1. The President has gotten much better at delivering speeches from a teleprompter which means that he’s worked on it, something neither George W. Bush or John McCain had the commitment and diligence to do. Trump was always better when riffing, but that led into interminable, unfocused rants, like his infamous 2024 nomination acceptance speech. Last night’s speech was, for Trump, remarkably crisp, succinct, and well-delivered.
2. As he was starting off, making the speech feel like a State of the Union message, I could see in my mind’s eye all the “lies” that the Axis fact-checkers would complain about this morning. I wish the President didn’t have to describe everything he views as an accomplishment in hyperbolic terms, as a superlative: “the best,” “the greatest,” “the biggest.” Surely he must know that the habit automatically invites skepticism: if some achievement really was the best, Trump would have a difficult time getting anyone to believe it. Isn’t there an advisor, a friend, a supporter, someone who could tell him this is a self-defeating approach?
3. My vote for the most unethical hyperbole last night: “This country was dead.”
4. The President was pointed as he brought out into the open the Deep State sabotage and the mainstream media propaganda that has hindered both of his terms. Good.
As it doesn’t come up that often, once again I must review what the Ethics Alarms “Kaufman” designation signifies. I hand out the award for alleged ethics violation or other news stories so unremarkable and trivial that they are literally not worth talking about or thinking about, except to note how foolish it was to raise the matter in the first place. From the EA glossary:
“George S. Kaufman was a celebrated wit and playwright (“The Man Who Came To Dinner”, “You Can’t Take It With You”, and many more, usually in tandem with Moss Hart), and he moonlighted as a panelist on the early TV show, “This is Show Business,” which often featured a celebrity who would consult the panel members about a personal problem. On one show, singer Eddie Fisher ( father of Carrie and Isla, husband of Debbie Reynolds and, scandalously, adulterous lover and eventual pre-Richard Burton spouse of Elizabeth Taylor) wanted advice from the panel because desirable women refused to go out with him because of his youth. Kaufman ‘s unsympathetic reply:
“Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the development and construction of the Mount Palomar telescope. The Mount Palomar telescope is an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope. Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to see my interest in your problem.”
A “Kaufman” is awarded when someone, usually in the news media, makes a big deal about something so trivial and unremarkable that it demands apathy. We are all familiar with fake news, and one of its more annoying sub-categories are stories that are presented and framed as news that aren’t news at all. People Magazine just came out with a doozy, as “Hazel” used to say on the long-running sitcom that nobody but me remembers: “Mom Defends Decision to Give Her Daughter an Unconventional Name: ‘It Just Felt Perfect’ (Exclusive)”
SURPRISE LANDING An insect crashed @KTLA reporter @RachelMenitoff's live shot last night, and we must praise her professionalism. Who else could remain this cool!? pic.twitter.com/a0naM2zxq9
— KTLA 5 Morning News (@KTLAMorningNews) July 15, 2026
This is a companion piece to yesterday’s celebratory post honoring the DoorDash driver who completed her delivery after being hit by a car. With her “the show must go on!” exemplary professionalism, Menitoff’s composure under extreme “EW!” has to be cheered, and, arguably, was even more impressive than Miracle’s performance under duress.
Menitoff was reporting live for KTLA in Los Angeles on the lingering effects of Southern California’s heat wave when a huge flying cockroach landed on her shoulder and crawled across her chest.
“And it’s a lot more comfortable at this hour, but we’re still in the 80s here in the Valley,” Menitoff was saying, “So overnight temperatures aren’t necessarily dropping, and this leads to less recovery time from the daytime heat…” Meanwhile, the ugly thing was visible as it scurried across her stomach, chest and neck before jumping onto her microphone, presumably to make a statement.
Only after the live shot ended did Menitoff exclaim, “Oh gosh! Oh, I feel something,” and try to deal with the bug. “I knew it was on me,” she said later. “But I knew if I took notice of it, I wouldn’t be able to continue on with the report. So I said to myself, just get through this moment and then kind of shake it off.”
Brava. Unfortunately, since everything is political now, even this incident was quickly exploited for partisan effect. In a classic of over-reach, Vigilante ex-mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt shared the clip on X to criticize Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is challenging incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in the 2026 mayoral race. Pratt said the insect symbolized conditions in Raman’s council district, where the Rachel’s report took place.
The House this week passed a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would set America’s clocks to daylight saving time permanently once it clears the Senate and is signed into law by the President. The bill itself raises no ethics issues at all: it is the reactions to it and the reasons, real and alleged, for those reactions that ping ethics alarms.
