Christopher Armitage, a far Left scholar whose anti-GOP, anti-Trump positions are cloaked in respectability, came up with this one. He describes himself as “independent.” Strangely, his work “has been cited by the Brookings Institution and covered by NPR, PBS, Mother Jones, and The Nation.” Those are all infamous Leftist propaganda organs, with Mother Jones and The Nation on the extreme end of the spectrum.
In one SCOTUS case after another, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a demented President’s irresponsible DEI selection for our highest court, has demonstrated an absence of judicial integrity, or, in the alternative, intellectual ability. Her questions in oral argument have been incoherent, and her legal reasoning is regularly polluted by obvious partisan bias. She is, in short, an embarrassment to the Court, the nation, the judiciary, the law, her race, her gender, and her party. Finally, following an extreme example of Jackson’s incompetence, Justice Samuel Alito came as close to calling her an idiot as a Supreme Court Justice can within the limits of professional civility.
It’s about time.
The Supreme Court last night granted a request to lock in its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, discussed on EA here and here, where the Court struck down a congressional gerrymander as racially discriminatory in breach of federal law. The decision allows Louisiana to draw a new map in time for the 2026 mid-term elections. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole dissenter in the 8-1 decision to eschew the delay. Jackson’s fatuously argued that the Court’s ruling “has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.”
Yes, chaos is often the result when a state is trying to do something unconstitutional and is blocked.
Giuliani is one of the lawyers hit with bar association discipline for representing Donald Trump in the wake of the highly suspicious 2020 Presidential election, or perhaps I should say the way they represented Trump and his contention that the election was “stolen” or “rigged.” I have written two posts about the D.C. Bar and New York Sate Bar’s proceedings against Rudy here and especially here. My conclusion in then latter piece, in part. :
“This case has been the subject of much debate by my legal ethicist colleagues of late, with a depressing near-consensus that Rudy is getting what he deserves. This is because, I detect, the vast majority of lawyers cannot see through their political biases and Trump hate. At the most simple level,… contrary to the Court’s certitude, all of the evidence is not in, though the claim that there was widespread election fraud and that the election was “stolen” has for many months been pronounced “a lie” by Democrats and the mainstream media with suspicious vigor. While the opinion makes a convincing case that many of Giuliani’s statements, including some made to courts and government bodies, were careless, sloppy, badly sourced, unprofessional and wrong, it cannot know at this point that his (or Trump’s) general claim is false. If it is not false, then raising doubts among the public cannot be called dangerous to the public. It is more dangerous to keep opinions, arguments and ideas from the public’s awareness “for their own good.”…Giuliani, like so many other victims of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, is being punished by a double standard predicated on the hatred of Donald Trump. That’s unethical.”
Esteemed law professor Brad Wendel, who belongs to the same, almost totally anti-Trump legal ethics specialist association that I do, has published a contrarian analysis following California’s disbarment of John Eastman (above), who was one of the principal architects, along with Kenneth Chesebro (who was disbarred in New York after pleading guilty in Georgia to charges of election interference), of President Trump’s legal assault on the 2020 election. There are plenty of tells in Prof. Wendel’s essay that he is far from a Trump admirer (for example, he refers to the “scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”) However, he writes,
A high school student in Philadelphia made series of videos, posted on TikTok, showing how exposed how some of his classmates could not read well nor comprehend relatively simple sentences. “whatthevek” posted a video showing single high school-aged students was unable to read the sentence, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” He made a follow-up video a day later in showing students unable to make sense of the sentence, “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.” The videos were filmed at the city’s Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers.
How surprised are you? I’m not.
The two videos went “viral,” accumulating 1.7 million likes and thousands of comments. The student says he won’t be posting a third, however. “I would post a part three, but the school board is trying to expel me, stop me from going to prom, and stop me from walking at graduation,” he revealed on Instagram last week.
South Philly-based Prep Charter has yet to conform or deny this. State test scores show that just 53% of students at the school tested proficient in reading, and 19% were proficient in math. Roughly 71% of Philadelphia’s fourth-graders cannot read at grade level, according to statistics from Philadelphia-based social justice group Achieve Now. The group also holds that about half of all adults in Philadelphia are functionally illiterate, one of the highest rates among large US cities.
Let us assume that the student, whose name is not yet known, is indeed facing punishment for his videos.
I’m proud to say that Ethics Alarms began identifying Dr. Anthony Fauci as the despicable liar and irresponsible hack that he was and is in December of 2020, during the societal lockdown that wrecked my business, helped kill my wife, hobbled children’s education, destroyed whole industries…well, but it let American elect a senile Democrat as President, so it wasn’t all bad, I guess.
