While debating a land-use bill at a committee meeting on Tuesday night, Pennsylvania state Rep. Matt Bradford laid his hand — for just a moment — on the left forearm of the colleague sitting next to him.
That colleague was conservative Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who interrupted Bradford mid-sentence with a personal bit of information.
“Look, I’m a heterosexual. I have a wife, I love my wife, I don’t like men — as you might. But stop touching me all the time,” Metcalfe told Bradford, who then began laughing.
Several other members of the committee, which Metcalfe chairs, giggled and smirked.
“Keep your hands to yourself,” said Metcalfe, a Republican from Butler County. “If you want to touch somebody, you have people on your side of the aisle who might like it.
“I don’t.”
Questions and Observations:
I love this story!
I wish I had made it up as an ethics hypothetical!
What difference does it make that Metcalfe is a conservative?
Would a liberal legislator who felt uncomfortable by an unwelcome touch have his complaint reported in the same way? Continue reading →
This is the revolting, understated, under-reported truth that the still rockin’ Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck has made explicit and beyond dispute. Journalists don’t report the news we need to know. They report the news they choose to allow us to know, when they choose to allow us to know it, in the form that serves their interests. This can no longer be denied by its enablers, who mostly look down on us from the Left.
Daniel Greenfield—yeah, yeah, he’s a conservative and this is on a conservative website—shut up and don’t play that game. He’s spot on—wrote in part..,
“Everybody f____g knew,” a top Hollywood screenwriter wrote of Harvey Weinstein. “Everybody knew” about Matt Lauer at NBC, Variety reports, and it “wasn’t even considered a secret.” “Every female in the press corps knew that, right, don’t get in elevator with him,” ABC’s Cokie Roberts said of Rep. Conyers.
Everybody knew.
The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals have hit CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, PBS, Vox, New Republic, Mother Jones. Forget Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. They were just the talent. Their big decisions were limited to which hairpiece looked best in all three mirrors and which naïve intern to prey on this month. The heads of the men who actually make the news are rolling left and right.
NPR lost its Chief News Editor and its Senior VP of News. Vox lost its Editorial Director. The New York Times lost its White House Correspondent and Mother Jones lost its D.C. Bureau Chief. MSNBC lost two prominent contributors who had done much to shape the political landscape, Mark Halperin, who had written the definitive media account of the ’08 election, and David Corn, who had debuted the 47% attack on Romney and got the first look at Hillary’s Trump dossier.
The massive media machine built to smear and steamroll Republicans never bothered to report what everybody on the inside already knew. The wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins in every paper, news bureau and explainer site weren’t investigating the scandals they already knew about. Those weren’t the scandals they were looking for.
That’s why no one trusts them. Hollywood, the media and the Democrats have been preaching to us about sexism and feminism for generations. Meanwhile behind the cameras and the chambers, an assault spree was in progress. And everybody knew.”
Well, that’s one of the myriad reasons nobody should trust them. I don’t think the causal connection between the #MeToo eruptions and the biased. partisan, ideologically driven manipulation of the news by our unethical, incompetent journalists has permeated the public consciousness yet—it took too long to permeate mine—but I’ll do my part to help, now that my brain has finally has engaged. Continue reading →
1 It’s a tradition, but still an embarrassment to democracy...Why isn’t this res ipsa loquitur, as in “so indisputable it ought to be embarrassing”? Rep. John Conyers, whose proclivity to engage in sexual harassment in full confidence that neither left-leaning reporters in the know (like Cokie Roberts ) nor his party’s leaders nor the victims themselves, would blow a whistle on a “civil rights icon” like him, is finally announcing a forced retirement. But he is attempting to anoint his oldest son, John Conyers III, as his successor. III has no special qualifications for elected office. He is a hedge fund manager and a business consultant whose famous father is part of his appeal to clients. The original John Conyers was used as a stepping stone to power by another unqualified family member using his name, III’s’ mother, former Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, was sentenced to 37 months in prison for bribery. She was released in 2013.