The headline is tongue-in-cheek, incidentally. Most of my life I heard that Daylight Savings Time was Ben Franklin’s idea. Ben was an amazingly prolific innovator and out-of-the-box thinker, but he was not the originator of the practice, so we can neither blame him nor praise him. Another myth is that DST was implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the strongest opponents of DST because the factors that influence farming schedules, like dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are dictated by the sun, so clocks going back and forth just complicates things. In general, Retailers, sports, and tourism interests like daylight saving, while agricultural and evening-entertainment interests do not.
Personally, I just want one time in place all year, because the changeover is traumatic for me whenever it happens. I have a long list of screw-ups, missed deadlines and meetings on my record. I bet no year has ever passed without one.
Like so many policies, the Daylight Savings Time tradition has had and continues to have all manner of unintended consequences, and those are controversial too. There is some data that shows that crime and accidents are reduced by DST, but precise causation issues make such data inherently dubious. A 2017 analysis of 44 studies concluded that DST leads to electricity savings of 0.3%, but we now know, or should, we can’t trust studies because we can’t trust the reseachers who perform them. Ditto for a 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics that estimated that “the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually,” primarily by increasing sleep deprivation. Another study claimed that hospitals see a 24% increase in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal crashes each year when the time changes.
President Trump has advocated permanent Daylight Savings Time, so that’s enough for the Axis of Unethical Conduct to oppose it. Predictably, the Washington Post rushed to publish “Why standard time is better for your health than daylight saving time:A proposed bill would make daylight saving time permanent. But standard time is actually better for your body, according to science.”
According to science! Even the Post’s readers tended to agree that this take was hooey. A typical reaction:
The story is sad but not exactly one that should inspire much sympathy. From the AP report:
“A man running from an encounter with immigration and other federal agents in Florida was struck and killed by a tractor trailer on Tuesday, authorities said….The 28-year-old was among four occupants of a vehicle that stopped in the parking lot of a gas station and convenience store in the St. Augustine area before 7 a.m. During an encounter with agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations, the four fled on foot, with one darting across a busy road into the path of the semi…”
Let’s be clear, now: a man was eluding law enforcement officials when he ran across a “busy road” and was hit by a truck. There are exactly two possible parties responsible for that death: the man running across the road, and the truck driver. There is nobody else to blame, and finding the truck driver responsible requires a quite stretch. Here is how the Associated Press characterizes the fatality, however:
That is pure deceit and indecent false framing. In cases where an individual dies at the hands of ICE agents, justifiably or not, the conduct of the agents can be fairly considered factors in the deaths. However, an individual who resists arrest and recklessly flees into the grill of a truck has not been killed by ICE, nor is ICE responsible for the death. The dead man would be alive if he obeyed law enforcement, as anyone in this country is obligated to do. He chose to run into traffic; ICE didn’t make him do that.
Never mind, though. You know we’ll be reading diatribes from the open borders fanatics that the dead man had a family, and was a respected member of the community, and he is dead because of Trump’s Gestapo. The Associated Press (and others) enable these advocates for illegal immigration with their deliberate anti-ICE and Trump Deranged spin. Naturally, other agents of pro-illegal immigration propaganda will add this death to the total that we will see repeatedly cited to show how “brutal” the enforcement of our immigration laws are.
An exchange yesterday between Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) and Republican Representative Brandon Gill during a House hearing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is rapidly going “viral” this morning, no thanks to any left-leaning news aggregators and the Axis media, which are trying to ignore it.
During the hearing, Representative Pressley criticized Republican anti-DEI policies as harmful to women (translation: not discriminating against men is harmful to women) and in her usual obnoxious “I wish I didn’t have to deal with these racist idiots” air asked Representative Gill to support her legislation to support the justly dead-in-the-water Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Gill immediately responded, “Does it define what a woman is?” and was met with crickets by Pressley, who pretended he hadn’t said that and muttered weakly, “I look forward to your signing on.” Gill, triumphant, replied, “I just was hoping for some analytical clarity, but thank you.”
Gil’s question was deft and significant. It instantly drew attention to the intellectual dishonesty, internal contradictions and the procrustean nature of so many progressive obsessions, including affirmative action (violating laws against discrimination in order to remedy discrimination), trans-female sports competition (harming biological women by warping Title IX) and, of course, DEI.
On a day like today, when there are already a lot of juicy ethics stories on the runway, I have learned from bitter experience not to tackle the most complicated one until my brain wakes up, typically after two giant mugs of coffee and a few of hours. Thus I choose this to kick off the day: CNBC released its ranking of the ten worst states to live in 2026 based on its “Quality of Life “scores. Hilariously, the list contained only Republican-run conservative states. This was preordained because the criteria for the ranking included such leftist-priority items as “air quality” [read “climate change measures”], “healthcare access” [abortion restrictions], “worker protections” [ high minimum wages and DEI policies], and civil rights laws [Can biological males compete against girls? Can they use women’s rest rooms?]
