This story first came to the attention of the legal community in February, when a plaintiff in an employment discrimination suit against Chevron filed a Motion for Sanctions against Chevron’s Houston-based attorney, Dennis Duffy. It began by stating that Duffy had engaged in “a campaign of abusive and intolerable conduct that began with profanity-laced conversation” and escalated to “discriminatory slurs.” Then she alleged, things got really bad. The motion further alleged, Continue reading
1. Is this is a Catch 22 or what? In order to start using Adobe Acrobat in the Creative Cloud “suite,” you must agree to Adobe’ s new Terms of Use. However, a user can’t read the Terms of Use until after he or she agrees to the Terms of Use. Among the provisions in those terms is this…
14.1 Process. If you have any concern or dispute, you agree to first try to resolve the dispute informally by contacting us. If a dispute is not resolved within 30 days of receipt by us, any resulting legal actions must be resolved through final and binding arbitration, including any question of whether arbitration is required, except that you may assert claims in small claims court if your claims qualify. Claims related to the Terms, Services, or Software are permanently barred if not brought within one year of the event resulting in the claim.
That’s right: you have to agree not to sue them.
Rob Beschizza posted a video online showing him futilely clicking the “Terms of Use” link only to be prevented from reading them because he hadn’t agreed to the Terms of Use. As he points out, almost nobody—yes, not even lawyers—reads these fine print, intentionally verbose and obscure conditions before they agree to terms of use, but that’s the users’ fault. Being forced to agree to terms before it is possible to read them is another kettle of fish. That’s con-man stuff. That makes it an invalid contract.
Of course, a company that tries this stunt assumes that when it produces a lawyer-signed statement reminding dissatisfied customers of the terms they signed, that will be sufficient to discourage any further action.
2. In a mass shooting any excuse for this? Watch this video of an arrest by Canadian police in Lethbridge, Alberta:
A young woman dressed as an Empire Storm Trooper and carrying a plastic “blaster” on May the Fourth (…”be with you!”) to promote her employer’s cafe was surrounded by four officers, guns drawn, then tackled—bloodying her nose—cuffed and arrested. Lethbridge Police Inspector Jason Walper said his department received two 911 calls regarding someone brandishing a weapon.
Apparently there really are people, at least in Canada, who have never seen “Star Wars.” But what are the odds that none of the four police were aware that this was a costume? Surely the rational approach to the silly situation would be to ask the woman to take off her helmet and explain what she was doing before they attacked her. If the girl had been black, and this had occurred in the U.S., the NAACP would be demanding an investigation.
Canadians are trying to mitigate the stupidity here by noting that everyone is traumatized by the nation’s mass shooting last month that left 22 dead. And, I suppose, a Storm Trooper outfit could have been a diabolical hit man’s clever disguise. I suppose.
Only 22? Heck, in the U.S., that’s chicken feed! Continue reading
1. What does this tell you, Elie? Come on, I know you can figure it out...Elie Mystal, the emotional lawyer turned social justice warrior who used to embarrass “Above the Law” with his unhinged rants (like the time he announced that no black juror should ever vote to convict a black defendant regardless of the evidence) finally ended up where he belonged all along, the far-left Communist-flirting The Nation. He just issued a post that raises a legitimate issue, despite a typical Nation headline ( “The Men Pushing to Open the Economy Clearly Don’t Need Child Care”).
Closing the schools does indeed make it impossible for many Americans to go to work; this was obvious (wasn’t it?) as soon as schools started closing due to the Wuhan virus. His most useful observation: how are we going to send people back to work without addressing the school problem, and doesn’t that have to be addressed in order to open up the economy? Ellie, who is being Daddy-child care in the division of duties in his family (good for him) writes in part,
As of this writing, 43 states have closed schools through the end of the academic year. …For most families, there is no child care without school. In America, school is pretty much the only free or subsidized child care our government provides. Without reliable, affordable, and Covid-free child care, going back to work is simply not an option for many parents. The school closings only deepen a reoccurring problem most parents face: the summer. In a society that has decided to outsource child care responsibilities to the school system, the fact that this system goes on an annual months-long holiday is already a nightmare for working parents.
After that, Ellie being Ellie and The Nation being The Nation, we get indictments of unfeeling male policy-makers (“I bet if we elected more women, the order of operations for reopening the economy wouldn’t be so ass-backwards”—Did you check how many states with female governors shut down the schools, Elie? I didn’t think so) and, of course, a call for more subsidized child care, because it takes a village to raise a child and because you never let a crisis go to waste.
I bet, if he thinks real hard, Elie can come up with another, less expensive, easier to implement plan that will address the problem, at least for now. Come on, man. Think.