In a profanity and vulgarity-laced video III posted last year, he said in part,
“Third and fourth generations of Conyers running for office. It’s really crazy. My grandfather did an incredible job, man. Fuck. A lot of people stand on the sidelines of their own lives. It’s like you just watch that shit go by like, no, I don’t think I’m going to get in the game – that shit is short, man. Whatever you do, make sure you vote….Voting feels so good, like even if your person doesn’t win, like, it feels good. The craziest part about it all is that my dad really walked with Martin Luther King and got arrested for this shit, like, damn this shit is deep fam. I casted my vote and I was hype as shit, like, I voted, like, this is awesome and I am really thankful for people that died for that for me. Any race, whatever, it’s important to vote but I mean, like, especially African-Americans man, go vote because people really died for this shit. If you don’t know shit about a candidate, man, and you just want to vote like you can write your own name in there, but like the action of going to vote is so important.”
Or just vote for someone with a last name you recognize! He sounds like a winner to me! One hurdle: Democratic Michigan State Sen. Ian Conyers, the congressman’s great-nephew, announced his intention to run for the open seat.
This is a long, long blight on American democracy that makes me wonder if we’re really up to it. The number of voters in both parties who are so shallow, lazy, and foolish as to assume that merely being related to a famous or popular leader is sufficient reason to elect him or her is disgraceful, but it has always been thus. Among those who never would have made it into a high office without this factor are Mary Bono, Jesse Jacskon, Jr. (currently in prison), Lindy Boggs, Lurleen Wallace, Margaret Chase Smith, Robert Taft, George W. Bush, Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr, Joseph Kennedy III, Joe Kennedy II, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—anyone named Kennedy, really—current Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Cal.), Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton. There are many, many more.
A last name is not a qualification for office. Why should that even have to be pointed out in a nation founded upon the rejection of royalty?
The topic of the evening was fake news and government manipulation of it, as the Clinton era film about a phony war being launched by a President to distract from a scandal is a fascinating one to ponder through the rear view mirror. Hoffman, one of the stars of the film, recently became one of the few dubious victims of a #MeToo-er, as he was accused of groping and sexually harassing a 17-year old woman on the set of another film in 1985. Unlike most of the celebrities and power-brokers run over by the Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck, Hoffman has not had other accusers surface. He denies the woman’s characterization of what happened, and so have others, like the director of the movie in question, the filmed version of Hoffman’s Broadway turn as Willie Loman in “Death of Salesman.”
I have read fans of Oliver saying that Hoffman should have assumed that Oliver would grill him on the allegations, to which I say, “Only if Hoffman realized what a knee-jerk progressive creep Oliver is.” I think the actor assumed that Oliver was an honorable professional, and as a moderator wouldn’t hijack the discussion to embarrass Hoffman and burnish his feminist creds.
To Hoffman’s credit, he stood up to the abuse of position by Oliver and defended himself. At one point, there was this exchange:
HOFFMAN: “Do you believe this stuff you read?
OLIVER: Yes. Because there’s no point in (the accuser) lying.”
HOFFMAN: Well, there’s a point in her not bringing it up for 40 years.
OLIVER: Oh Dustin…
I would have said,
“Don’t “Oh, Dustin” me, you arrogant, posturing ass. The fact that a complaint isn’t made for that much time automatically makes it dubious. It places the accused in an impossible position; evidence has evaporated, and memories have faded. There are many reasons to lie. To get publicity, To get revenge for some real or imagined slight. To bring down someone famous or powerful. To join a mob—and regardless of the fact that the post-Weinstein focus on legitimate sexual misconduct in the workplace has created needed awareness and exposed long-time abusers, it is a mob, with all of the capacity a mob has to harm the innocent in its self-righteousness. You are playing to the mob right now, and willing to unjustly smear me to do it. You’re a disgrace.”
John Ziegler quoted a Hollywood writer who knows Hoffman and is convinced he is innocent, who said,
“Someone should tell John Oliver he’s the true heir to Joe McCarthy!Sex abuse baiting has replaced red-baiting. The ‘Sexual Blacklist’ reigns supreme. Guilty until ruined!”