Upon reflection, I am surprised “number of Democratic Socialist elected officials” wasn’t one of the factors weighed.
The rejiggered”Quality of Life” scores were then used to create CNBC’s best states for businesses list, so “blue” states dominate that list like the “red” states fill up the “suckiest places to live.”
Seems fair!
When consulted, a sample group of 1,000 aborted babies overwhelmingly disagreed that the states supporting abortions enhanced their “quality of life.”
This is a remarkable exchange for several reasons.
First, Ana Navarro, the long-time fake Republican, token Hispanic, DEI and Trump-Deranged shill who has a regular platform on ABC’s “news show” “The View,” makes a deceitful statement designed to mislead viewers, especially those who have been in a cave for the past two years. “There have been at least five” people killed by ICE she intones, as if the immigration enforcement agents have been going house to house murdering people. Her deception is right out of the playbook of the Left’s “defund the police” lunatics. Law enforcement officers sometimes have to shoot people to protect themselves. They also sometimes kill people who irresponsibly place themselves in harm’s way by interfering with the officers’ lawful execution of their duties, or when lawbreakers resist arrest. These incidents are investigated and sometimes result in discipline or even criminal charges.
Second, CNN’s Abby Philips, who has to be the most dead-faced round-table moderator in the history of television and one of the most incompetent, just sits there like a barnacle, as usual. An ethical moderator would correct Ana’s garbage on the spot, lest the discussion be built on a false foundation.
Finally, listen to Navarro’s babbling when she is caught like a rat in a trap! Caroline Sunshine asks, “Do you know the names as well of Americans who have been killed by illegal immigrants? Do you have that list, too?” [Aside: Sunshine is one of those people who makes me realize that I made a serious wrong turn somewhere in what I laughingly call “my career”: to say her credentials to be a pundit on CNN in such a discussion are paper-thin is to be generous. Sunshine is a former Disney and B-movie starlet who was rapidly advanced through GOP and Trump I press ranks substantially on the basis of her looks.] That was exactly the right question to expose Navarro’s bias and intellectual dishonesty. Navarro’s reply…
I expect politicians to be hypocritical and without integrity. Journalists, however, especially those who engage in commentary, must display consistent principles, values and priorities or be disregarded, ignored and reviled as destructive, unprofessional, untrustworthy hacks.
Anahit Misak “Ana” Kasparian styles herself a progressive political commentator, a media host and a journalist. With the blatant hypocrisy revealed in the tweets above—first, her pious condemnation of anyone who would gloat about someone’s death, followed by her tweets today rejoicing in the death of lifetime public servant Lindsay Graham—Kasparian reveals herself to be a monster by her own standards.
…and the league is letting them get away with it, while the Axis sports media pretends not to notice.
Three years into her pro career, Caitlin Clark is a recognized superstar and a driver of WNBA attendance, merchandising and popularity. She is, however, a white heterosexual in a league dominated by black lesbians, so she has been targeted, attacked, bullied and injured out of, as Outkick recently put it, “a loathsome combination of race idolatry, jealousy, and territorialism.”
“As Clark’s popularity grew during her rookie season, critics increasingly attributed it to “whiteness” rather than talent, charisma, or style of play. Commentators such as Jemele Hill argued that Clark’s appeal was inseparable from her being a straight White woman in a league made up primarily of Black and lesbian players. “We would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity,” Hill told the Los Angeles Times in 2024.”
Hill is an anti-white racist and routinely enables others in her quest as regular Ethics Alarms readers know. For example, she claimed that Harvard’ incompetent, plagiarizing DEI president Claudine Gay was forced to resign because she was black, not because she embarrassed the university. [Incidentally, I am constantly confused because Jemele Hill is a black anti-white racist female sports commentator and Jamelle Bouie is a black anti-white racist male New York Times columnist. I know they are different people, but neither should be taken seriously. I apologize in advance if I mix them up, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.]
Clark was viewed as an outsider and an interloper on black, gay territory, so she was targeted from the beginning. Chennedy Carter hit her with a blindside hip and then entered a social media post encouraging other players to “hurt” her next time. (Baseball would suspend a player who did that.) DiJonai Carrington poked Clark in the eye during a playoff game later posted online accusing Clark of “white privilege.” Angel Reese committed several hard fouls against Clark and posted TikTok video mocking her as a “white girl afraid to catch the fade.” Nice. Baseball would suspend a player who did that, too.
Ethics Alarms 