The Impeachment Clause in the U.S. Constitution was written by the Founders to create an emergency “Get Rid of a Rogue President (or other high Federal official) Free Card,” to be used in a bid-partisan process featuring due process, hearings and a trial. The Democrats cynically used the process as part of their undemocratic and ruinous campaign to make it impossible for the elected President to govern, because he had committed the unforgivable sin of blocking Hillary Clinton’s rose-strewn path to the White House. Like the fake, Hillary and Obama engineered Russian collusion hoax (and in Trump’s second term, the J-6 kangaroo hearings in the House, both of Trump’s impeachments were contrived, politically motivated, and Constitutionally indefensible. The damage was done, the precedent set. Impeachment is now toothless; the Founders’ metaphorical safety valve is done. What once was framed as cooperative, bi-partisan inquiry to be triggered by genuine abuses of power is now just another toothless and corrupt tool of political warfare. Good job, everybody!
Rep. Thomas Massie(R-KY), on the way out after losing the primary for his seat earlier this year, filed eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth this week.
The whole “Dreamer” thing seemed like classic liberal sentimental hogwash from the start, because it was, ethically, logically and legally. If illegal immigrants could be certain that their young children sneaking across the border when they did would suddenly become “good illegal immigrants” as soon as they approached majority and would be eligible for all sorts of benefits, that was just one more incentive for aliens to break our laws.
You may recall that President Obama issued an unconstitutional Executive Order to coddle the “Dreamers” that was struck down by the Supreme Court. I wrote at the time,
1. Phone Hold Music Ethics. DirecTV, which has bedeviled me, annoyed me and frustrated me for 30 years, had, all during that time, the worst on-hold music in human history. It was a scratchy recording of a high-pitched flute repeating the same unresolved bars over and over again. This selection was particularly crazy-making when DirecTV would, as was their wont, keep me waiting for ten minutes or more after telling me my wait time would be “less than two minutes.” Today I had an occasion to call the service again, and, mirabile dictu, the hold music is now a clear, crisp piano composition by Schubert. Small victories is all I have these days…
[Update: It wasn’t even a small victory! The new music was a tell: I was engaging with a fake DirecTV scammer. Irony: the lousy hold music helped make me check out the caller.]
2. More DirecTV…For weeks I have been getting robo calls from DirecTV telling me to call a phone number. Sometimes I would get ten such calls a day. As a matter of principle, I refuse to continue robocalls or the new AI calls in which a female voice begins with “Hello?” so I hang up, sometimes with a tart, “Bite me!” Finally I decided to call the number I had been getting ordered to call just to complain about being harassed. I then learned from the agent in Bangladesh or somewhere that because I had set some kind of record for legitimate complaints over the past six months (loss of signal, interruption in service, installment of equipment, incompetent agents, etc, etc.) I was receiving a special promotion to keep me from ditching the service like so many other subscribers apparently are. It will save me about 50 bucks a month for two years, so I’m not complaining. At least for now.
[Update: yes, this was a scam. I hate and distrust DirecTV so much that the ridiculously complicated script I was being read and the confusing payment process seemed consistent with my usual interactions.]
In 2023 I presented the Ethics Alarms “Do Something!” Scale, which was subsequently enhanced and expanded with suggestion from AM Golden and Michael West. Right now, in great part because one of our political parties depends on fearmongering as its primary campaign strategy, we have seen an increase in Doomsday scenarios regarding the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, escalating protests, and various well-meaning prescriptions to save humanity, or something. A substack essay by Damien Charlotin has received a great deal of attention: you can read it here. It is thoughtful, erudite, thorough and deluded. The essay is also a typical “expert” reaction to “Do Something!” hysterics.
The latest hyperventilating outrage for the Trump Deranged to get furious over is this:
“President Donald Trump gave $45,000 cash gifts to his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two of his other young, loyal White House employees, according to financial disclosures released by the administration. On their disclosure forms, which were released publicly late last week, the three women described the payments as “Cash Gift for Holidays.” The gifts amount to about one-third of the $150,000 salaries they each earn from their White House positions, according to an annual report to Congress.”
