Kaboom!

Well, I Sure Know What Channel I’ll Be Avoiding In the Morning From Now On…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I typically play untrustworthy news source roulette every morning as I have that crucial first cup of coffee. Today the silver ball landed in the Fox News slot. Even before that ad I just posted about made my head explode, spraying bone, brains and blood all over the room (and my dog), one of the fungible Fox Bleached Blondes had already made me wish I had stayed in bed. All the Fox Blondes are the same. though some have worse voices that others, and Dana Perino is interesting to watch because her botoxed face is completely immobile except for the occasional blink and her lips, which make her face resemble those creepy “Clutch Cargo” cartoons where moving human lips were superimposed on cartoon faces.

But I digress. This particular Fox segment featured an interview with the actor I had never heard of who plays St. Peter in a new Fox movie or series or something. The Fox News hostess said that the thing was about “the incredible life of St. Peter.”

Incredible is right! There are absolutely no credible accounts of St. Peter’s life, no evidence, no documentation, no historical accounts, nothing. “Tradition” has him founding the Catholic Church, but that’s impossible, so people who aren’t incredibly gullible pretty much agree that at best there were two different Peters, the disciple and the first Pope. We don’t know much about either of them.

Fox News is supposed to be a trusted news source. Its alleged journalists shouldn’t be proselytizing, promoting Christianity, or representing Bible apocrypha as fact. It’s not fact, but faith, or legend, or mythology, but whatever it is, if a Fox News journalist will tell viewers that it is fact, what else that is of dubious provenance will Fox News call true?

Unethical, unprofessional, misleading and stupid.

But at least Fox News runs ads showing the President of the United States hawking cheap watches….

KABOOM! I Never Thought We’d See a U.S. President (Or Senator, or Governor, or Judge) Stoop To This…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Do I really have to explain what’s unethical about this?

I hope not.

It’s something special, all right. Talk about shattering “norms.” Also good taste, the respect for the office, the line between celebrity and public service, and… well, you fill in the rest.

I’ll be in my bathroom, throwing up.

Nah, The Democratic Party Hasn’t Become Openly Anti-Semitic! It’s Just That One of Its Biggest Allies Wants To Erase Jews From the Holocaust…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I read about this, I was certain that some NEA-hating conservative news source was exaggerating. Nope. It is right there in black and white, as you can see above in the entry from the National Education Association’s newly released 2025 handbook. My brain found this so shocking that it refused to explode as it should have, and just went into a safety shutdown. I can’t account for the last three hours…

The nation’s largest teacher’s union is a massive contributor to the Democratic Party, a major reason why public education has deteriorated into ideological indoctrination, and a force for ill in American culture and society. It was, for instance, substantially responsible for the disastrous decision to close the schools in the midst of the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck. Now it has openly proclaimed its hostility toward not just Israel, but the Jewish people.

The handbook, the NEA’s guide for the union’s nearly 3 million members, describes the Holocaust as having “12 million victims… from different faiths.” As unquestioned historical sources make undeniable, “The Final Solution” was at the core of Hitler’s extermination project. The NEA says the union will “promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day” by “recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.” This section is on the page before the one shown above:

The NEA then promotes “Nakba” education, which describes Israel’s founding in 1948 as the “forced, violent displacement” of 750,000 Palestinians. The document further pledges to teach that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” and defends educators’ and students’ “free speech in defense of Palestine.” In case the graphic above is too hard to read, here are the key sections:

States one news source, “Critics argue the NEA is promoting a one-sided, revisionist history while ignoring the central role of Jews in the Holocaust.” This would warrant a “Ya think?” except that I have used my quote for today in the previous post. Where’s the “argument”? That is exactly what the NEA does in the handbook, and the position goes beyond unethical into evil. The group is obviously proud of its position and confident that the Democratic Party and the public supports it.

Did you know that the Republicans and Donald Trump are Nazis?

Now what? Here is what…

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Now THESE Are Unethical Doctors….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Bart Writer, 56, died shortly after undergoing cataract surgery at Colorado’s InSight Surgery Center on February 3, 2023. The reason? The two doctors performing the operation were distracted by playing “music bingo” and failed to notice that he had stopped breathing.

A lawsuit filed by his widow claimed that the “the distraction of the music bingo game … contributed to the operating room staff’s failure to monitor Mr. Writer’s vital signs during the procedure” and ultimately led to his death. The game involved listening to ’70s and ’80s songs and linking band names to the letters B-I-N-G-O. Dr. Carl Stark Johnson, the surgeon, and Dr. Michael Urban, the anesthesiologist, regularly played the game during operations and admitted this in their depositions.

The lawsuit was settled, but now the two doctors swear the distraction had nothing to do with their patient’s death. Well, to be more specific, the two doctors are blaming each other. Johnson, who has performed over 25,000 cataract surgeries, blames Urban for silencing critical monitoring alarms without informing the surgical team. “I know that he wasn’t paying attention to the vital signs and doing his job,” he said. Urban, who is now practicing in Oregon, stands by his care and disputes Johnson’s version of events.

Writer, meanwhile, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, is still dead.

Questions: Why is that surgery center still treating patients? Why hasn’t it been razed for a parking lot?

_________________

Pointer: JutGory

Sad News: Ethics Alarms’ Esteemed AWOL Columnist Just Posted This Trump-Deranged Meme on Facebook…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Pray for Curmie.

