Law & Law Enforcement

Impeachment Ethics Update, Holiday Edition, Part One

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

1. A recent exchange in a Facebook debate: I challenged someone who said that the President had extorted a foreign government to get “dirt” on a likely opponent in the election, thus personal gain. This, he said, was impeachable. After pointing out that the evidence of “extortion” is speculative at best, since a) no money was ultimately withheld,  b) the government at issue says they did not feel extorted, and c), as many have pointed out, using such goodies as foreign aid and state visits as carrots to persuade governments to agree to various U.S. requests and demands that, among other results, might help a President or his party win an election is international politics as usual, and has only been called sinister during this administration.

Then I asked, “If all the facts were the same, except that Joe Biden had not entered the Presidential race, would there be anything wrong, much less impeachable, about the President asking the Ukraine to investigate what appears to have been possible illicit influences on the Vice President of the U.S. through benefits being showered on his son?”

No answer was forthcoming.

So much for impeachment article #1.

2. Alan Dershowitz explained last week  that the Supreme Court “pulled the rug out of part two of impeachment”  by agreeing to hear a trio of cases involving subpoenas for the President’s financial records. He is quite right; I would say inarguably so.

Dershowitz explained that by granting certiorari in three cases where Trump had challenged a congressional subpoena, SCOTUS had made a statement that there was a legal question regarding whether the subpoenas were valid.  Because the Supreme Court said the issue needed to be settled, the message was that the President was right,, that he does not have to comply with a subpoena by Congress unless a court orders him  to comply.

“Now, we don’t know how the court is going to come out,” the former Harvard professor said. “But they made it clear that’s a viable issue. So, that charge, that ground of impeachment, should be immediately removed by the House and not sent to the Senate. There’s nothing to it anymore after the Supreme Court today said you’re entitled to a review on an issue when the President challenges the subpoena power of Congress.”

And that’s it for #2. “It’s all done. It’s over,” says Dershowitz . Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 12/14/19: Insulting George Washington And Other Annoyances”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There goes Professor Morrison!!!

This is the third (in three days) and final, for now, of a series of  impeachment-related Comments of the Day by Ethics Alarms loyalist and ace  Glenn Logan. He’s authored a couple more COTD-worthy posts since this one went up two days ago; at this rate, I might just turn the blog over to him and Mrs. Q (whose latest column is coming!) and retire to beachcombing and directing satirical musical reviews.

In his latest, Glenn did me a favor and defenestrated George Washington law professor, Alan Morrison’s depressingly lame attempt to rebut Jonathan Turley’s superb explanation of why the House’s impeachment ploy was misguided and wrong.

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 12/14/19: Insulting George Washington And Other Annoyances”:

Morrison complains that the House cannot obtain the information they need to impeach Trump or not because Trump insists on is right as the head of an equal branch of government to have the House demands on the executive subjected to judicial scrutiny.

Therefore, his claim is that the House has no choice but to infer whatever it can from the witnesses who have testified so they can get the President impeached before the election.

This is not just a weak argument, but a completely specious one. The President:

a) considers the investigation illegitimate and partisan, and;

b) has a duty to protect his office against just such an illegitimate partisan investigation by legitimately referring such demands to the courts. Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Reflections, 12/15/2019: Bad Film Criticism, Bad Journalism, Bad Honors…And Some Really Stupid Stuff Too

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments

The late, great, Jerry Vale..

(Also known as “the mob’s favorite tenor”…)

1. And speaking of Martin Scorcese movies, since Jerry Vale is alluded to in several of them…”The Irishman” has been viewed on Netflix by many of my showbiz friends, and most, while complaining about the film’s length, have declared the performances “brilliant.” This reaction, is, I think, bias at work, the so-called “halo effect.” It’s the same phenomenon I witnessed in the D.C. theater community, where certain actors, directors and big theater companies were routinely called “brilliant” in their efforts, when in truth, the exact same product presented by artists with lesser reputations would be shrugged off or ignored.

The three veteran stars of “The Irishman” are being praised by critics across the board, but in truth, with the exception of Al Pacino, they seem weary and channeling earlier, better performances. This is especially true of Joe Pesci, who shows none of the energy we associate with his best performances, and the script requires him to run the gamut of emotions, as the old joke goes, from A to C. He’s as old as Joe Biden, and looks and acts every inch of it, though his character is supposed to be younger. Scorcese has used tech wizardry to give De Niro a younger face when necessary, but it still sits on top of his  80-year-old body. and there is nothing in De Niro’s act that we haven’t seen over and over again (though not so much lately, as Bob has been collecting checks for bad movies in which he appeared to be “phoning it in”).

