Law & Law Enforcement

Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls” Blogger Nina Bookout

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This sentencing decision by Merchan is, in my opinion, based upon pure spite.”

—-Nina Bookout, one of several conservative female pundits who populate the “Victory Girls” blog, correctly assessing the planned conclusion of one of the many contrived “lawfare” cases against Donald Trump that ultimately failed at their mission, which was to stop him from returning to the White House even at the price of emulating totalitarian regimes.

Gee, ya think, Nina?

There has been a lot of spite emanating from the Angry (and justly humiliated) Left lately, with Biden giving civilian honors to the likes of Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. The latter, among other revolting uses of his billions, funded anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas/pro-terrorism demonstrations on college campuses. Bookout’s particular focus regarding spite is New York’s Judge Merchan ruling last week that President-Elect Trump will be sentenced on January 10, less the two week from his swearing in as POTUS. Merchan also made it clear that the sentence will include no jail time, an “unconditional discharge,” which is what New York criminal courts call a non-jail and non-probation sentence that carries no other obligations.

The objective, Bookout surmises, is so the resistance, Democrats and the corrupted mainstream media (the cabal that Ethics Alarms refers to with the term, “The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or “Axis” for short) can continue to deride Trump as a “convicted felon” and the “first U.S. President to be convicted of a felony.”

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Tales of the King’s Pass

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

During the baseball off-season the MLB channel on DirecTV has a lot of dead time to fill between the periodic announcements of trades, free agent signings and post-season awards and honors. Lately it has been re-running an old Bob Castas show called “Studio 42” (that’s Jackie Robinson’s number) where the perpetually boyish-looking baseball commentator, who now really is Old Bob, interviews retired players and managers about significant games and moments in their careers.

In an episode I happened across this morning after my dog woke me up and then stole the bed as soon as I got out of it, Costas’s guest was the late, great manager Whitey Herzog, like so many successful baseball managers, a mediocre-to-poor player in his Major League career. Whitey told a story that is as good an example of the King’s Pass, #11 on the Rationalization List, as there is.

He said that in one game between the old Washington Senators (the first Senators, the team that moved to Minnesota and became the Twins) and the Red Sox in Boston, Ted Williams had drawn a walk on a 3-2 pitch right down the middle of the plate that the umpire had called a ball. Williams was famous for his plate discipline and above-average eyesight, and umpires frequently let him, opposing players complained, call his own balls and strikes because unpires acknowledged that he was better at it than they were. Herzog came to bat late in the same contest having walked four times and with a chance to set a record by getting five bases-on-balls in a single game. He told Costas that the umpire called him out on strikes on a 3-2 pitch in the dirt.

“I turned around and said to the ump, ‘You give Williams five strikes and give me only two. It should be the other way around!'”

This struck me particularly squarely because I had been thinking about the Judicial Conference declining to take any action against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the subject of a Senate Judiciary inquiry ever since ProPublica revealed that the Justice had neglected to report around half a million in luxury travel and gifts as legally required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

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Social Media Doesn’t Make College Kids Act Like Morons—Being Morons Make College Kids Act Like Morons

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

(I’m always happy when I can justify posting a Charles Addams cartoon.)

I’m sure this discouraging episode will somehow make it into the dispute over whether TikTok, which apparently gathers data from millions of Americans to put in the clutches of China’s Dark Masters, should be banned or not. The incident isn’t about TikTok, however.

Apparently there is now a viral TikTok-promoted fad in which people lure suspected sexual predators to some location, lie in wait for them, and either call the police or, for even more fun, beat them up. The “game” is modeled after an unethical vigilante TV reality show on ABC that lasted three seasons; I wrote several posts about it on Ethics Alarms’ now unavailable predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. Starring “Dateline” reporter Chris Hanson, the show that aired from 2004-2007 would use the internet and phone calls to lure someone seeking underage sexual companionship to a hidden camera ambush. The entertainment came from watching Hanson walk out from behind a bush and make the sick bastard huminahumina his way into coast-to-coast humiliation. The pre-crime predators who were thus “caught” almost never were convicted of anything.

In Worcester, Massachusetts (that’s pronounced “Wuster,” you Bay State ignoramuses!) students at Assumption University came to the wrong assumption that the “To Catch a Predator” game was a good use of their time. Easton Randall, Kevin Carroll, Isabella Trudeau, Kelsy Brainard, and Joaqin Smith, all 18, decided that a “creepy guy” was a sexual predator, so a female student used dating site Tinder to lure him to where he would think was a meeting place for a hook-up with a 17-year old girl. They had enlisted about 30 other students to lie in wait with them, and the mob chased and assaulted him as the stunt was recorded. Oh, the views it would attract! Randall told police that the idea was to emulate “the Chris Hansen videos where you catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,” but the incident “got out of hand and went bad.”

Ya think?

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Ethics Quiz: Trump-Proofing

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

In the last couple of weeks there have been multiple news reports regarding President Biden “Trump-proofing” the government in advance of the newly elected President taking over as the voters have willed. The decision to veto the bi-partisan act that would create more federal judgeships was such a measure: though the new judges are desperately needed to address the backlog in the courts, apparently whoever is pulling Biden’s strings has decided that no new judges at all are better than Trump appointed judges.

Today there was another example. Bloomberg reported that President Biden is will issue an unusually resilient executive order permanently banning new offshore oil and gas development in some US coastal waters.The executive order will bar the sale of new drilling rights in portions of the country’s outer continental shelf, potentially foiling Trump’s promise to ramp up domestic energy production. The plan will exploit a 72-year-old law that gives the White House wide discretion to permanently protect US waters from oil and gas leasing. The same law does not without explicitly empower Presidents to revoke the designation. (It sounds legally dubious to me, but I haven’t read the law.)

Trump is expected to order a reversal of these attempted permanent protections, but whether he will be able to do so is unknown.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is this…

Do you think it is ethical for an outgoing President to take measures to impede the agenda of the incoming President?

Ethics Quiz: Discrimination As a IA Right

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Seriously? Will this ruling stand? Can it? Should it?

The Superior Court of New Jersey’s Appellate Division ruled Dec. 20 against Rajeh A. Saadeh in his lawsuit alleging that the New Jersey State Bar Association had violated the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination. The NJSB has a diversity policy that reserves 13 out of 94 leadership positions for members of specified underrepresented groups. Saadeh is a Palestinian Muslim American attorney, and his group didn’t make the cut. He argued that this was discriminatory, while the bar association argued that it had a First Amendment right to select leaders “consistent with its values regarding diversity in the legal profession.”

The Appellate Court overruled a trial judge who had held that the diversity program was an illegal quota system under New Jersey law. “[T]he undisputed facts in this record establishes beyond peradventure that the bar association qualifies as an expressive association, and that compelling it to end its practice of ensuring the presence of designated underrepresented groups in its leadership would unconstitutionally infringe its ability to advocate the value of diversity and inclusivity in the association and more broadly in the legal profession,” the appeals court said. Since the ruling was that the discriminatory policy was protected speech, it did not even address the question of discrimination.

[Two side points: 1) I have an automatic prejudice against any judge, or anyone, who uses the term “peradventure” and 2) I will not forgive the NJSBA for firing me after years of providing it with (acclaimed, profitable and discounted!) musical ethics CLE programs because I exclaimed “Fuck!” a single time to no one in particular in a moment of frustation during a tech check on Zoom when the bar association’s technical staff proved that it had no idea what it was doing.]

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day…

Is that an ethically defensible decision?

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‘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.

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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.

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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…

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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:

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