Let me also remind readers that my hypothetical illustrating how a woman might retroactively decide that what she did not regard as sexual harassment years ago was harassment now was mocked by both the moderator and a Georgetown law professor during the NPR panel I participated in last week.
I am right, they are biased.
The more I think about that exchange, the more ticked off I get….
Unless he loses, and then my post, in its entirety, will read, “Good!”
The Republican Party reversed its previously signaled course this week, and appeared to be supporting the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore. This has been greeted by Democrats, the leftward pundits and news media as the equivalent of the GOP endorsing Jeffrey Daumer. “This is the end of the Republican Party!” I have read, in various forms. meanwhile, the predictable feckless Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also reversed himself. Once he said that Moore would not be seated if elected, said he believes Moore’s accusers and called for the candidate to step aside. Now he’s saying it’s up to Alabama voters to decide. “The people of Alabama are going to decide a week from Tuesday who they want to send to the Senate,” McConnell said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday. “It’s really up to them. It’s been a pretty robust campaign with a lot of people weighing in. The president and I, of course, supported somebody different earlier in the process. But in the end, the voters of Alabama will make their choice.”
Observations:
The Republican Party had an obligation not to endorse (or run) Moore before a single accusation regarding his fondness for teenage girls surfaced. He was already unfit for office; it wold be unethical to support him if he had the personal life of Pat Boone.
If the party somehow decides that stalking shopping malls for dates and persuading mothers to pimp out 14 year olds was nothing to get upset about in a U.S. Senator, there would still be the fact that Moore doesn’t believe in the rule of law, the Constitution, Equal Justice or the Bill of Rights, and that he’s an anti-gay bigot. These are more disqualifying than any sexual misconduct he engaged in 40 years ago. After all, I strongly suspect that 20-30, maybe more, U. S. Senators have engaged in past sexual misconduct that would make their continued presence in the Senate unpalatable. I don’t think any of them have acted or considered acting as Moore has, repeatedly violating the hierarchy of authority in the government, and arguing that that God has veto power over the Supreme Court. Mike Huckabee, at his worst, has said similar things, but he’s a talking head now; I can’t envision him actually defying a court order.
As I wrote back when the GOP had a chance to refuse to nominate Donald Trump, a political party is charged with maintaining the integrity of the government and our democracy, which means only offering for election candidates for office who are at least minimally qualified and trustworthy. That is a party’s duty: not just to win elections, but to win them with candidates of whom it can be reasonably and objectively said will serve the nation with honor and competence. That can’t be said of Roy Moore, and it never could.
To a great extent, all the focus on his teen dates obscure the real problem with his candidacy. Since a majority of Alabama Republicans don’t believe Moore’s accusers, this has helped him. Continue reading →
1 Wait, What??? ABC has announced that suspended reporter Brian Ross will no longer handle stories involving President Trump after Ross returns from his suspension. The suspension, you will recall, was occasioned by his misreporting of a matter involving the Mueller investigation and causing a stock market dive as a result.
This makes no sense at all. Either Ross is a professional, competent journalist who can be trusted to report the news without allowing his biases to distort the facts, or he is not. If ABC deems Ross too unreliable and partisan to report on stories involving the President of the United States, then—can I say obviously?—is also too reliable to be a reporter at all.
In his weekly unhinged hate-rant against President Trump—this one claims that favoring “national security and sovereignty; economic nationalism; and deconstruction of the administrative state” proves the President is a Nazi—Charles M. Blow writes, “Trump’s continued attacks on the media — and on truth itself — is an attempt to weaken the watchdogs, to grease the skids toward more oligarchy, more authoritarianism, more fascism.”