Pacino, as Jimmy Hoffa, is lots of fun as usual, but he doesn’t appear to be trying to be convincing as the mysteriously disappeared labor boss, who was 62 with he vanished. Pacino is 79. How could anyone call Pacino “brilliant” as Hoffa? Jack Nicholson was far more convincing in the film “Hoffa,” and Pacino isn’t significantly different than he was playing a Hollywood agent in “Once Upon A Time In America.”

It must be nice to reach that stage as an actor when you get paid big checks just to show up, like Marlon Brando in “Superman.” Especially if everyone is going to say you were brilliant.

2.  And now for something completely stupid. This is remarkable in the dual category of incompetence in one’s chosen pursuit (theft) and unforgivable ignorance regarding social media.  Arlando Henderson, 29, who worked for a bank  in Charlotte, North Carolina, stole money from his employer’s vault at least 18 times, for a grand total of $88,000.  He was apprehended and arrested after posting about his robbery hobby on Facebook, including posts showing his new Mercedes-Benz, and this one…

You know, if someone is this stupid, ethics alarms hardly matter…

3. Surely we are missing some crucial information here...The New York Giants, in the midst of a horrible season, fired veteran cornerback Janoris Jenkins last week. Why? He was engaged in an argument with a fan on social media who objected to Jenkins posting  his personal stats after a game that his team lost, and wrote,

“I only can do my job.. retard. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “If I Had Been Able To Swing A Full-Time Impeachment News And Commentary Blog…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Now the second of three Comments of the Day I’m posting this weekend authored by Glenn Logan. Like the first, this one is about the impeachment drama (or farce, if you prefer.)

His specific context is the post, “If I Had Been Able To Swing A Full-Time Impeachment News And Commentary Blog, These Kind Of Things Would Have Been On It…” It begins with a quote from the text. I suppose this is as good a place as any to apologize for floating the idea of launching a separate blog to address what still is infuriating to me, the impossibility of getting accurate, objective information regarding the process, its history, essential legal principles involved, like hearsay and due process, and the context of this particular blot on our history. This would not be needed, except that we have no trustworthy journalism sources today. One stop information is impossible, and few people have the time or inclination to bounce around the web to get a fair snapshot of what’s going on without being misled by misrepresentations on one side and crucial omissions on the other.

Almost as soon as I asked for volunteers to assist in this project, the metaphorical roof fell in on me, and just getting this blog out every day became difficult. At this point in my life I should have been financially independent enough to devote full time to projects like the impeachment site. I’ve got half-drafted books lying around, I have half a dozen other fascinating and important projects that should be moving forward and instead have been on my “To do” list for years. This is nobody’s fault but my own: not enough focus, not enough discipline, too easily distracted by topics that interest me but don’t pay the bills or advance the chess pieces.

What a waste. But the end of the year always sees my mind running in this gutter. Anyway, I’m sorry.

Now here’s Glenn:

“For leaders, those who deal in power, distinguishing between rightful and wrongful acts based on motives is particularly difficult, if not impossible.”

I think the Democrats are being deliberately deceptive here, and can’t really say what they mean. What they mean is that the actions they have ascribed to Trump are crimes because Trump did them. If a person such as former president Barack Obama, or more pointedly former vice-president Joe Biden, had done the exact same thing, they would carry with them a presumption of innocence, validity and indeed, praiseworthiness. Their motives would’ve never been questioned, let alone put forward as the basis for an impeachment.

This just highlights the political nature of the impeachment “process” the Democrats have initiated, and the utter bankruptcy of their argument. If they can define crimes as not the acts themselves, but the combination of and act and who commits it, they will have reached a point that Orwell couldn’t, or didn’t imagine. Continue reading →

Eureka! Here’s One Way To Guarantee Diversity In College Admissions: Eliminate Objective Standards

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Oh, it can’t be you! It’s always the test.

A group of students, advocacy groups and a primarily black and Hispanic California school district filed suit against the University of California last week,  alleging that  the SAT and ACT college admission tests discriminate  against black and Hispanic students and demanding that the school stop using standardized test scores in its admissions process.