The Washington Post predictably runs to NeverTrump Bush White House legal ethicist Richard Painter, who wanted to impeach Trump in 2016 before he took office. “Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and a critic of Trump,” the Post tells us, “said the payments appear to violate a federal statute that prohibits the supplementation of federal employees’ salaries from outside sources.” “He’s clearly trying to make it easier for them financially to work in government service at the White House,” Painter said. “You can’t do that.”
Wouldn’t you think a responsible and objective news source would begin by highlighting the opinion of a lawyer and ethicist who hadn’t already made it clear that one of his main goals in life is to “Get Trump”? If the gifts were the slam-dunk offense Painter says it is, shouldn’t it be easy to find other “experts” to weigh in on the matter? Eventually, the Post does bring another “expert” into the mix, but only after quoting Painter extensively. [Full Disclosure:the best legal ethics website that I have ever had the pleasure to visit was John Steele’s Legal Ethics Forum. It managed to stay non-partisan and therefore useful until Painter ruined it with his routine anti-Trump rants. Steele eventually gave up and let the website slide into misuse. The partisan ethics rot that killed that site has also seeped into the listserv of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers. I can’t blame Painter for the whole phenomenon, but he was one of its architects, and yes, I resent it.]
That second voice does not echo Painter’s predictable condemnation. Don Fox, the former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) in the Obama administration, tells the Post:
“…it was not clear from the available facts that the payments violate the prohibition on supplementation. He said that would be the case if Trump made the gifts after one of the employees said they were leaving for the private sector because they couldn’t live on what they were making, and he gave them a supplement to level the disparity in salaries. There are rules that restrict employees from giving gifts to their superiors over concerns they could be abused to curry favor. But a large payment to a subordinate is “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned,” Fox said. “This just doesn’t happen.”…Even in the absence of any violation, however, Fox said he still found the payments “troublesome” because they could leave the aides indebted to Trump. “I would feel somewhere between really uncomfortable and then beholden to the person who gave me such a large gift,” he said.
Oh-oh! There’s another one of those “democratic norms” that Trump keeps breaching!
The Post reveals,
Harp, Martin, Harris and Nauta all have ties to Trump dating from his first term, and they were all among a small inner circle of aides who worked for Trump in Florida in between his presidencies. Harp, Martin and Harris have limited work experience that isn’t tied to Trump…Harp gained national attention in 2019 for a LinkedIn post in which she credited a law Trump signed in 2018 expanding access to experimental treatments with saving her life following a Stage 2 bone cancer diagnosis. Medical experts have cast doubt on those claims. Harp spoke about the experience at the 2020 Republican National Convention. As an anchor with One America News, she frequently promoted Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election. She began working for Trump in 2022 after leaving the network.
Martin began working for the Trump White House as a press assistant in 2019 and continued to work as a press secretary for Trump after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Harris began her career at the White House and was known as the “receptionist of the United States” during Trump’s first term.
Nauta is a Guam native who enlisted in the Navy in 2001. By 2021, he was promoted to the rank of senior chief culinary specialist, according to military records. Nauta was working in the White House at that time, and Trump promoted him to be his valet, according to court records. Valets are often known as “body men,” following politicians closely so that they can provide them with everything from snacks to schedules.
This juror is telling you from the prosecution’s opening statement that she was team free Lindsay regardless of any evidence they would produce. pic.twitter.com/HsTxl54EXA
As EA noted from the beginning of the Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck, the trial presents an excellent argument for why women should be subject to peremptory challenges in voir dire when their biases are likely to result in jurors like this woman.
The prosecution isn’t supposed to show “compassion” for accused murderers. Nor are prosecution opening statements supposed to be warm and fuzzy toward a defendant. The state’s concern is with the victims, as well as the fabric of society wounded by terrible crimes.
Moreover, no “character witnesses” need testify that a woman who murders her own children is a “bad mother.” In a sane world, a woman who strangles her own children is by definition a bad mother. Presuming that a mother must be insane to do this is a pre-existing bias that should have disqualified this juror and any juror.
