Law & Law Enforcement

Ethics Quiz: The “Incestuous” Candidacy

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Troy Jackson, the latest un-democratically selected candidate being offered to the public by Maine Democrats, is the Great White Male Hope for the unprincipled party as it tries to take over the U.S. Senate “by any means necessary.” You will recall that he became a necessary means after much-heralded lying, Nazi woman-abuser Graham Platner was revealed to be…well, a lying, Nazi woman-abuser. Oopsie!

Jackson has little in his record or character to suggest fitness to serve as a U.S. Senator, but what conservative critics are focusing their fire on is this, as the New York Post reports:

“Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson is in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart — who is also his second cousin, according to a new report. Jackson, 58, and Lana Pelletier share two adult sons and the same great-grandparents, according to Thursday’s report by independent journalist Steve Robinson, who notes that such relationships are both legal under state law and not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.While Jackson, a onetime logger and the former president of the Maine State Senate, has described Pelletier as his wife in the past, locals tell Robinson the couple has never been legally married.

“Jackson grew up in the village of Allagash (population 237 as of the 2020 census) and attended nearby Fort Kent High School with Pelletier.According to geneological records unearthed by Robinson, Jackson’s maternal grandmother — Albertine Pelletier O’Leary — and Pelletier’s paternal grandfather — Louis A. Pelletier Sr. — were siblings, making Jackson’s mother, Colleen McBreairty, and Pelletier’s father, Louis Jr., first cousins.Since 1985, Maine law has prohibited marriages to an individual’s parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, or uncles.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of this Weekend:

Is this a legitimate campaign issue?

Legal Insurrection concludes, “All Maine Democrats had to do after Platner dropped out was find a normal person to take his place. It’s amazing that such a simple task was a challenge.” The conservative site reposts many contemptuous tweets, such as conservative pundit Jim Treacher’s…

OUT: Third Reich

IN: Second cousins

and Stephen L. Miller’s “The plan? We convince them to drop an abusive Nazi and then replace him with someone married to his own cousin.”

My view? I find this the kind of right wing “gotcha!”pearl-clutching that loses conservatives credibility. It’s mainly (Mainely?) Ick rather than ethics. He didn’t marry his cousin, he sort-of married his second cousin, which isn’t illegal incest in Maine or as far as I can find, anywhere else. Franklin D. Roosevely married and had children with his distant cousin (you’ll notice that they had the same last names). Thomas Jefferson and John Adams married third cousins; John and Abigail’s line was eventually stuffed with geniuses and high achievers. I have a long-time friend (well, she used to be a friend until Trump Derangement caused her to cut me off, and I was a particularly good and generous friend…grrrrrr!) who chose her first cousin as her third husband, which my late wife found disgusting. They were past the children stage; I found it interesting but hardly scandalous.

Just Because The NYT’s “There Are So Many Reasons to Reject Todd Blanche. Here’s Another One” Is Completely Biased Doesn’t Mean Todd Blanche Should Be Confirmed…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

UPDATE: After this was posted, the Senate confirmed Blanche despite the fact, and it is the fact, that doing so was indefensible and irresponsible.

So much that it horrifying from an ethical perspective has occurred lately in all sectors and in both political parties (actually “all three” might be more accurate, with the socialist/communists slowly but surely stomping out the Democratic part like the Cro-Magnons wiped out Neanderthals) that I am searching through the thesaurus for synonyms. I’m sick of writing unethical, unconscionable, inexcusable, unforgivable, indefensible, disgraceful, nauseating, shameful, corrupt, incompetent and irresponsible, so I can only imagine how sick of reading it you must be. Let’s see: Execrable. Gotta use that one more. Untenable? Not strong enough. Of course, I could always default to Prof. Turley’s academic weenie-speak, with “troubling” and “problematic.” I’ll work on it. Meanwhile, here’s what I posted before Republicans mortified themselves…

***

I was just about to write a post about how confirming Todd Blanche as the new U.S. Attorney General is so unethical and unconscionable that any Senator voting for him should put a paper bag over his or her head. Then I was compelled to click on the above titled op-ed [gift link!]today by a former Trump first term Justice Department official. His analysis is so biased and frequently full of…beans that it made my stomach hurt. Nevertheless, Blanche is a disgrace. He should not only be be unanimously rejected, he should be disbarred. There are others, but one reason is enough. And EA has written about it several times.