“[L]ying is not an option for someone who has been held up for almost a year as the epitome of an expert representing “science,” who must be believed and slavishly obeyed by policymakers because, after all, scientists only convey cold hard facts. If that’s the basis for your authority, if that’s the reason the news media and the President-elect lecturing us about the virtues of obeying experts and following what the “science” says, no matter how difficult, painful and counter-intuitive it might be, then a high profile expert cannot, must not, and dare not announce later that he withheld facts for our own good. That’s not the role that we have been told anexpert fills. Not telling the public the truth for the greater good is a pubic servant’s tool, and one that is perilous to use at best. We do not expect politicians to always tell us the truth, and we even accept the troubling reality that sometimes they may be right not to tell us the truth. As Pelt, the character played by the late Richard Jordan in “The Hunt for the Red October” says,
“Listen, I’m a politician, which means I’m a cheat and a liar, and when I’m not kissing babies, I’m stealing their lollipops, but it also means that I keep my options open.“
“But scientists, we have been told, over and over again, regarding climate change and the pandemic just to name two of the most egregious examples, aren’t politicians. They deal in facts only. They have no agendas, they aren’t shading or outright hiding the truth to manipulate us. We are told this by people arrogantly treating us like children and fools. Oh, you poor ignorant dolts who a skeptical of what these learned, good men and women know!
“Right. Anthony Fauci, the current symbol of the integrity and reliability of science, lied to the public (and probably to policymakers: who can be sure?) by his own admission.
“He cannot be trusted. He can never be trusted. And, having been held up as the unimpeachable representative of experts and science generally, they can’t be trusted either.”
Well before that post, Ethics Alarms (and many commenters here) had taken the position that the lockdown of the schools and the economy was a near suicidal act made politically unavoidable by the teachers unions, the news media and the “experts” who were, like Fauci, asserting dire consequences as “science” when they were in fact only guesses or worse, deliberate lies to advance a partisan agenda. The mask nearly fell off when the same “experts” that insisted that white people avoid groups larger than five declared that there was an exception for George Floyd mobs because, see, racism is a public health threat.
It was, or should have been, so obvious what was going on, but Fauci played saintly doctor beautifully, bolstered by Axis propaganda like this…
….to crush anyone who pointed out that shutting down the economy and the schools for a virus that was only more dangerous than the flu to people over 65 is insane.
Now, six years after that headline (I have never trusted The Atlantic since, and never will)—too late for all the millions of victims of the pandemic lies and experts malpractice—the walls may finally be closing in on Fauci.
May.
Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens was indicted this week and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records relating to the origins of the Wuhan virus. He faces up to 51 years in prison. If Morens is guilty so is Fauci, who denied under oath that he funded “gain of function” experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started. The five-year statute of limitations runs out on May 11.
“99% of this country has no idea who Morens is,” said Oversight Project President Mike Howell after the indictment was announced. “It’s Fauci that they will blame for one of the worst government catastrophes in history in America. And so the test is Fauci. The Morens indictment is great, and we applaud it. But there are a lot of people out there that want to see Fauci held to account for the damage he wrought. [Fauci] lied about one of the most damaging events in American history routinely and was behind a massive coverup of the key factors,” Howell said.
Verdict:true. The Ethics Villain may avoid accountability anyway, because on his final full day in office, President Joe Biden or whoever was operating his auto-pen issued a blanket pardon to Fauci for “any offenses” dating to 2014. After all, it was Fauci’s lockdown (and the questionable election security that it spawned) that made Biden President. A Fauci indictment would neatly set up a judicial determination if the pardon (and others “Biden” issued) is valid.
Yes, the Trump DOJ really indicted the Deep State’s scumball ex-FBI Director for his obnoxious Instagram post featuring an anti-Trump seashell message he happened upon on the beach (Yeah, I wouldn’t put it past this guy to arrange the seashells himself and then pretend it was made by someone else, but that is unprovable.)
Trump’s DOJ has unsuccessfully indicted Comey once already. That indictment at least had some law and logic to support it: this one does not. I didn’t think the DOJ and FBI could be so wasteful as to have an ongoing investigation of a seashell formation that has taken eleven months, but to be fair, tracking down all those mollusk witnesses and interviewing them must have been quite a chore.
Last year I wrote, after Comey issued his Instagram post,
“James Comey, the partisan, dishonest, unethical former FBI Director whom Trump was right to fire (but he should have fired him earlier) posted on Instagram, with approval, a message that consisted of the numbers 8647, meaning “rub out the 47th President,” Donald Trump, delineated with sea shells. …
“Nice! It didn’t take long for Comey to realize that this was, to say the least, a tactical error, and he took down the post. In doing so, Comey proved what a mendacious creep he is again by claiming that it never occurred to him that 8647 might be interpreted as a call to have the President of the United States eradicated, offed, murdered, killed…you know assassinated. Never mind that there have been two near misses by the “Kill Trump” club already, that some Democrats and “the resistance” have openly advocated violence, and that for a former head of the FBI to join their ranks is, to put it mildly, unseemly. Comey said he was sorry.
“Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. A former high law enforcement official calling for the assassination of the sitting President is a big deal, attention should be paid, and Comey should suffer more than the indignity of having to channel Emily Litella (“Never mind!”)
“…There is no valid justification for taking criminal action against Comey (who wrote coyly under his shells photo, “Cool shell formation”), but there also is no good reason not to thoroughly humiliate this Ethics Villain either.”
Instead, the crack MAGA lawyers in Trump’s Justice Department decided to thoroughly humiliate themselves instead by using this old, obnoxious, since-deleted Instagram post as the basis for two criminal counts alleging that Comey “ma[d]e a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the States”:
DOJ has to prove under the law that “a reasonable recipient“ of the image of “8647” posted by Comey “who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” the post “as a serious expression of an intent to do harm” to Trump. It can’t. Among other things, the editing term “86” is ambiguous. Because I have been an editor, I know it means “Kill this section” or “throw away this story.” But even in the editing game, 86 doesn’t literally mean “kill” because you can’t kill something that isn’t alive in the first place. Furthermore, most Americans don’t have a clue that “86” means “eliminate/cut/get rid of/trash, etc.” In fact, the DOJ can’t assume or prove that Comey did, so the “knowingly and willfully” requirement is dead in the water, like the previous inhabitants of those shells.
It’s overkill because the indictment is obviously absurd and you shouldn’t have to be a lawyer, a legal scholar or a beach-comber to figure it out, but Alan Rozenshtein and Ben Wittes at Lawfare—a reliably anti-Trump, Axis-allied site, but that doesn’t mean it is always wrong— examined the legal issues regarding Comey’s post and concluded, “James Comey could have gone a lot stronger than ‘8647’ and still not risked jail.”
Absolutely correct. Taking a picture of an ambiguous message on a beach and calling it “cool” can’t conceivably constitute a “true threat.”
In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court held “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit [a law] to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” A seashell message on a beach complimented by a fired FBI director is likely to incite violence? Come on.
There is no honest way to spin this, but Murphy, truly one of the most despicable members of the Senate, tried anyway.
Democrats, like Murphy and the ethics-blind citizens who elected him (and many equally terrible people), really and truly hate the President of the United States so much that they are actively rooting for Iran to prevail in the current conflict. This is a half-century-long enemy of the United States that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans as well as terror attacks all over the Middle East, and that has made “Death to America” and the end of the state of Israel its openly stated mission, and that recently massacred tens of thousands of its own people because they demonstrated against Iran’s dictatorial theocracy.
Has any member of Congress publicly cheered the enemy during a U.S. war? Is that not, as Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution defines treason, “adhering” to enemies of the U.S. and, “giving them aid and comfort”?
Then, after the response to Murphy’s stunning declaration of pleasure in a setback for the U.S. and the success of an enemy’s efforts to defeat his own nation, Murphy managed to further prove his warped character by lying, and obviously so:
JUST IN: Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy doesn't say he has any regrets after furious backlash to his X post calling reports of Iranian ships slipping past the U.S. naval blockade "awesome."
"I guess I just have to be more careful about sarcasm on Twitter," Murphy exclusively told… pic.twitter.com/MB6nuZjY9V
He really expects anyone to believes he was being “sarcastic,” and is trying to blame the public for not understanding his subtle wit. He’s an asshole, but that label is too good for him.
Murphy should be prosecuted, and if not, then rebuked by his own party.
He won’t be of course. He’s invoking Rationalization 55. The Joke Excuse, or “I was only kidding!”…
“This is a common backtracking strategy when someone has been caught making a hurtful, unfair, false or otherwise unethical statement… defenders of comedian Wanda Sykes apply[ed] the joke excuse to her purely mean-spirited comment about Rush Limbaugh at a White House Correspondents Dinner, when she said “I hope his kidneys fail.” What a knee-slapper! As a general rule, “I hope you die” is not a joke, no matter who says it. Even when it is a joke, the jokester is still accountable for how people react to it. When a Washington D.C.’s shock-jock made the second of two racially-charged quips…he lost his job and his career, because his employers didn’t want somebody on their payroll who made those kinds of “jokes.” …Nobody should accept the defense that “it was a joke” if it wasn’t a good enough joke to compensate for the damage it did, the people it hurt, or the trouble it will cause. …[P]eople and organizations …make jokes in public at their peril. Professionals. Elected officials. Scholars. People who expect to be taken seriously and trusted.”
But he wasn’t making a joke or being sarcastic. You know, I know, and he knows he was pandering to the anti-Americans and Trump Deranged in his increasingly perverted party.