The theory that the tests are biased against poor and mainly black and Hispanic students concludes that the system illegally discriminates against applicants on the basis of their race, wealth or disabilities, thus denying them equal protection under the California Constitution. This battle has been fought before, of course. There was a time, decades ago, when foes of standardized testing could point to test questions referring to yachting and Western philosophers, baking in a bias that handicapped students fromracial and ethnic  sub-cultures in America. Those prejudicial questions have been purged, but the long-time disparity between the test scores of white and Asian applicants on one side and black and Hispanic students on the other continues. Continue reading →

Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up. 12/14/19: Insulting George Washington And Other Annoyances

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Good Morning!

1. Now THIS ia an abuse of power! It sure looks as if outgoing Kentucky governor Matt Bevin—he’s a Republican, remember— has decided to take revenge on the state that narrowly defeated him for re-election. Right before he moved out of the Governor’s Mansion, Bevin issued 428 pardons and commutations, often without apparent regard to who or what he was pardoning. He pardoned a man convicted of homicide, after the murderer’s  family raised more than $20,000  to help Bevin pay off a debt owed from his previous gubernatorial campaign.  That wasn’t the only murderer Kentucky got back in its Christmas stocking; there were more, like the man who paid to have his business partner killed, and  another who killed his parents.. Bevin released a man convicted of raping a child.

While many of the pardons issued did involve cases where there were allegations of  sloppy police work and injustice, many did not. Bevin pardoned  Dayton Ross Jones, who pleaded guilty to the 2014 sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy, for example. That crime was captured on video and shared on social media. Jones was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2016. Now he’s out.

“A young man was attacked, was violated, it was filmed, it was sent out to different people at his school,” Kentucky’s new governor, Andy Beshear said. “It was one of the worst crimes that we have seen. I fully disagree with that pardon. It is a shame and its wrong.”

But there isn’t a thing he or Kentucky citizens can do about it.

2. Let’s ask Chris Wallace about this sterling example of fair and balanced journalism...I know that Ethics Alarms has documented over many years what a partisan, biased, incompetent and dishonest hack Chris Cillizza is, so this is hardly news. Still, he has a job at CNN, which allows him to inflict his hackery on the public. An ethical news organization wouldn’t keep someone like Cillizza around., but as James Earl Jones used to say, “This is CNN.” The disturbing part is that he’s far from the worst hack on its payroll.

A Monmouth University poll this week claimed that Republican voters believed that George Washington was a better President than Donald Trump by only a 44%-37% margin. (Remember: polls.)  Cillizza said that fact that 37% of Republican respondents chose Trump over Washington provides “a useful way into understanding just how rote the fealty is to Trump within the ranks of the Republican Party at the moment.”

Let me just interject here that almost no Americans could tell you anything about George Washington’s terms in office other than the fact that he was the first President. (This is another reason to watch “John Adams.”)

While implying that Republicans are ignorant morons, however, Cillizza neglected to mention another alleged result of the poll: Democratic voters said former President Barack Obama was a better President than George an embarrassing 63%-29% margin. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/13/2019: Defending Bette, Not Defending Cuba Or The Giant Christmas Penis….

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Good Morning!

1. Regarding the President’s military pardons. This story is now a month old, and my post about it got derailed, so let me be brief. The uproar over these pardons was overblown, and yes, by the media. I never read any mention in the various reports, for example, about how Jimmy Carter, then Governor of Georgia,  announced his outrage when Lt,  William Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre . Carter instituted American Fighting Man’s Day in support of Calley, and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on.  Calley only served seven years of his sentence.

It is important for the military to insist on discipline, and I think President Trump was wrong to interfere with it in these cases. Each of them has a different set of facts, but the President’s statement about the inherent unfairness of training human beings to kill, placing them in deadly situations and unimaginable stress, and then punishing them when their fury and programmed violence erupts in illegal violence and other acts (like posing in a photo with a dead enemy  combatant) has validity. My father, who had been in combat in World War II, regarded such crimes as the equivalent of “battle fatigue.” He hated General Patton for slapping the GI suffering from what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome in a field hospital, and felt that harshly punishing soldiers for the kinds of incidents Trump’s beneficiaries engaged in was wrong and hypocritical.

Any time any convicted American is pardoned, there are arguments that clemency undermines the justice system. In the end, this is a policy dispute. The military has good reasons to object to such pardons, but President Trump’s decision is defensible, and would probably be considered so if he were anyone else.

2.  Cuba Gooding, Jr. is now in Bill Cosby territory. Seven more women have come forward to accuse the popular actor of sexually assaulting them. This brings the total number of accusers up to 22.