2. Incompetent #MeToo Hypocrite Of The Year. I can’t believe I once advocated Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer as the best female VP option for Joe Biden since he has announced that he will be choosing the most female individual rather than the most qualified one. In addition to being one of the elected officials the pandemic has exposed as an aspiring dictator, she’s the state house version of Kamala Harris: ask her a question requiring thought and a clear response, and you get obfuscation and double-talk. Here’s the exchange that won her title, from last Sunday’s ” State of the Union.with Jake Tapper:
TAPPER: “You have said that you believe Vice President Biden. I want to compare that to 2018, when you said you believed Dr. Christine Blasey Ford after she accused now Justice Brett Kavanaugh of assault. Kavanaugh also, like Biden, categorically denied that accusation. And Blasey Ford, to be honest, she did not have the contemporaneous accounts of her view of what happened that Tara Reade does. You have spoken movingly about how you’re a survivor — survivor of assault yourself. Why do you believe Biden, and not Kavanaugh? Are they not both entitled to the same presumption of innocence, regardless of their political views?”
WHITMER: “You know, Jake, as a survivor and as a feminist, I will say this. We need to give people an opportunity to tell their story. But then we have a duty to vet it. And just because you’re a survivor doesn’t mean that every claim is equal. It means we give them the ability to make their case, and the other side as well, and then to make a judgment that is informed. I have read a lot about this current allegation. I know Joe Biden, and I have watched his defense. And there’s not a pattern that goes into this. And I think that, for these reasons, I’m very comfortable that Joe Biden is who he says he is. He’s — and you know what? And that’s all I’m going to say about it. I really resent the fact that, every time a case comes up, all of us survivors have to weigh in. It is reopening wounds. And it is — take us at our word, ask us for our opinion, and let’s move on.”
Weasel, hypocrite, coward, dim wit.
To be blunt.
The prevailing attitude toward the growing and eventually irrefutable evidence that hostile forces within the FBI and the Justice Department were unethically, illegally and unconstitutionally working behind the scenes to undermine the President and, if possible, have him removed from office was that this was just another right-wing conspiracy theory. That spin allowed the mainstream media to justify refusing to investigate the many smoking guns that were being uncovered,and to report on them using the familiar techniques it employs when it wants to protect its fellow Axis of Unthical Conduct allies, the Democrats and “the resistance.”
The illegal FISA warrants to allow surveillance of the Trump campaign that a federal judge eventually ruled constituted both judicial and prosecutor misconduct were a small part of the ethics train wreck that was the Mueller investigation. When Ethics Alarms accurately described this breach of law and ethics, I was accused here of “drinking the Kool-Aid,” in a now familiar ploy by blinded or unscrupulous partisans to throw up metaphorical sand and dust, allowing wrongdoing to prevail. By their definition of the term, Prof. Jonathan Turley has mixed-up another delicious pitcher of the beverage. Yum!
Let me interject here what a continuing Ethics Hero Turley is. Almost alone among law professors, scholars and academics, he has been willing to call out ethical misconduct throughout the Trump Administration years thus far without consideration of who benefits or whose political fortunes the truth might harm. For this, progressives have regularly denigrated as a traitor to the cause, the cause being “Get Trump.” Turley is a Democrat and an old fashioned liberal—you know, the kind that had integrity—but never flinches when it is time to call out the Left on its increasingly unconscionable conduct.
Now the Constitutional Law expert has turned his legal analysis skills on the developing Michael Flynn story. His unequivocal conclusion: “The Flynn Case Should Be Dismissed In The Name Of Justice.” Continue reading
1. This Time, Blame The Victim (3/24/2020) and High Noon Ethics Showdown, 4/2/2020: Reality Dawns
From the National Review:
Arizona police are now conducting a homicide investigation into a woman who claimed she gave her husband fish tank cleaner after President Trump claimed the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for coronavirus.
Wanda Lenius told NBC News last month that she and her husband Gary consumed fish tank cleaner because it contained a chemical that Trump suggested might be an effective prophylactic and treatment for coronavirus. The cocktail, which contained four teaspoons of fish tank cleaner mixed with soda water, put Wanda in the ICU and killed Gary. “My advice,” Wanda explained, is “don’t believe anything that the President says and his people because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
When I wrote the first post about Wanda Lenius, who, she said, persuaded her husband to swallow fish-tank cleaner because the President had promoted chloroquine, one of the ingredients, as a promising treatment for Wuhan virus infections, commenter Joe Fowler suggested that the story sounded to him as if she had figured out how to bump off her husband, writing,
Am I alone in finding it suspicious that the couple that consumed the fish tank cleaner is presumed to have done exactly what the wife is claiming? The husband is dead in bizarre circumstances, poison in fact…. The “Trump told us to do it!” nonsense is just too perfect a narrative for the corrupt media, They can’t help but use it.
Blogger Ann Althouse also suggested that foul play might be involved, and so did my wife. later we learned that far from being a robotic Trump-follower, the woman was, in fact, an active anti-Trump donor. She and her husband had a contentious relationship that had include a domestic abuse complaint.
Stay tuned... Continue reading
Cool your jets, conservative media.