Are even New York Times readers gullible enough to buy that absurd description of the news media any more? The Ross fiasco is only the latest in a chain of thousands, some more minor, many not, that prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the news media is not a respectable watch dog, and that truth is the farthest thing from its agenda. The op-ed page that Blow squats on is a daily display of deceit and anti-Trump propaganda. There has never been anything like it in the history of the legitimate press. The same day Blow’s screed appeared, Times editors went full race-baiter, publishing a column that cherry picked black athletes, celebrities and politicians the President has issued insulting tweets about, regardless of the topic or issue, to show that he’s obviously a racist. (For example, since the NFL player who stood during the Mexican national anthem while having Kaepernicked for weeks in games played in the U.S., the President tweeted criticism was racist.) My junior high school journalism teacher, who advised the student newspaper, would have flagged this is terrible journalism, but Timed editors think it’s just great,
1 Actually, it’s a terrible morning. I began what has really been a hideous morning at 5 a.m. with a hacking alert on my computer. I eventually, with the help of some technicians, identified the usernames of 27 hackers who were accessing my data, apparently.
I should have written this before, I guess, but hackers, all of them, every single one no matter what their motives or what they do, are the scum of the earth, ethical black pits, and blight on civilization. Yet the popular culture loves them. There are young hackers, male, female, black, white, Asian, Indian and Hispanic, handicapped hackers…no old hackers,of every type all over the TV fare, usually as part of the heroic team on procedurals. (There are no old hackers.) What power they have! How smart they are! Often they are ex-criminals, who managed to acquire an exciting, lucrative job by displaying their hacking skills to law enforcement in the course of committing crimes. Usually, they are the funny members of the team, or the cute, like Matthew Broderick in “Wargames.” No wonder our young see these shows and think hacking is cool. In “Jurassic Park,” Lexi, the young girl who almost gets her feet bitten off by a raptor, proudly calls herself a hacker.
“Hacker” means asshole, kid.
And I was rooting for the raptor.
2. Marley was dead. One of these days I will have to do an overview of the links to your left. They are there for their value in stimulating ethical thought and discussion, not because some asked for a link exchange. Under the “Inspiration” category—you have to scroll down to see it—is “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, arguably the best and most accessible ethics story ever written. I have directed four staged readings of the classic and three “radio” versions through the years, and I don’t know a better way to get into the proper frame of mind—an ethical one– for the holiday season.
Last night I watched actor Paul Morella perform his one man “Christmas Carol” at the Olney Theater in Maryland. Paul is a long-time friend and collaborator: he has been playing Clarence Darrow in a one-man show we created together for 17 years, and we launched a continuing legal education seminar about Darrow’s legal ethics at the D.C. Bar this year. If you live in the D.C. Metropolitan area, I can not recommend the Olney show to you more enthusiastically. As Paul points out in his notes, this is how Charles Dickens himself presented the story in front of Victorian audiences, and he did not have the benefit of the evocative sound and light effects Paul employs. Charles was also not in Paul’s league as actor, I bet.
3. One down, 102, 568 to go… Brian Ross went live on ABC last week and announced the fake news story that then-candidate Donald Trump had instructed Michael Flynn to make contact with the Russians, thus triggering a massive stock market sell-off. Seven hours later, ABC sheepishly admitted that it was President-elect”Trump who had made the request of Flynn. ABC News announced last night that Ross would be suspended for four weeks without pay. Said the Disney-owned network:
“It is vital we get the story right and retain the trust we have built with our audience – these are our core principles. We fell far short of that yesterday. Effective immediately, Brian Ross will be suspended for four weeks without pay.”
Observations:
Good.
It would be very good if this became the routine response when a mainstream media reporter misinformed the public through bias, negligence or incompetence.
Raise your hand if you think that this action only occurred because the Dow Jones crashed.
My hand is up.
“Retain the trust we have built with our audience…”What trust? Anyone who trusts the news media after the past two years, not to mention the past ten, is foolish, gullible, or a Democrat.
1 Moron on board. Passengers can create personal wi-fi networks o and name them what they want while flying on some airlines, like Turkish Airlines.One passenger on a flight from Nairobi to Istanbul named his wi-fi network “bomb on board.”