In one court filing, a woman alleges that after she met Mr. Gooding at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in 2009, he took her to a concert, where he began to kiss her in a secluded hallway as she was attempting to leave. Then he placed his hands on her buttocks, and pushed onto her crotch so forcefully that her tights ripped.  The woman bit Mr. Gooding’s cheek so she could escape. Another woman accused the 51-year-old Gooding of sliding his hand down her pants and grabbing her buttocks at a restaurant in 2011. Yet another accuser says that he grabbed her vagina twice at a restaurant in  in 2016, according  the court filings.

Gooding’s legal team argues that the new claims are from women looking to cash in  due to his celebrity status. maybe, but history and experience suggests otherwise.

Whatever the culture is that gives men the idea that they can act like this and that there is nothing wrong with it needs to be rejected, since it obviously came special delivery from Hell. I would no more have done any of those things, even in the prime of youth, than I would have ridden a pogo stick into church with a wombat on my head. I assumed everyone was raised like that. Continue reading →

Ethics Catch-Up, 12/12/2019: Special Two-Day Edition!

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

So far, this pre-Christmas slog has been especially horrible.

This post started out as yesterday’s potpourri, and I was interrupted just as I was about to post it. So now its a two-day edition.

1. The IG’s report embraces Hanlon’s Razor. What the report on the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged “collusion” says is that he Inspector General could find no documentation of a “conspiracy” or bias against the President, but that the FBI’s conduct was remarkably inept throughout. Hanlon Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

When the AG says that the FBI handling of the investigation raises questions about how it conducts itself in more routine matters, isn’t the obvious next step to find out? If the evidence shows that the FBI doesn’t make such “mistakes” normally, only in a situation—the investigation of a Presidential candidate from the party opposite from the one currently represented in the White House—where one would assume special care would be applied, what would that tell us? One of the AG’s revelations is that “an F.B.I. official who had to sign an affidavit attesting to the accuracy and completeness of a court filing had specifically asked about any relationship with the C.I.A. Mr. Clinesmith altered the email so that it stated that Mr. Page was “not a source,” contributing to the Justice Department’s failure to discuss his relationship with the C.I.A. in a renewal application.”

That’s interesting. And why did he lie? Just “sloppiness”? At some point, repeated errors begin suggesting bias and intent.

It is astounding that James Comey is crowing in the media about the report, when the agency he led showed itself to be thoroughly incompetent at the exact moment when trust and care were most essential. He should hide his head in a bag, as Justice Scalia liked to say.

2. Ann Althouse reads Jamelle Bouie so I don’t have to. Thanks, Ann! After making Bouie an Ethics Dunce numerous times and finding him to be biased, anti-white fool who had no business being published in any fair and responsible conversation, I stopped reading him. Fortunately, Ann Althouse has a stronger stomach than I do, and pointed readers to “Two Articles of Impeachment for Trump Are Nowhere Near Enough/The House should take its own sweet time and investigate many more aspects of the president’s perfidious behavior,”  where he openly analyzes the Democratic impeachment follies as tactic to affect the 2020 election, and, ethics-challenged that he is, endorses that clear abuse of the Constitution, writing in part,

Democrats, in other words, can use the power of impeachment to set the terms of the next election — to shape the national political landscape in their favor. In a political culture governed by negative partisanship and hyperpolarization, restraint won’t save the Democratic majority. But a relentless anti-Trump posture — including comprehensive investigations and additional articles of impeachment — might just do the trick.

He’s scum, pure and simple.

Ann responds, “Does he not hear what he is saying?! He’s telling Democrats to drop the pretense of principle and patriotism and go all out for political advantage.”

3. Benefit of the doubt! That’s rich. The New England Patriots are again implicated in a cheating controversy. I have no read several commentaries, mostly from Boston source, arguing that the team “deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

This is the most unethical, untrustworthy, win-at-all-costs team in a sports league that has no problem crippling young athletes for profit. Sure, it should be proven guilty on facts, not presumption, but a history of being deceptive and breaking rules at very least removes the “How can anyone think we would do such a thing?” factor.

4. Top stories? Below are the results of a poll that tried to determine what the public considered the “top stories” of 2019 according to the proportion of those polled who “heard a lot about” each, by party affiliation.

5.  This is propaganda, not news reporting. Time Magazine, which admittedly is an animated journalistic corpse these days, still makes headlines with its choice of its “Person of the Year,” but that nostalgic notice won’t last much longer with selections like this year’s honoree:  teenage climate change scold Greta Thunberg. The choice is dishonest, manipulative, and absurd. Her impact has been nil; her expertise is imaginary; her cause is futile, and her rhetoric is insulting and hysterical. Few Americans know her name, and the number is still higher than it should be.