Witness to “Pay to Play”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am not quite ready to write about the project I am currently involved in, but when I do, it will be a major story, and not just on Ethics Alarms. I found myself, mostly by happenstance, at Ground Zero in a massive scandal for the legal profession. Now I am working to expose it, make the public and the legal profession aware of it, and to both fix the problem and take measures in multiple sectors to ensure that it is permanently fixed. I’m not doing this alone; indeed I am focusing primarily on the ethical regulation front. However, the alliance is growing, and includes an insider whistle-blower, several public interest organizations, litigators, law firms, and at least one national association.

Regard the foregoing as a preview of coming attractions. This post is about a conversation I witnessed that continues to bother me, and will probably bother you as well. Some of the participants in the project were meeting with a prominent, well-connected D.C. attorney with a long history of legislative involvement. The topic was whether an Executive Order from the President would super-charge our effort. The lawyer said that he was close to an individual who “meets with the President every week” and that the contact was capable of carrying the EO request into the Oval Office.

“But it will cost you,” the lawyer said. “Access isn’t free.” “How much?” one of my delegation asked. “You give me a figure,” was the answer, “and I’ll let you know what would get it done.” The lawyer shook his head and smiled at $100,000, and kept giving a negative response until the number reached $100 million.” Now you’re talking,” he said. “That’s what this kind of thing takes.”

The group is confident that it could raise that kind of money—the scam we will expose and undo involves billions—but its ethics consultant, me, pointed out that our mission is to eliminate widespread and destructive unethical conduct. Using unethical means to accomplish that goal will taint the whole enterprise, corrupt it, and undermine trust in its motives and participants.

There will be no $100 million pay-to-play cash deals, at least as long as I am involved. However, the bland, “it’s always done this way”/”that’s just how Washington works” response we got from that prominent lawyer is by turns chilling, disillusioning, and discouraging.

KABOOM! Well, My Head Just Exploded, and If You Read This, Yours Will Too…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Unbelievable. Outrageous. Disgusting. Amazing.

And yet, oddly satisfying and welcome!

That “60 Minutes” segment on Kamala Harris in which CBS and the once-respected new magazine tried to influence the 2024 election by editing a Harris interview to make her seem like less of a babbling, intellectually-challenged fool — the subject of Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS — was nominated yesterday by Emmys for “outstanding edited interview.”

The revelation that the television industry approves of deceptive partisan propaganda that helps Democrats and advances progressive agendas isn’t the shocking aspect of the nomination. Anyone paying attention know that already. What is head-blowing is that the Emmys would be so open about its bias and rejection of ethics.

The nomination is a direct and flagrant gesture of defiance to President Trump. It is not merely political and partisan, but openly and intentionally political and partisan. Trump sued CBS for $20 billion as a result of this all-time low-point in fair, unbiased, and trustworthy journalism, and should have, if only to make sure the smoking gun “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” episode wasn’t jammed in a metaphorical memory hole as the Axis media continues to pretend that it is interested in informing the American public rather than manipulating it.

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KABOOM! My Head Just Exploded! Biden’s Executive Orders Used an Autopen???

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wait, what? An Executive Order can be legal and go into effect without a President actually signing it? A so-called “autopen signature” counts? EVEN WHEN THE PRESIDENT MAY NOT BE CAPABLE OF KNOWING WHAT HE’S “SIGNING”?

A Heritage Foundation investigation has discovered that the majority of official documents signed by President Joe Biden used the same autopen signature. The Oversight Project, which is an initiative within the conservative Heritage Foundation that investigates the government, announced, “We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his Presidency. All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year. Here is the autopen signature,” the group said, attaching photo examples like these:

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Former President Barack Obama Runs For 2024’s “Hypocrite Of The Year”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Oh, shut up, Barack!

In a speech yesterday at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, Barack Obama demonstrated his abundance of gall by calling for an end to “divisiveness” and for Americans to embrace compromise while building coalitions, something he refused to do as President.

Obama, after pledging to be a President of all the people, “bringing black and white together,”also exacerbated racial divisions like no President before him since Woodrow Wilson, a big Jim Crow fan. He chose to avoid political compromise during his entire term, laying the foundations of the gridlock we have seen since with the enthusiastic assistance of Nancy Pelosi in the House and the now thankfully dead Harry Reid Senate. As a former President, Obama did not extend his successor the same courtesy George W. Bush extended to him, which was to stay on the sidelines and withhold public criticism. He vividly illustrated why the unwritten rule and “democratic norm” in the U.S. has been that former Presidents, as the New York Times stated in 2007, “should speak respectfully of their successors, or at least with some measure of restraint.”

Did you know that Donald Trump doesn’t respect “democratic norms”?

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Breaking: Trump Has A New Attorney General Nominee, and Arguably, She’s Worse Than Matt Gaetz…

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

It’s Pam Bondi.

Ugh.

  • She was the Ethics Alarms Unethical Prosecutor of the Year in 2016.
  • That year I wrote,

    “Florida’s attorney general Pam Bondi personally solicited a political contribution from Donald Trump while she considered joining an investigation of alleged fraud at Trump University and its affiliates, AP reports Trump’s $25,000 donation to Bondi came from a Trump family foundation in a likely violation of rules surrounding legitimate activities by 501 C (3) charities, which are not allowed to engage in political grant-making. And Justice for All, a political group backing Bondi’s re-election,  reported receiving the check on Sept. 17, 2013 — four days after Bondi’s office publicly announced she was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University’s activities.”

  • Still later, after the 2016 election, I wrote,

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