Brilliant. Passengers could see that the network was in operation on the plane when they used their own devices, and became, ah, upset. In a statement, Turkish Airlines said the flight made an emergency landing at the Khartoum airport in Sudan, but the flight was safely resumed after security inspections on all passengers and the aircraft.
2. Terry McAuliffe for President! A 220-page report from Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney, was commissioned by the city council to find out what happened in Charlottesville when a white nationalist group opposing the removal of a Robert. E. Lee statue was opposed by a group including violent antifa thugs. It was released yesterday, and USA Today reports that it concluded…
“This represents a failure of one of government’s core functions — the protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury and death.”
Among the report’s other findings:
• Charlottesville police didn’t ensure separation between counter-protesters and so-called alt-right protesters upset with the city council’s decision to remove the Robert E. Lee statue from Emancipation Park.
• Officers weren’t stationed along routes to the park, but instead remained behind barricades in relatively empty zones.
• City police didn’t adequately coordinate with Virginia State Police, and authorities were unable to communicate via radio.
• State police didn’t share a formal planning document with city police, “a crucial failure.”
• Officers were inadequately equipped to respond to the clashes between the two groups, and tactical gear was not accessible to officers.
The handling of this episode by city and state officials was a warning about how tenuous support is for core American rights and values, though the news media didn’t cover it that way. Ethics Alarms did. Here is what I wrote at the time about the Governor of Virginia, now being prominently mentions as a possible Democratic Presidential nominee…after all, he is long-time Clinton loyalist, so why not?
[We] have Virginia’s governor Terry McAuliffe, who used the power and influence of his office to declare that people holding views he does not approve of are not welcome in the Old Dominion. In the midst of some patriotic grandstanding, he said…
“You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you….There is no place for you here. There is no place for you in America.”
This is leftist fascism, by definition. Who is Terry McAuliffe, or Virginia, or anyone, to say who can or should have a “place” in the United States of America? How is this statement applied to white nationalists any different legally or ethically from applying it to Muslims, or lesbians, or abortion advocates, or Catholics, Jews or libertarians?
It isn’t. The entire point of the Bill of Rights is that the government does not get to tell us what to thing, what we can chant, what we can protest, and where we can live.
Charlottesville’s mayor made similar sentiments known, and the result was that the police obeyed the cues, and a riot resulted.
Then the news media blamed Steve Bannon and President Trump. Continue reading →
“Once when I was reporting, Lyndon Johnson’s top guy gave me the word they were looking for a successor to J. Edgar Hoover. I wrote it and the day it appeared Johnson called a press conference and appointed Hoover head of the FBI for life… And when he was done, he turned to his top guy and the President said, “Call Ben Bradlee and tell him fuck you.” I took a lot of static for that–everyone said, “You did it, Bradlee, you screwed up–you stuck us with Hoover forever.” I screwed up but I wasn’t wrong.”
—-Washington Post Editor-in-Chief Ben Bradley (Jason Robards, Jr.) in “All the President’s Men.”
Surely I wasn’t the only one who immediately thought about this anecdote (apparently true) from the film version of the Woodward and Bernstein book about the Post’s Watergate investigation. All yesterday, the news services were following the New York Times “scoop,” based on anonymous leaks out of the Trump Administration, claiming that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was about to be canned within days, with CIA head Mike Pompeo, a Trump favorite, taking his place.
I know a little bit about leadership and the kind of people who get to the top of the heap, the Presidents of the United States. I also know how I would think if I disliked and distrusted a newspaper and someone betrayed me within my staff, resulting in a premature revelation of my plans. Unless I regarded a personnel matter as essential, I’d change course to discredit the leaker and make the newspaper look bad.
The media has been speculating that I fired Rex Tillerson or that he would be leaving soon – FAKE NEWS! He’s not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again! https://instagram.com/p/BcLCXDYgQed/
(Although it was reportedly a rough morning for the former Eleanor Coulouris 67 years ago_)
Or so I was told.