Of course, the idiocy of Time’s choice doesn’t excuse President Trump’s gratuitous tweet mocking her and the selection. This is beneath him, or should be. I grasp his logic: since the mainstream media will treat the ridiculous choice with reverence, being all-in on climate change hysteria, so he has to publicize the truth. Sometimes that logic is valid, but not when it comes to punching down at a manipulated and exploited child, which is what Thunberg is. Continue reading →

Even MORE Of The Kinds Of Things That Would Have Been On A Full-Time Impeachment News And Commentary Blog…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

1 . You know I can’t let this pass: New Age guru and cool Democratic Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson tweeted out both fake news and, given her number of followers and <cough> far more effective disinformation for the kind of idiots who believe Russian bots than any foreign mischief-maker on Facebook:

She only could believe this absurd “report” if  a) she was so ready to believe anything bad about this President that literally nothing could be too absurd to swallow, and b) if she was so irresponsible that she would tweet it to her gazillion followers without checking.  It seems that she read a phony article published on Nov. 16 by MoronMajority.com. by the light of her lava lamp, after itwas then picked up by  the Daily Kos, which could easily use the name “MoronMajority.” After pulling down the tweet, Williamson had the chutzpa to write she wrote that we had to be vigilant against “big lies” in the coming campaign….you know, like hers.

2. Then there is this from Rep. Al Green, who was calling for Trump’s impeachment, and entered resolutions to that effect, long, long before there was any Ukraaine phone call:

Rep. Al Green (D-TX) said on Saturday during an interview on MSNBC that President Donald Trump needed to be impeached “to deal with slavery.”Green, who has previously stated that Trump must be impeached or else “he will get reelected,” said this week that there is “no limit” to the number of times that Democrats can try to impeach the president.

In other words, he is just like every other House Democrat, just not as subtle. And perhaps a little bit more stupid. Asked to explain what slavery has to do with impeachment, Green replied,

I do believe, ma’am, that we have to deal with the original sin. We have to deal with slavery. Slavery was the thing that put all of what President Trump has done lately into motion.We cannot overlook what happened when he came down the escalator and just demeaned people of color when he talked about the s-hole countries. It’s insidious … racism, the president has played on racism and he’s used that as a weapon to galvanize a base of support to mobilize people.So, I appreciate whatever we will do, but until we deal with the issue of invidious discrimination as a relates to [the] LGBTQ community, the anti-Semitism, the racism, the Islamophobia, the transphobia, and also the misogyny that he has exemplified, I don’t think our work is done.

Ah! Now he sounds more typical. This is, of course, Big Lie #4, “Trump is a racist.” John Hinderaker correctly notes on his blog:

Green’s rant is valuable, not because it makes any sense, but because it gives us a window into the Democrats’ real motive for wanting to impeach the president–sheer hatred over political differences. Combined, of course, with the realization that in all probability, he will be re-elected next year if they do not succeed in evicting him from office.

How long can the news media and the public fail to acknowledge this? Continue reading →

If I Had Been Able To Swing A Full-Time Impeachment News And Commentary Blog, These Kind Of Things Would Have Been On It…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

I. In the House impeachment Report, Chairman Nadler really and truly says this:

“The question is not whether the President’s conduct could have resulted from permissible motives. It is whether the President’s real reasons, the ones in his mind at the time, were legitimate. Where the House discovers persuasive evidence of corrupt wrongdoing, it is entitled to rely upon that evidence to impeach.”

Such an attitude and approach is smoking gun evidence of a rogue process. The President, of course, has not been interviewed, questioned or cross examined. His “real reasons” can only be a matter of speculation, based on the confirmation biases of his prosecutors. In ethics, motives just confuse the issue, because all human actions have complex and interacting motives. In law, malum in re, that is, objectively bad intent, often defines a crime (such as murder), but a legal action does not become illegal because the actor has some wrongful intentions, just as an illegal action doesn’t become legal because the malefactor meant well. For leaders, those who deal in power, distinguishing between rightful and wrongful acts based on motives is particularly difficult, if not impossible.

I suppose Nadler should be praised for candor, but the state of mind of Trump’s inquisitors could not be less trustworthy or more irresponsible. They believe the President to be corrupt, thus they interpret conduct by him which literally any other President could have (and has) engaged in without criticism or condemnation (except on a policy prudence basis) as impeachable. This has been the presumption from the beginning of his Presidency. No leader can function properly in such an environment….which was the idea. Continue reading →