Law & Law Enforcement

‘Nah, Those Prosecutions of Trump Weren’t Political!’

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One inconvenient aspect of creeping senility is that the sufferers often say out loud what is normally filed in the brain file labeled “Never Speak of This, Ever.” And so it is that, as the Washington Post reports,

“In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to multiple people familiar with his comments. [….] Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election.’

Of course, we all knew that the plan was to burden Trump with dubious and politically motivated prosecutions in the year leading up to the election, and with a normal human being, it would have worked, or at least caused him to have a stroke or a breakdown. Instead, the Democratic Party’s “democratic norms”-wrecking strategy alienated Americans who don’t like to see their government acting like the Stasi. It showed a strength of character and fighting spirit that Americans still seek in their leaders. It proved how desperate and hypocritical Trumps foes and adversaries were. But the Axis denied it all—and now the intended beneficiary of the plot to make Donald Trump run for President as a “convicted felon” and “adjudicated rapist” has admitted that a better Attorney General would have nailed Trump before he could get elected.

And Donald Trump was the existential threat to the republic, this same man told us.

Has there ever been a time in our history when an entire political party and all of its voters and supporters so deserved to wear paper bags over their heads in disgrace?

Let Us Give Belated Thanks To President Biden’s Ventriloquists For Another Vivid Example of Unethical Anti-Gun Propaganda

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

I missed this, but the White House statement from “President Biden” (Who wrote it? Who approved it? Did the President even know about it?) following the Madison, Wisconsin school shooting two weeks ago couldn’t be a better demonstration of the intellectual dishonesty and ruthlessness of the Left’s anti-Second Amendment fanatics. Apparently gun-phobics are thrilled any time a gun-related tragedy occurs so they can rush out junk like this and fundraising appeals to exploit the event for all it’s worth, and the higher body count the better. The alleged Presidential sentiment deliberately misrepresents the shooting by linking it to standard tenets of the anti-gun agenda that literally have nothing to do with the incident being exploited.

The Biden statement also brands itself as standard issue cant by using the deliberately meaningless Axis phrase “commonsense gun safety laws,” overwhelming used by those whose idea of “common sense” is not to allow legal private gun ownership at all. Then the letter advocates universal background checks, a national red flag law, a ban on assault weapons, and a ban on high-capacity magazines, not one of which would have done anything to prevent the shooting that is supposed to be the subject of the letter.

The shooter in Madison was a 15-year-old girl who couldn’t legally purchase a gun anyway: background checks don’t apply to shooters like her. Nor would a “red flag law” have flagged her, since it doesn’t include children too young to own guns. The shooter didn’t use an “assault weapon”; she used a pistol; nor was a high-capacity magazine involved. Never mind! Guns bad, so this tragedy that might have been prevented if only “we could melt all the guns and give a new world to our daughters and sons” (which we can’t: Who recognizes the song lyric?) justifies rushing out anti-gun propaganda when the appeal to emotion would be most effective.

Yecchh.

_______________

Pointer: Not the Bee

Final 2024 Ethics Round-Up, 12/29/24: Of Jawbreakers, ‘Thinflation,’ Weasel Words and Prison Sex

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(You’re going to have to wait until the end to learn who that is in the photo above….)

I’ve been trying to figure out an ethics angle for the best news story I saw today; the best I can come up with is “life incompetence.” The headline was “Woman Breaks Jaw After Biting into Jawbreaker Candy.” Apparently Canadian student Javeria Wasim wondered if someone could bite through a giant jawbreaker, and took it on as a challeng. She barely made a dent in the candy when she felt a pop followed by piercing pain in her lower jaw. Yup, it was a jawbreaker, all right! She had fractured her mandible in two places and also loosened her top and lower front teeth. Now her jaw is wired shut.

1. You’ve noticed “shrinkflation,” but have you picked up on ‘thinflation’? It appears that clothing manufacturers are using thinner, lighter fabric for such staples as T-shirts and chinos. “Pretty much everything is lighter and thinner,” Sean Cormier, a professor of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told Slate. He said chinos that used to weigh 8 ounces per square yard of fabric might be only 6 ounces today.

“It’s a trend in the industry, and not one that’s sustainable, because obviously the thinner the garment, it’s not going to last as long,” Cormier says. Two decades ago a T-shirt might have weighed 8 to 10 ounces per square yard of fabric. Today, experts report, it’s half that. Clothing doesn’t last as long as it used to, fabrics are generally thinner, and the quality of clothing has decreased. Not the prices, however. The garments also don’t have as much “covering power,” meaning that not only wet T-shirts but the dry ones too are revealing.

2. Apparently some people have a problem with this statement. Not me! An Illinois homeowner’s surveillance camera detected motion on the side of the home and he spotted two masked men. After instructing his wife to seek cover, he grabbed his gun. Then he shot shot and killed Jorge Nestevan Flores-Toledo, a 27-year-old from Mexico with a long criminal record. The second man, an illegal immigrant, aka. “a visitor” skedaddled but was tracked down by K9 dogs and arrested a few blocks away. Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells said, in describing the incident, “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.” I don’t see why you shouldn’t expect to be shot when you want to break into anyone’s home in any state.

Continue reading →

In a Fascinating Though Risky Experiment, NY Gov. Kathy Hochul Decides To Test If Anything Can Make Voters Reject The Democratic Party

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I confess, I don’t know what to call this post, how to define NY Gov. Kathy Hochul at this point, or how to explain American citizens who would put up with her.