1. It’s NOT okay to be white? CNN Commentator Angela Rye, formerly executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, told CNN audiences that “white, liberal women” were the cause of the pressure on iconic Michigan Representative John Conyers to resign from Congress. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi would have never called for Conyers to resign if it weren’t the other “white, liberal women” pressuring her to do so. Rye, who earlier in the week said that a racist double standards was causing Conyers to be pressured to resign while white Democratic Senator Al Franken was not, said,
“I think Nancy Pelosi made a commitment to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus that she would not call for Conyers resignation before due process was allowed to take place. Now she’s being faced with the pressure of white, liberal women for the most part who have told her she needs to say something different.”
Race-baiting and using racism as an excuse for any criticism of black politicians is still the reflex response of far too many Democrats, in part because they face no consequences for doing so, and because any whites who object are tarred as white supremacists.
Until the news media and progressives have the integrity to treat this tactic for what it is, and as exactly as intolerable as white racism, the nation will continue to split hard along racial lines. I guess that’s what the Left wants.
How can CNN justify continuing to employ a “contributor” like Rye—it has some others, too—who is a stone-cold racist?
How can anyone who abhors racism in all its forms continue to patronize an intentionally racial division-promoting news source that does employ someone like Rye?
Here, for people like Rye—you know, stupid people—are some reasons Al Franken’s situation is distinguishable from that of Conyers: he is thirty years younger and shouldn’t have retired about a decade ago anyway; he, unlike Conyers, hasn’t flatly denied all of the allegations against him as they keep on coming; a Senator resigning is a bigger deal than a Representative resigning; and Nancy Pelosi doesn’t oversee Senate Democrats.
Also there are no reports of Franken habitually meeting with female staffers without his pants on. It’s small thing—well, not that small—but still…
2. No, really, it isn’t OK...In related news,Texas State University student journalist Rudy Martinez wrote an article entitled “Your DNA Is An Abomination”—referring to white DNA, of course—for The University Star, the University of Texas student publication. The piece also advocated the death of whites, which is unpleasantly close to calling for them to be killed. If you think I’m going to point out that any student who wrote this about blacks in a student newspaper would be quickly disciplined, while the newspaper editor responsible for publishing such vile material was hounded of campus, you’re right. If the University of Texas administrators had any integrity, common sense or guts, it would, this is what would happen. At least the president of Texas State, Denise M. Trauth, said that “The column’s central theme was abhorrent and is contrary to the core values of inclusion and unity that our Bobcat students, faculty, and staff hold dear.” That’s nice. Why is Texas State graduating racists? From the column:
“Ontologically speaking, white death will mean liberation for all. Accept this death as the first step toward defining yourself as something other than the oppressor. Until then, remember this: I hate you because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”
Denise Cervantes, The University Star’s editor-in-chief, pulled the column and apologized, saying “We acknowledge that the column could have been clearer in its message and that it has caused hurt within our campus community. We apologize and hope that we can move forward to a place of productive dialogue on ways to bring our community together.”
Did you miss The Great Pie Controversy? Then sit down, children, and hear the tale…
It all began when White House spokesperson Sarah Hucklebee Sanders posted a photo on Thanksgiving showing a pecan pie she baked for Thanksgiving. Above is the 2:40 p.m. tweet. The next day, American Urban Radio Networks Washington bureau chief April Ryan tweeted her doubts that the pie was real, implying that Sanders was a liar. She needed to “show it to us on a table,” Ryan demanded, and had to see “folks eating it and a pic of you cooking it.”
Now, let us pause and ponder what would make someone react like that to a simple declaration that someone had baked a pie for Thanksgiving. Why would anyone set out to embarrass and impugn an individual’s honesty over something so innocuous, based on no evidence or good reason at all? This isn’t journalism. It ‘s just meanness, motivated by sheer bias and hate. Conduct like that is so contrary to the Golden Rule that it constitutes tarnish.
And, of course, Ryan’s demands were also stupid and unreasonable. How would Sanders, where she so inclined, produce photos of guests eating a pie after it had been eaten?
Never mind. This example of disgusting and gratuitous reporter enmity was quickly picked up by the anti-Trump journalism establishment as an actual news story. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 