“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
—Kellie Farina, one of the three jurors interviewed following the mistrial called in the Lindsay Clancy murder case, after the jury deadlocked 11-1 with a single hold-out male juror refusing to vote for acquittal.
That may end up being an iconic unethical quote, one that echoes through the years as America comes to realize how shattered the values of American women have become in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The especially nice touch is the use of “viciously,” don’t you think? ‘Imagine, this idiot was somehow stuck on the fact that a mother murdered her three small children viciously! What’s the matter with him?’
I’d like to know what’s the matter with anyone who can “get over” the fact that three children were murdered by their own mother “viciously.”
Brenda Deutsch, 70, a serial foster mother in Missouri, was sentenced to seven years in prison for child endangerment, because, among other things, she traded her teenage foster daughter for a monkey.
Nonetheless this creature—Deutch, not the monkey—avoided prison time, or even zoo time. Judge Thomas Frawley condemned her in open court as reprehensible and apologized to her alleged victims for a foster care system that had failed them, but he suspended execution of the sentence and placed her on three years of probation. Hey, after all, she was good to the monkey! The judge also revoked Deutsch’s foster care license and criticized the state of Missouri for allowing her to keep it.
Deutsch was arrested in April after authorities investigated allegations that she sent the girl she was fostering, now 17, to Texas to stay in a home that Deutsch admitted in court she knew nothing about. After Deutsch sought permission to take the girl to visit “a friend” in Texas, an anonymous caller alerted the Missouri Department of Social Services Children’s Division that Deutsch was allegedly physically and mentally abusing a child. Investigators later learned that the girl had been allegedly traded for “an exotic animal,” aka. the monkey, and was now living in Texas with the “friend.” She was also apparently living in squalor, because her new home was packed with animals. The teenager told investigators that Foster Mom had told her trading partner that she could keep the girl, but that Deutsch “will be keeping the check.” And the monkey, of course.
I don’t understand why Deutch isn’t receiving the same kind of passionate support Lindsay Clancy is. Heck, all Deutch did was trade a child for a monkey; she didn’t kill her. And everyone knows that teenagers are much more annoying than toddlers and babies.
It also seems pretty clear that Deutch is at least as nuts as Clancy is, just in different ways. (Note that I resisted saying that she was “bananas”…) So where’s the compassion? Where are the demonstrators in pink? How many mothers haven’t had moments when they would have happily traded their unruly, hateful teen for a monkey, a Hershey Bar or a 1958 Gino Cimoli baseball card? I see no signs reading “Listen to Mothers…Who want to Trade Their Teens for Monkeys!” This is a double standard.
Apparently Deutch has fostered over 200 kids. What a great child welfare system we have!
I was glad to see the often rogue Democrat/Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema leave Congress and my ethics scrutiny because she was a one-woman EA spelling landmine: I always wanted to spell her first name “Krysten” and her last name “Cinema.” But a federal judge last week cleared the way for a the wife of a man she had been having an affair with while she was a U.S. Senator to litigate a North Carolina “homewrecker” lawsuit against her.
Good.
To be fair, Ethics Alarms had extolled Sinema a couple times in the past, most recently in 2021, when I wrote:
“Totalitarianism takes a hit! Is it fatal? Senator Krysten Sinema (D-Az) is suddenly evil in the eyes of progressives hoping to ram through SCOTUS packing, gun restrictions, D.C. statehood, HR One and other measures designed to make the US a one party, European-style nanny state until the stars turn cold. She announced that she is unalterably opposed to eliminating the filibuster, meaning that it’s probably here to stay, at least for a while. The ethical response to this development would be for the two parties to stop insisting on extreme positions, and work toward compromises, as our system was designed to foster. Nah.”
Nonetheless, Sinema carried on a sexual affair with her bodyguard (heh!), leading to his divorce. Sinema’s lawyers had asked U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon to toss the suit, arguing she had no meaningful ties to North Carolina and had conducted her affair with Matthew Ammel entirely in other states. Bragdon, rejected that account in a 13-page order.
