, something squirms up out of the muck to set a new–what should I call it? High? Low?

Let’s go with “low.” This one, like many of the others, was triggered by President Trump himself. Why does he do these things? It’s the strangest habit I’ve ever seen in a President or read about, and that includes such quirks as William McKinley calmly draping a dinner napkin over his wife Ida’s head when she would have epileptic seizures at state dinners. I cannot believe that Trump doesn’t know he is throwing red meat to the jackals when he deliberately hits “resistance” hot buttons. Is he trolling? Is he trying to push his enemies to expose their bias and irrationality for all to see? I don’t know. I do know the President shares responsibility for these periodic eruptions

Nevertheless, in this case Trump was being candid, and speaking the truth.

Speaking with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, President Trump said he would accept information on political opponents from a foreign government. “It’s not an interference,” he said.  “They have information. I think I would take it.”

Then came the freak-out.  Predictably, multiple impeachment advocates from the Democratic side of the aisle and their puppet pundits pronounced THIS as the ultimate, final, smoking gun proof that Trump should be impeached, without the immediate and required response from the news media and academia, of “What? Saying what you might do is an impeachable act now? Have you all taken leave of your senses?”

No, mere words and an answer to a hypothetical on a news show are not a crime, nor evidence of one to come. More importantly, the act President Trump described is not only not a crime, it is something I assume that many, many Presidential candidates have done and that virtually every single candidate would do. Trump is unusual in that he is open about it.

Now that’s ironic, don’t you think? The President who has been painted in the news media as a habitual liar is now being attacked for telling the truth. Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Pick-Me–Up, 6/15/2019: The “Oh, Fine, It’s Afternoon Already And I’m Barely Awake” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Bvuh.

Travel hangover today: I’ll do the best I can…

1. Thank you, loyal commenters, for a yeoman job in yesterday’s Open Forum.

2. Confederate Statuary Ethics Train Wreck update. Now the historical airbrushers (all from Progressiveland, just in case you couldn’t guess) are going after Civil War recreations and commemorative events. The head of the Lake County Forest Preserve in Illinois declared that there would be no more annual Civil War Days event after next  month’s edition, if he gets his way. He doesn’t think Confederate flags should ever be displayed, even in battle recreations. Besides, he wants the event to be retooled so that instead of commemorating the single most important period and struggle in U.S. history, it advances an understanding of climate change.

(Who are these people? How did they get this way? What do we do about them so the cultural damage they inflict is contained?)

The home-grown historical censor also said,

“This has nothing we want, nor should celebrate, nor re-enact. When southern states are being made to tear down every statute representing this racist, murdering chapter of our history, I can’t believe here in Lake County our own forest preserve is preserving and celebrating it every year, and with our tax dollars.”

This deliberately brain-dead approach to U.S. history is working (aided greatly by the atrocious neglect of American history in our schools), and by working I mean promoting ignorance so citizens can be more easily misled. The Wall Street Journal reported that visits to Civil War national battlefields are falling off. Over 10 million Americans visited  Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga, and Vicksburg  in 1970. They only had 3.1 million visitors last year.

That’s about as many tourists as visited the “Cheers” bar in Boston.

3. Oberlin race-baiting update: in case you missed it, the jury in the Gibson’s Bakery case  hit the college with the maximum punitive damages, capped by law at 22 million dollars.  Continue reading →

Donald Trump, Abe Lincoln, The Phantom Document Trick, And The Almanac Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The most recent example of the news media’s self-destructive obsession with embarrassing and denigrating Donald Trump was the alleged “prop” Mexico deal scandal. this week. Writers from both the New York Times and Washington Post, including Post “Factchecker” Glenn Kessler, stated as fact that the paper the  President had held up as he talked about the border agreement with Mexico and said,

“In here is the agreement. We’re getting along great.Two weeks ago we had nothing,”

…was blank, a prop, just one more example of Trump lying to the American people. Other pundits and bloggers, like progressive Josh Marshall,  joined the mockery.

Then it turned out that some shots of the paper showed that it was a folded over piece with a printed document inside. Of course, that paper could have also been a prop, a recipe for gazpacho or something, but the President’s later remarks suggested that he was enjoying the spectacle (#47, 391 by my count, but I’m sure I missed a few) of the biased and incompetent mainstream news media further undermining the public’s trust in journalism by indulging its hatred for the President.