Let me refresh your memory, as they used to say on “Perry Mason”:

“In May, Ethics Alarms expressed its horror here, here and here over the unethical, conflicted deal engineered by Trump’s acting-Attorney General and Trump’s Treasury Dept. to bestow undeserved benefits on the President, his family, and the Trump Organization. I wrote at the end of the last of these, “I continue to think, or at least hope, that this abomination will be stopped. As I already wrote when asked in a comment, this, unlike the artificial offenses behind the two purely partisan impeachments in Trump’s first term, is a genuine impeachable offense”…U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said in her 56-page order yesterday that the President and his fellow plaintiffs, his adult sons and the Trump Organization LLC, may not refer in any judicial, administrative or other official proceeding to the “purported ‘settlement agreement’” that gave them broad protection from federal government audits and investigations. The judge then sanctioned the attorneys that represented Trump in his personal capacity, Daniel Z. Epstein of Epstein & Co. LLC and Alejandro Brito of Brito PLLC.Good. They should be sanctioned. They should be suspended. If I had the choice, I would disbar them. They are both a disgrace to the legal profession.”

An so is Blanche, who approved this illegal, unconstitutional, monstrosity. Senator Lisa Murkowski, the nepotism RINO Senator from Alaska, proved that, like a blind squirrel, she can find a metaphorical acorn when she became the second Republican to oppose Blanche’s confirmation. Murkowski said in a statement that she feared that Blanche would “fail to check the worst impulses of this administration,” and cited, among other less convincing examples (like the Epstein Files), the settlement agreement that included the creation of a $1.8 billion compensation fund that could have been used to pay people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration,” Ms. Murkowski said. “I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.”

Ya think? That he agreed to that deal at all is smoking gun proof that Blanche is a political hack who will ask “How high?” when the President says “Jump!” GOP Senators are, idiotically, saying that they will support Blanche if he promises that he won’t pursue that deal. So Blanche issued documents narrowing or dissolving aspects of the settlement that he shoould have never approved in the first place. So what? I don’t care if he groveled an abject apology, wore a hair shirt, flagellated himself and ate dirt in penance. He approved the evil thing: it’s signature significance for an untrustworthy, corrupt, incompetent wimp. Would he be worse than his predecessor Pam Bondi, whom Ethics Alarms flagged as one of Trump’s worst appointments from the start? Gee, I don’t know: was “Bay Watch” dumber than “Hart to Hart”? We are still talking about a level below reasonable tolerance.

Pages: 1 2

Ethics Alarms Challenge: Name All The Ways This Meme Is Misleading and Breathtakingly Stupid….

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

My Facebook friends really like it!

This is the level of intellect at which foes of enforcing immigration laws are functioning. The director of the Smithsonian American History Museum gives land acknowledgements, meaning that she must think that map is profound.

Wrong! Athletes Should Shut Up About Political and Social Issues and Do What They Are Paid To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I remember sports columnist Steve Buckley, now with the Athletic (the Times’ captive sports publication) from my halcyon days in Boston. Now he’s issuing badly-reasoned, ethically blind sports commentary from a national platform. Yecchh.

As a special annoyance, his poorly-reasoned observations on sports figures weighing in on national controversies are under a misleading headline: “Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they lose.” I assumed from those words that Steve was going to echo my long-time position regarding narrow-range celebrities in general: “Shut up and sing/dance/act/ dribble/run/kick/pitch.”

But no.

“…Sports people (and this includes sports media people) who weigh in on political and social issues can count on being inundated with anonymous directives that they should “stick to sports.” It’s a mystery who these people are who feel empowered to tell others to stick to sports. The mere utterance suggests somebody with a doctorate in government affairs, or who perhaps has served in Congress or the diplomatic corps. The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards. At the risk of boring you with seventh-grade civics, but to use a kitschy sports term to make the point, this would be a good time to have a Turn Back the Clock event that teaches and celebrates the protections of the First Amendment. And if you happen to be a member of a championship team who’s been invited to the White House, go ahead and go. Or don’t go. Do that First Amendment thing and tell everyone else to screw off. For sports people who want to take a stand on this or that issue and who are prepared to deal with the avalanche of positive and negative commentary that ensues, go right ahead. For athletes who choose to say nothing, allow them that right. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

Because things are complicated, Steve—now I remember why I skipped your work at the Boston Herald—and because they are complicated, most sports celebrities have nothing of value to contribute in understanding them. Celebrities do, however, have outsized metaphorical megaphones that give their usually simple-minded opinions far more influence on the public than is healthy for democracy and the quality of civic discourse. I know why Buckley has his own simple-minded view of this issue: sportswriters are, with few exceptions (not him, obviously), also unqualified by intellect, education, experience and skill, to comment publicly on political and social policy matters. Like all journalists, they think they are smarter than they are. This column is a useful piece of evidence to the contrary.

The inspiration for Buckley’s piece was Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci after the Ethics Villain repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing last week, plus Sophie Cunningham‘s public statements regarding trans-females competing in women’s sports, along with fellow WNBA star and team mate Caitlin Clark’s refusal to get drawn into the controversy. Right off the bat (that’s a sports metaphor), Steve trips on his sneaker laces by mixing apples and oranges (a fruit analogy).