Two “the rest of the story” items to kick things off:
As we all hoped would be the case, MLB reprimanded umpire Doug Eddings for telling rookie St. Louis Cardinals rookie reliever Hancel Rincon to straighten his cap and to “Grow the hell up!” Eddings issued an apology. EA covered the episode here. But last night, as many suggested, many Cardinals wore their caps askew as a visual rebuke to Eddings, who was the umpire at third base. Interestingly, some of the Colorado Rockies had their caps tilted as well. Eddings claimed that he admonished Rincon because a Rockies batter, Hunter Goodman, flagged the rakish angle of the young pitcher’s headgear. Goodman, however denies that he said anything.
See? I said this was an ethics train wreck!
In this post, EA discussed the absurd controversy involving “Stars and Stripes” staff maintaining that they were “independent” of the Pentagon. In a 24-page ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden turned down the entreaty by the newspaper’s publisher, editor-in-chief and Middle East reporter to stay their firings while a lawsuit challenging the terminations as First Amendment violations works its way through the court system. McFadden found the government probably did not violate their First Amendment rights by firing them. I think their claim came perilously close to being a frivolous suit. If it were to prevail, no reporter or journalist could be fired by a government publication for an inflammatory or anti-American output because it could be framed as “censorship.” Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte told CBS in an interview that they “worked for Stars and Stripes, “not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker.” They were asserting total independence and autonomy, despite being a Pentagon publication and funded by tax-payers.
Meanwhile…
1. The NFL is increasingly ridiculous, and I continue to wonder when it’s core audience will just say, “Enough already! Bye!” The league’s woke virtue signaling and DEI embrace is obnoxious, but its recent decision that football needs screamingly fey male cheerleaders boggles the mind. Look at this guy:
What the hell? I find female NFL cheerleaders an embarrassment, but this…any idea what the NFL is going for here or why? Tim O’Brien writes in part,
“I mean, who in the world asked for this? What market research told the NFL that what it really needed to do was complement all that toxic masculinity during the game with this? Seriously, are gay men a viable market for the NFL? How big is that market? Perhaps even more pointedly, as a percentage, how many not just gay men, but flaming gay men, watch the NFL on Sundays? Are we missing something? …[T]he NFL continues to find ways to alienate me and the millions of others who tune in because all we want to do is watch good football, see a little patriotism, and get a dose of a high-energy, traditional game-day atmosphere, nothing more….All of it is telling me the NFL no longer wants or needs people like me as fans. I’m cool with that, but if I have one message for the league, it’s this: “Be careful what you wish for.”
The NFL is already the most unethical sports league in existence (after the WNBA, of course). More on that tomorrow.
2. Speaking of the WNBA, ESPN’s headline was “Cathy Engelbert, who oversaw WNBA boom, to retire as commissioner.” It could well have read, “Cathy Engelbert, who proved completely incapable of leading the WNBA as it found itself immersed in racial and gender controversies, is running away. Good.” “Over the years, it has been amazing to watch WNBA players thrive and lead the massive cultural surge around women’s sports,” Engelbert said in a statement. “I retire knowing we have built something bigger, stronger and more enduring than we could have imagined. I am grateful to the WNBA and NBA team owners and staff, players, investors, fans and the powerhouse league office staff, who believed in what this league could become. I retire with immense gratitude and tremendous optimism for the future of the WNBA, with the best yet to come.”
Englebert is an accountant, and served as the CEO of Deloitte. She was brought in to develop the WNBA as a business, but had no skills or orientation that qualified her to deal with the league’s image and public relations problems. It took some gall for her to talk about the surge in “women’s sports” as so many of her league’s coaches speak as if they don’t know what a woman is.
Players and coaches have described her as “negligent.” One player said that the WNBA had the “worst leadership in the world.” From my observations, this was a severely limited leader who saw her job in the narrowest possible terms. She was hired to cut business deals and make money for the owners. She was good at that. Meanwhile, under her stewardship the WNBA has acquired the reputation of being dominated by lesbian thugs who resent the few white heterosexuals in their midst.
Maybe the WNBA should acquire the NFL’s gay cheerleaders…