“I just give you my word, inside here … is the agreement,” he said . “That’s the agreement that everybody says I don’t have.” Finally, someone freeze-framed the video where the inner document could be read. The visible words…

“The Government of Mexico will take all necessary steps under domestic law to bring the agreement into force with a view to ensuring that the agreement will enter into force within 45 days.”

So the paper Trump held up was not a prop, an engine of deception, after all. Or was the President deliberately using the covering paper to beguile the news media into calling him a liar? “You were able to read it through the sunlight,” Mr. Trump told reporters at a press conference. “That was not anticipated.”

And suddenly the voice of Wilfred Brimley (from “Absence of Malice”) intrudes on my consciousness, in an altered version of his famous scene in the film, asking the President, “I could ask you if you set all of this up, but you wouldn’t tell me if you did, would you?”

“Mr. Trump, are you that smart?”

Oh no, of course not! He’s a barely functioning demented moron who should be removed by the  25th Amendment. It’s amazing how he keeps making his smug enemies expose their own hate and ineptitude. Just lucky I guess. Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend President Trum…Oh, Hell, If You Care About The Country, I Guess There’s No Other Choice When Democrats Openly Say Things Like, “I’m Concerned That If We Don’t Impeach This President, He Will Get Re-Elected”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

There has been a dramatic increase in hysterical, exaggerated, fact-free, unfair, dishonest and contrived attacks on President Trump in the last few weeks, creating a practical problem for Ethics Alarms. The blog is neither devoted to politics or partisanship, but  since the 2016 election and the “resistance,” progressives, Democrats and the news media decided that it was worth tearing apart the nation and ripping to shreds its institutions to remove an elected President they oppose by any means necessary. It is, as I am forced to write too often, the single greatest continuous ethics breach since the Democratic Party’s support for Jim Crow.

I have so many issues unrelated to Donald Trump, whom I dislike intensely, that I want and need to discuss here.  I spent much of both 2015 and 2016 explaining why he should never be allowed to run for the Republican nomination, be nominated for President,  or elected President. I do not retract or regret  a single essay on these matters, but I cannot sit back and ignore what the Democrats and the news media are doing. I can’t. Neither my temperament, my love for America nor my  mission here permit it.

But BOY am I sick of having to  write about crap like…

  • “Trump administration to send migrant children to Army base once used as Japanese internment camp” screamed the Hill today.

How unethical is that headline? Let’s see…It begins with a deceit: “migrant children” is the latest euphemism for “children of illegal immigrants being used as human shields to allow them to break the law via the Think of the Children! rationalization, #58. It is also called, ironiclly, “The Universal Trump.” “ It is deceitful, the equivalent of  condemning a politicians as pro-white supremacy with a headline like: ” Senate candidate holds fundraiser in building where Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer!”  Just as Ford’s Theater is also just a theater, Fort Sill, in Oklahoma. To quote Wikipedia,

Fort Sill is a United States Army post north of Lawton, Oklahoma, about 85 miles southwest of Oklahoma City. It covers almost 94,000 acres (38,000 ha).[ The fort was first built during the Indian Wars.  It is designated as a National Historic Landmark  and serves as home of the United States Army Field Artillery School as well as the Marine Corps’ site for Field Artillery MOS school, United States Army Air Defense Artillery School, the 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, and the 75th Field Artillery Brigade. Fort Sill is also one of the four locations for Army Basic Combat Training. It has played a significant role in every major American conflict since 1869.

So what the Hill did is to pick a single use of Fort Hill during its long history so it could make a sinister analogy between the Trump Administration policy regarding immigration, and the racist policy of the Roosevelt Administration regarding Asian-Americans during WWII. Continue reading →

Rushing Out The Door Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/11/2019!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Hello, I Must Be Going…

This will be quick…

1. Hoping it was a mistake, fearing it was not. When I wrote about how David Ortiz’s post-baseball life before his near-fatal shooting was full of nothing but promising options, I was not including “having an extra-marital affair with a Dominican crime boss’s wife” among them. Yet that’s the story coming out of Santo Domingo: Big Papi was the target of a hit. Ugh. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding….