Pages: 1 2

Another Nauseating Chapter From The Presumed-Racism-and-Police- Brutality Playbook

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.

Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange.  Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:

Family of teen killed by Elkhart police seeks state investigation amid wave of violence

The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,

“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”

Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:

Pages: 1 2

As If The Fauci Scandal Wasn’t Enough “Republicans Pounce!” Fodder For The Dishonest Axis News Media…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is axiomatic that whenever a news event casts legitimate shadows on Democrats, progressives or their allies, the story is framed by the Axis media as a partisan attack by the political Right (Republicans, conservatives, President Trump) with the event itself de-emphasized. “Republicans pounce!” is the short-hand name for the phenomenon.

Of course the practice is unethical and deliberately misleading. The news media’s coverage of the Fauci hearings was a classic of the genre. For example, ABC’s  correspondent Jay O’Brien said on Wednesday’s Good Morning America that the retired scientist would, at “85 years old,” have to face “a fiery hearing” because he “has long been a target of” Rand Paul, who obtained his “private diary.” Later, on World News Tonight O’Brien described Fauci as “the man millions of Americans turned to for answers during the COVID pandemic” now being “needled” by Republicans even though he “served in government for 54 years and has testified in more than 200 hearings.”

That commentary is revolting in its mendacity. People who do bad things need to be held responsible, and how old they happen to be when the piper must be paid is irrelevant. Citing Fauci’s age was a pure appeal to emotion: “Aw, poor old guy, can’t they just leave him alone?” The diary, legally and factually, was not private because it was created on a government platform. Yeah, sure, millions of Americans turned to Fauci for answers, including the President, and he lied to them all, repeatedly, or gave wrong answers.

Pages: 1 2

Seattle’s Self-Inflicted Police Chief Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t understand this at all. Even for Seattle, the current controversy over the ex-chief of police is nuts.

The city’s far left Mayor Katie Wilson is under fire for the city’s botched handling of the Bite of Seattle mass shooting, which saw seven people shot with three dying. A toddler was among those wounded. Seattle Police issued a brief report to the public shortly after the shooting, urging everyone to stay away from the area, but nothing more for five hours, when a press conference was called. The city’s emergency alert system wasn’t activated, though this is exactly the kind of situation it was designed for.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town, as he is remarkably frequently. He was at a police convention in Dallas; since March, he’s also attended police gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Barnes doesn’t reside in Seattle full time, you see. He lives part-time in Chicago, where his family is. Over the last six months, Barnes has been out of town for about seven weeks, including four trips to Chicago.

When he got back to his place of employment, Barnes got in the face of a reporter who dared to ask him whether reports were accurate that Barnes planned to be away from Seattle until mid-August, and whether his travel schedule might be a bit problematic. Barnes stepped into his questioner and said, “I don’t have to tell you where I go…,” before a city employee pulled the chief away from the reporter and out of the room. At another news conference, Barnes denied that he frequently travels or is routinely absent from the city, and said that he doesn’t travel as much as he would like to. He really said that.

Subsequently Mayor Wilson announced that Barnes had “resigned.” Incredibly, the Seattle City Council was troubled by that. City Councilman Bob Kettle said working with Barnes was going well—yeah, it all seemed to be going swimmingly!—and that firing him would just increase the city’s feeling of insecurity. Barnes lasted a year, and the city has had four police chiefs in just two and a half years.

Wait, let’s back up a bit. Why would any major city—Seattle is one, or at least used to be until it was engulfed by The Great Stupid—hire a police chief who wasn’t prepared to reside full time in that city, or at least nearby? Unless the individual was some kind of miracle worker, it makes no sense. Based on his biography Barnes is an anti-policing police advocate, a social justice warrior, and, of course, he’s black:

Pages: 1 2

The Revolting Shiloh Hendrix Case

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

The last time I wrote about this Minnesota ethics train wreck more than a year ago, I began with “Yecchh! Pooey!” I would now like to add, “Ick! Barf!” I hate this story.

The latest revolting development is that a Minnesota jury convicted Shiloh Hendrix of a single charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct last week for repeatedly calling a black man who confronted and filmed her at a Rochester playground “nigger.” Hendrix also directed the slur at an 8-year-old black boy who had been going through her purse.

Because Hendrix’s speech was the conduct underlying the disorderly conduct charge according toMinnesota law, we have a controversy over whether using “nigger” as this awful woman did falls within the narrow “fighting words” exception to speech protected under the First Amendment.

The six-person jury returned its verdict after four days of testimony in Olmsted County District Court, finding Hendrix, 37, guilty on the count involving using “nigger” in her exchanges with videographer Sharmake Omar. She was not found guilty on the count involving the child. The full sentence: a stayed 90-day jail sentence, supervised probation, 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.