She’s had quite an exciting December. On the same day and just two hours after a psychopathic illegal immigrant set a sleeping woman on fire in a New York City subway train, Hochel sent out this…

Continue reading →

Post Script To “Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the previous post I wrote,

“I am sure someone will do research into who the order has spared, and we will see other multiple murderers, people who killed without remorse and with extreme cruelty, vicious psychopaths who killed for the fun of it, or who murdered children, or who slaughtered their victims after rape or torture. These don’t warrant executions, Biden says on behalf of the Wonderful Woke who refuse to acknowledge that there is a point where an individual has forfeited the benefits of civilization, but the single factor of “hate” elevates murder from really, really bad to intolerable.”

No sooner had I posted than Not The Bee posted exactly what I expected; it popped up in my email, in fact. Among those the President’s mass commutation today saves from the fate they all richly deserve:

Continue reading →

Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As was anticipated after reports that were issued over the weekend, “President Joe Biden announced” today that he has commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers, thus taking them off federal death row. They will now serve out life sentences in prison, being housed, fed, given medical attention and more at taxpayer expense. This was done deliberately to foil the announced intention of President-elect Donald Trump to carry out the verdicts of juries and the courts.

“Biden’s statement”—this is in quotation marks because he didn’t write it, probably doesn’t understand it and quite possibly never read it or approved it—reads,

“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss. But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Ethics observations:

Continue reading →

When Your Trump-Deranged, Slowly Metamorphosing Into Full Leftist Totalitarian Friends and Relatives Deny What Their “Movement” Has Become, Waive This In Their Smug, Red, Contorted Faces…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This must stop, here, there, and everywhere.

As frequent readers here know, Ethics Alarms has been referring to the Axis of Unethical Conduct (an Ethics Alarms term, and a fair one) as a totalitarianism-leaning, anti-American phenomenon for years now, as I have tracked the frightening progress on the 2016 Ethics Train Wreck and all of its many offshoots. I have used made this point frequently and, I recognize, emphatically to the point that many object to those and related labels as inflammatory and biased, which they are not because my assessment is objective and accurate. I could also say, with justification, “If the show fits, wear it,” and even “If the shoe fits wear it, you assholes.”

Today I was sent promotional spam by my old hometown newspaper, the lone surviving conservative #2 paper in Boston (The Dominating Axis representative is the always Democratic Boston Globe) after the slow amalgam of four newspapers with long histories of service to the people of New England: The Boston Herald, the Boston Traveler, the Boston Record and the Boston American. That headline above was all I needed to spark a head explosion with several subsequent explosions that left bits of brain and bone on my keyboard and computer screen after I read the entire report.

Continue reading →

The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

Continue reading →

A Federal Judge Gets Benchslapped For An Unethical Times Column

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On May 24, 2024, while Supreme Court Justice Jackson was dreaming of playing “Medea,” The New York Times published an op-ed entitled, “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” by Senior Judge Michael A. Ponsor of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.  Judge Ponsor addressed the flying of an upside-down American flag and the “Appeal to Heaven” flags outside homes owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a controversy covered thoroughly on Ethics Alarms.

The ethics verdict here was that the controversy was contrived, and that the attack on Alito was politically motivated, biased, and wrong. Judge Ponsor, however, opined that “any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have” recognized that the flag displays were improper because they could be perceived as “a banner of allegiance on partisan issues that are or could be before the court.”

Let me inject here, “Sure, by an idiot!” “The appearance of impropriety is a reason-based standard. “Hey, this SCOTUS judge’s wife flew the same flag that began the HBO John Adams series: that must mean that her husband is in the bag for President Trump!” is not a reasonable perception.

Continue reading →

On the ABC $16 Million Libel Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ABC News agreed last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” broadcast in March, in which he repeatedly said, while interviewing Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had, in fact, been found liable for sexual assault but not rape, and this had been well-publicized at the time.

Trump sued ABC, and I assumed it was a nuisance suit made for effect rather than in expectation of winning. In fact, I regarded it as this close to being frivolous. That it wasn’t was proven by the settlement.

News media fans (I am not one) and journalism advocates are apoplectic over the settlement, believing that it weakens the “power of the press” to distort, lie and manipulate public opinion as the news media has been doing increasingly and shamelessly in one direction on the ideological scale for more than two decades. Good. The news media is careless, reckless, arrogant and unprofessional, as well as unaccountable. If the ABC defeat makes them a little bit more wary and careful to be sure of their facts, it is to everyone’s benefit, including journalists.

It couldn’t have happened to a better target than Stephanopoulos. He is a partisan hack, and never should have been allowed to pretend to be a journalist after serving as one of Bill Clinton’s henchmen. The Times v. Sullivan case requires that a journalist must demonstrate actual malice toward a public figure before a defamation suit gets past the First Amendment, and in most cases miscreants like George are saved by their own incompetence. I was certain that he would be saved this time— ah, rape, sexual assault, tomato-tomahto, who cares, what’s the difference. Of course, everyone knows except maybe Ethics Alarms vigilante press defender “A Friend” that Stephanopoulos and about 90% of his colleagues are hostile to Donald Trump, but general antipathy is usually not enough to show malice.

Continue reading →