2. I could have written two separate posts about these ridiculous and ethicallyiaddled New York Times op-eds, but I’ll leave it to you:  first up is this thing, as an illegal immigration advocate uses the tit-for-tat and Sicilian ethics rationalizations to argue that letting foreign nationals cross our borders illegally is just reparations for what the United States owes “to other countries for their colonial adventures, for the wars they imposed on them, for the inequality they have built into the world order, for the excess carbon they have dumped into the atmosphere.” By all means, take your best shot at explaining why this theory is nuts, and then explain to me why any respectable newspaper would think it is worth publishing. Then Jamele Bouie, the former Slate race-baiting specialists whose extreme rants were so absurd, the Times decided to make him a regular columnist, issued this, in which he argues for sinking Marbury vs Madison and stopping the Supreme Court from blocking unconstitutional laws, because, you know, the people know best, even though most of them couldn’t name three entries in the Bill of Rights. It would make it easier to Leftist totalitarian regime to take over, though. Or, you moron, a conservative one.

Let’s have a poll!

3. I see fat people...As I’m sure you have noticed, more and more ads and TV commercials are featuring actors who range from chunky to obese. This is in response to the long-standing complaints that the media causes eating disorders and poor self-esteem by promoting unrealistic standards for female bodies. Now, we have a deadly obesity epidemic, and ads are sending the message that it’s normal to be fat. Is this really an improvement?

Ugh..late. Gotta run..back soon!

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 6/9/2019: “Big Lie” Week !

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Good Morning!

1. “Big Lie” Week coming! Hopefully today, definitely over the next week, I will begin a surprisingly long series of posts, each devoted to one of the Big Lies being used by the “resistance,” as well as the news media and the Democratic Party, to try to destroy the administration of President Trump and, if possible, remove him from office without the inconvenience of an election. I began a single post on the topic with the goal of producing a list, but it became evident that the result would be too long.

I will assemble all of the Big Lies into a single list when all the posts are done.

I should have done this earlier. The Big Lies are being thrown around more thickly than ever, nearly blotting out the sun, as Democratic Party hysteria over the failure of the Mueller Report to confirm the Russian collusion fantasy has spawned a desperate push for impeachment. In yesterday’s Times, for example, there was another screed from one of the paper’s full-time “resistance” columnists, Timothy Egan, this one proclaiming under the headline that “the president is corroding and destabilizing the institutions of democracy.” That’s on my Big Lie list, though I won’t get to it until the fourth or fifth post. I was curious: did Egan have actual evidence of such corroding and destabilizing? He did not. Here are his examples, which I have to assume are the best he could come up with: Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Smorgasbord, 6/8/2019: Yes, Double Standards Are Really Bugging Me Today

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Goddagens!

1. I’ve been trying to find away to fit Reps. Ocasio-Cortez. Tlaib and Omar into a parody of Abraham, Martin and John. “AOC, Omar and Tlaib” almost works... An investigation by Minnesota’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has determined  she violated campaign finance laws dating back to when she served a single term in the State House of Representatives from 2016-2018. The report also reveals that Omar filed joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Ahmed Hirsi, even though she was married to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi from 2009-2017.

Nice.

Let me know if you hear about this from any mainstream media outlet.

2. Individually, there are a lot of wonderful, funny, brilliant and admirable theater people. As a group, however, it is a cowardly, biased, intellectually lazy herd with the political sophistication of third graders.

I wrote on Facebook about the Ethics Alarms post on D.C.’s Studio Theater cancelling a production that reveals the text messages between the “FBI Lovebirds” who dished about how the Deep State would sabotage Donald Trump. The majority of my more than 400 Facebook friends are involved in theater. None of them commented on the issue. The apparent reasons are apathy, hypocrisy, or fear of being labelled a “Trump supporter” because they don’t applaud active censorship of the truth when it is inconvenient to the plots of “the resistance.” I don’t care which it is: the response is disgraceful…and typical.

Hollywood writer Christian Toto contacted 14 theaters across the country to ask their response to Studio’s actions. None of them responded. Among the fourteen were New Neighborhood and Slightly Altered States,  theatrical groups which took part in the  dramatic readings of the Mueller Report (the attending of which is a reliable indication of late stage Trump Derangement–I presume the theaters will follow up with readings of the phone book). Christian Toto writes,

“Imagine if unseen forces threatened violence against that Mueller Report reading, an event framed as critical of President Trump. Does anyone think those same 14 theatre groups would have remained silent?”

Should I ask my Facebook friends? Continue reading →