We are told Hendrix did not speak before sentencing. Good.

Pages: 1 2

“Ideological Capture”: How Academia Suppresses Conservative Thought

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais represented a straight, non-liberal activist reading of the Constitution, which prohibits racial discrimination for any purpose. Naturally, brain-washed progressives pronounced the SCOTUS ruling this year an abomination, a claim based in bias and ignorance as I explained here.

Never mind: the news media and legal websites have overwhelmingly attacked the decision, as has the legal academia sector. The latter is especially ominous. The SCOTUS ruling was the right one, I believe, but certainly one that can support serious, good faith debate. On the scholarly side, however, the analysis of the issues only go one way. Is that the kind of expert “consensus” the climate change hysterics maintain exists on that topic? How could that be?

In his essay “The case for Callais” on SCOTUSblog [“This publication has been inundated with essays by academics critical of Louisiana v. Callais, but has not published a single one in defense of it. So I decided to take it on in my column”] Brian Fitzpatrick explains how. He writes at the start,

“When I was thinking about becoming a law professor – I am sorry to say this was something like a quarter century ago now – I went to go see one of my favorite former law professors, Elena Kagan, for advice. She was then the dean at Harvard Law School, but I had known her merely as my Administrative Law professor. She asked me what field I wanted to pursue and I told her race discrimination law. It was the reason I went to law school to begin with. It was what I had written my law school thesis on.

“Her response: don’t do it. She explained that, in order to get a job as a race discrimination scholar at any school, I would have to win over the other scholars at that school who worked in that area. Kagan said that at every school the scholars who worked in that area all supported racial preferences. The problem was that I was against racial preferences. She said for that reason alone no one in the field would support hiring me. She told me to choose something else.

“So I did. I decided to pursue class action litigation instead. It’s been a perfectly pleasant career. But it also explains why the academy is monolithic – and, frankly, untrustworthy – on race issues: you aren’t allowed to specialize in these issues unless you toe the party line. Today, we call this “ideological capture” of the academy. I think it’s a pretty sad state of affairs and I am not the only one.”

“Sad” doesn’t begin to describe what is wrong with this phenomenon, but it does explain the process whereby colleges and universities slowly but relentlessly eliminated objectivity and balance in entire fields—education, of course, but also history, journalism, political science, law, and, based on what I have experienced this year, ethics. The consequences of that strategy are readily apparent, but how to undo the process and return to independent and ideologically diverse thought essential to a democracy is not so clear.

Ethics Quiz: The Professional Bimbo’s Late Hit

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Courtney Stodden, a reality show star for about 15 years and with her career sagging, decided this week to accuse “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander of abusive and exploitive behavior towards a “child” based on a sketch they performed together in 2012. The two were in a Funny or Die sketch where Alexander played a self-help guru and relationship coach. Stodden wore an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny small-as-it-could-be bikini as Alexander cracked jokes about her feminine assets.

At one point in the web video episode, Alexander rubbed an iPhone over her chest. “I was 17 years old in this photo,” Stodden wrote on Instagram. “The older I get, the more impossible this is to understand. During this comedy sketch, Jason Alexander repeatedly rubbed his phone across my breasts while saying there was ‘no signal’ in my head but ‘plenty of signal’ in my chest.” Jason was 53 at the time and co- writer of the sketch.

“Later in the sketch,” Stodden continued, “he joked that when I turned 18 he’d like to take me behind the couch and ‘have his way’ with me. IMDb credits him as one of the writers of the episode. As an adult, that fact has become harder—not easier—for me to understand. I was a minor. I didn’t have the legal power to decide whether I wanted to participate. The contracts were signed by adults. The paycheck went to Doug [her husband]. The production moved forward. I was the only child in the room. I felt so alone. Looking back now, I don’t see comedy. I see a 17-year-old girl whose body became part of an adult joke. People still say, ‘You chose to be there.’ Legally, I couldn’t make those decisions for myself. That’s the point. I can’t change what happened to me but I can ask myself: How did so many adults look at a minor and decide this was acceptable? That’s exactly why I speak out today. Children deserve laws that protect them. They shouldn’t have to become adults before realizing the law should have protected them all along.”

Alexander, not wishing to be cancelled over an offense from 14-year-old skit that nobody remembers, groveled an apology. “Looking back at the comedy sketch in which Ms. Stodden and I participated in 2012, I completely agree that it was inappropriate and I truly regret it,” he said. “But more importantly, I am deeply sorry for any harm or distress it has caused Ms. Stodden. I offer her my sincerest apologies.”

And now, as Paul Harvey would say, “The rest of the story!”

As an introduction, here is Courtney at what I guess she would call “her peak”:

Pages: 1 2