Two days ago, Law and Crime, usually a partisan website on the Democratic side, posted the detailed allegation of Eva Murry, a 26-year-old woman who is engaged and has two children. The site treated it as a major scoop (“A woman says she was sexually harassed by presumptive Democratic Party Presidential nominee Joe Biden when she was 14 years old”) and the conservative news media picked up the ball and ran for the metaphorical goal-line. Fox News wrote, “A woman related to a former Republican Senate candidate is accusing former Vice President Joe Biden of sexual harassment…The claim comes as Biden is denying a separate allegation made by former staffer Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in 1993.” Further down the food chain—much further— the Trump-boosting blog WS sported the headline, “Report: Another Biden Accuser Comes Forward, Says He Sexually Harassed Her When She Was Only 14-Years-Old,” and began, “Yet another Biden accuser has come forward with a disgusting story of sexual harassment.”
Eva Murry’s account has absolutely no relevance to Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault. None. It should not be treated as if it does.
In an earlier post, I listed the three reasons why I am dubious of Reade’s accusation. The first is that she took so long to make her accusation public, a problem she shares with Dr. Blasey Ford and Anita Hill, among others. Second, the accusation looks and feels like a politically-motivated attack, another feature redolent of Hill and Ford. Third, such accusations are always suspect when they are alone.
It’s still alone. Murry’s story is the kind of “this guy is a creep” tale that came from all sides at Donald Trump during the Presidential campaign. We know Biden is a creep, or should; it doesn’t provide any reason to believe he is capable of sexual assault no matter how hard his adversaries try to spin it. Continue reading
This is going to be uncharacteristically short, but I feel the story deserves its own post
The Ohio Supreme Court has indefinitely suspended lawyer Austin Roan Buttars of Dublin, Ohio for transferring more than $147,000 from the accounts of a mentally ill client though the lawyer and his law firm were only owed about $19,000. Buttars acquired the other $128,000 by stealing from or overcharging the client
Not that he didn’t work for his money. For example, the Court found that Buttars charged his legal hourly rate for mowing her lawn.
I just thought you should know.
There’s Joe, being Joe Biden again!
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, on why Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden couldn’t possibly be true, as she responded to a question about how she justified treating Biden’s accuser differently from Bret Kavanaugh’s accuser.
“Joe Biden is Joe Biden.”
“Joe Biden is Joe Biden”????
Is there any conceivable reading of that statement that isn’t unethical?
Does she mean that Joe Biden isn’t Bret Kavanaugh, so he should be subject to a different standard? Unethical.
Does she mean that Joe Biden, being Joe Biden, is such a boon to American society that he deserves to get away with sexual assault? That’s Rationalization #11, The King’s Pass. Unethical. Continue reading
1. Idiotic movie ethics. Last night I watched “Five-Headed Shark Attack,” hoping to discover a new all-time bad horror movie. First, it wasn’t that terrible, meaning that it was a total waste of time. Mainly, however, the title was a shark bait-and-switch. The preview (and the posters) said the shark had 5 heads and was shaped like a starfish. No, it had four heads, and looked exactly like a Disney cartoon character’s glove.
Late in the movie, we saw that the monster’s tail had a mouth (once we saw it gobble a foot that slipped by the four heads), but it had no eyes, guided the shark like a tail, and no character in the film ever saw it, so the creature was never once called a “Five-Headed Shark.” My wife and I had an argument over my contention that just because a tail has teeth, that doesn’t make it a head.
2. I think we can fairly conclude now how serious progressives and Democrats are about standing up for women and fighting against sexual assault and harassment: They’re not . #MeToo and #TimesUp are clearly political weapons to be used against conservatives, Republicans and abortion opponents, real or otherwise, and certain groups, like black Democrats, are immune, even from adverse opinion.
Nice. A lot of women are going to suffer because of this, and they can blame their own alleged advocates.
In Maryland, right next door to Virginia where African-American Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax is still in office despite having been credibly accused of rape and sexual assault , Democrat Kweisi Mfume easily won a special election yesterday to finish the term of the late Elijah Cummings, retaking a Maryland congressional seat he held for five terms before leaving to lead the NAACP. Mifune had to leave the NAACP after it was revealed that he dated one staffer while its president, and another alleged she had been sexually harassed by him and was passed over for a promotion after she rejected his advances, according to the Baltimore Sun. She then threatened to sue the organization, so the NAACP paid her a $100,000 hush money payment in 2004 to avoid the lawsuit. This was the sort of scandal that drove Bill O’Reilly off Fox News. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 
We have a rare two-headed Comment of the Day on “Ethics Quiz And Poll: The Nurse Practitioner’s Dilemma,”about the nurse practitioner’s dilemma when she was asked by a poor, unmarried, 16-year-old , unemployed high school drop-out to help her get pregnant. Taking a minority position among commenters (the post’s poll results overwhelmingly favored counseling the girl against pregnancy), commenter valkygrrl wrote,
Commenter Tony, a physician, added in his Comment of the Day #1, Continue reading →