The Democrats have given Republicans and the voting public so much evidence of their party’s ethics rot that the campaign ads write themselves. If the GOP cannot convince its supporters and a wave of progressives with a conscience to reject what the Democratic Party has become, it won’t be able to blame gerrymandering in Virginia or anything other than its own incompetence and the self-destructive ignorance of the American people.
“Jeffrey Epstein Lawyer Alan Dershowitz Registers as Republican After 67 Years in Democratic Party”
It’s hard to get blacklisted on Ethics Alarms. Snopes, MSNBC, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, The Smoking Gun, Media Matters and The Daily Beast all managed to do it through repeatedly dishonest, biased and misleading stories. In other words, a site has to be even more biased and untrustworthy than Fox News, the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post to end up on mu blacklist.
Mediaite was once barely tolerable when the able Joe Concha worked there as a counter-balance to the mostly knee-jerk leftist propagandists like–-yecchh—Tommy Christopher. Joe is long gone, however, and what is left is unethical human dreck like whoever approved that headline.
The technique is called “poisoning the well,” and it is recognized by journalism ethicists, if there are any now, as a slimy tabloid tactic. Dershowitz authored an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal announcing that he was leaving the Democratic Party and why, despite pretty much opposing most conservative and Republican positions—even, he says, “immigration.” The Dersh” likes open borders? Wow. He also things abortion is swell.
The GOP might want to throw him back, like a three-eyed fish.
This is another integrity test for your woke friends who claim that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.
Tomorrow, Virginians (like me) will go to polling places to decide whether to vote for a “proposed constitutional amendment.” Note that the proposed amendment isn’t included on the ballot. This is because Democrats, who dominate the state government cheat. There is no other way to explain this.
Constitutional amendments, which must be approved by Virginia voters, have to be on the ballot with a full explanation of the amendment available to the public at least 90 days before the election. Virginia Code 30-19.9 provides,
“The explanation shall contain the ballot question, the full text of the proposed constitutional amendment, and a statement of not more than 500 words on the proposed amendment. The explanation shall be presented in plain English, shall be limited to a neutral explanation, which may include a brief statement on the effect of a “yes” and “no” vote on the question but shall not include arguments submitted by either proponents or opponents of the proposal.”
How has it been “made available”? I don’t know: I hadn’t seen it, and I’m fairly informed on such matters. Maybe it was in something I thought was junk mail. Maybe Democrats think posting something on a website nobody is likely to visit is sufficient advance notice. The alleged required explanation of the current proposed amendment is here. In addition to the deceitful and misleading language on the ballot above, we see:
Right now, the ethics story that gets my special notice is this, from The Federalist, which writes in part,
When the draft of the Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked to the press, the conservative justices who signed on to the majority opinion [faced a] very real threat of assassination…And still their pro-abortion colleagues stalled the release of the official ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, as detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito and reported Saturday by Fox News.
Alito is the justice who wrote Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending nationalized abortion. “Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief writes in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.” …Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the liberals when they expected to be wrapped up. They refused to provide a date.
…On May 2, 2022, accomplice media outlet Politico published the 98-page draft of Dobbs. The unprecedented leak set off a wave of leftist protests and a literal firestorm of pro-abortion-led violence. …“In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze,” Hemingway wrote. Protesters also lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes…
“Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically,” Hemingway writes. It took 53 days to finally release the Dobbs decision. Despite the growing threat to their colleagues, the liberals on the court refused to listen to urgent pleas to complete their work, Hemingway reports….
“Hemingway wrote that Kagan, an Obama appointee, angrily confronted Breyer, a Clinton appointee, in May 2022 behind closed doors after at least one justice, Samuel Alito, had asked his liberal colleagues to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats,” Fox reported. “Breyer was most likely to agree to Alito’s request, Hemingway wrote.” Hemingway wrote that “Kagan remonstrated with Breyer not to accommodate the majority, screaming so loudly, observers noted, that the ‘wall was shaking,’” according to Fox.
While pro-abortion zealots were calling for heads to roll, the court’s liberal minority did nothing to, as the left likes to say with empty virtue, “turn down the temperature.” The justices needed all the help they could get….
“Shortly after the leak, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to provide full-time security for all the justices, but he drew criticism because authorities did not arrest protesters despite a law that prohibits ‘picketing or parading’ near a federal judge’s home to influence a court decision,” Fox reported.
…Contrary to the belief by Roe’s supporters that the final outcome could be changed if they just demonstrated and threatened and destroyed enough, the conservatives on the court never wavered….The Fox report on Hemingway’s new book comes after former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer reported rumors earlier this week that the Supreme Court’s liberal minority is once again “slow-walking the dissent” in a landmark redistricting case Louisiana v. Callais, “so that [the decision] will not be issued in time for many Republican states to actually go in and redistrict based on the decision.”
Ethics Alarms 