I don’t know who or what persuaded CNN to set its sights on the Better Business Bureau, but we should be glad it did. Its first revelation, which I knew about, was how the non-profit BBB is funded by the same businesses it purports to rank. Depending on the size of a business, the BBB demands membership fees ranging from hundreds of dollars to more than $10,000 a year. Members can also pay for plaques announcing their accreditation, BBB seals of approval for their company’s websites, and ads. This is not just a conflict of interest, but a classic one, as well as a system that creates an appearance of impropriety.
Joseph Ridout, a spokesperson for watchdog group Consumer Action, agreed that this structure, where the BBB is “funded by the dues-paying businesses and not the consumers,” presents a “serious conflict of interest.” The BBB, however,told CNN that its membership dues have nothing to do with the ratings companies receive. Of course! And members of Congress don’t tend to vote the way their biggest donors want. Stop being so cynical! Continue reading →
There is nothing more welcome, when I am on the road and coping with a malfunctioning laptop, an inexplicably swollen knee and a headache, than a thoughtful, substantive, provocative, long post. Extradimensional Cephalopod provided just what I needed today, and I am awash with gratitude.
[ Washington Post editor Fred ] Hyatt’s forthrightness [ in his op-ed here] and his dedication to societal change that he acknowledges is difficult is definitely refreshing. I would object to the comparison to Australia mostly based on the fact that Australia also has a rather extreme (for the Western world) institution of censorship. I am curious as to what people do if they need to shoot a wild animal, as I understand there are many dangerous animals in Australia.Continue reading →
I apologize for the length of this two-part entry, but the preponderance of fact- and reasoning-free anti-gun hysteria in the wake of the Oregon shooting has even exceeded Sandy Hook levels, a development I didn’t think was possible. An emotional national reaction to such a tragedy is fine, and natural, as long as it doesn’t stampede policy-makers and make the public dumber and more ignorant than they already are regarding basic rights, the reasons for them, and the limits of law and government. This post and its earlier installment are offered to catalogue, in part, the ethics carnage, and perhaps to save some readers time when they are confronted with a usually sane friend or family member who begins ranting about how “ridiculous” it is that this “problem” hasn’t been “solved” and how it’s all the fault of the NRA and bribed politicians, because if Australia can do it, why can’t we? In my experience, however, the angry anti-gun zealots—yes, you can still be a zealot and talk about “common sense solutions” if they are either not sensible or not solutions—don’t want to hear facts or reason. People have died, guns are bad, and why can’t we stop it? The same people also tend to think we can stop prejudice, poverty, risk, inequality, war, and the effects of mankind living on the planet. They also rank “Imagine” among the most profound songs ever written.
Sigh.
Here are the rest of the points:
V. Another Facebook friend published this chart…
…and said that it showed that “states with fewer gun regulations had frequent gun related murders than those with more regulations. It doesn’t show that. It shows, for example, that Vermont, Maine and North Dakota have few regulations and low gun murder rates. I know him well–he’s an honest man. But he saw what he wanted to see, not what was actually on the chart. Meanwhile, everyone “liked” his post.
VI. I know I’ve made this observation before, but it still drives me crazy. I just had another argument over it with my sister, and she hung up on me. Obama and the hoard leaps on this shooting to once again lobby for “common sense” gun controls that most agree wouldn’t have stopped this shooting. There is , I would say, an obvious, ethical and logical disconnect there. If the measures being sought would not have stopped this shooting, why all the angry, “blood on your hands,” “how long will this go on” rhetoric? The clear and misleading message is that the shooting would have or might have been stopped if only, if only, but when the substantive recommendations are listed they have little or nothing to do with the incident itself. Why do smart people tolerate this? The shooter’s father–who, by the way, shares at least as much culpability for the Oregon shooting as anyone, and a lot more than the NRA, gave an interview in which he blamed the shooting on the fact that the law allowed his son to acquire 13 guns: Continue reading →
I. A good friend, who is a nice man so I chose not to upset him by explaining why he sounds like an idiot, announced on Facebook that he wasn’t reading any more “gun nut” posts. Hmmmm. I wonder what he thinks a “gun nut” is? Is a gun nut a teacher who punishes a student for pointing his finger like a gun, or who prevents a deaf child from signing his name, Gunner? Or is it someone who believes that the Second Amendment, which wasn’t second by accident, should be followed? Is it someone who keeps saying that laws need to be passed that will stop shootings like the one in Oregon, but who either has no realistic proposals to suggest or who suggest measures that wouldn’t have affected that shooting at all? Isn’t it nutty to engage in magical thinking? I think so.
II. I also think it’s nutty, not to mention hypocritical, to decry the lack of “civil debate” regarding gun policy and then call anyone who doesn’t want guns melted down by government order “nuts.” Actually it’s worse than that: pundits, politicians and anti-gun advocates are increasingly equating opposition to gun regulations advanced using false arguments, dubious logic, ad hominem attacks and deceitful statistics with insanity and intractable evil. Frankly, I resent it. I’m not opposed to sensible gun regulations, but my job is to oppose false arguments, dubious logic, ad hominem attacks and deceitful statistics, as well as to make sure that they don’t succeed lest “the ends justify the means” become a social norm.
III. Speaking of hypocritical, Mike Huckabee and others have been quite properly criticized (by me, for example) by claiming that since the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage is “wrong,” it shouldn’t be followed. Yet the most vociferous defenders of that SCOTUS decision simultaneously advocate anti-gun measures that are forbidden by the Court’s decisions interpreting the Second Amendment….because, you see, “it’s wrong.” Continue reading →
From the Ethics Alarms mail bag: A commenter asks, “Is there any department, agency or bureau of the executive branch that hasn’t become thoroughly corrupted during the regime of Obama?”
I don’t know, but I suspect not, and this AMAZING TALE supports that conclusion.
The Merit Systems Protection Board is a personnel court of last resort for federal employees who claim that they were unjustly fired, demoted, discriminated against or punished for bucking cultures of corruption in government departments and agencies and revealing, reporting or addressing misconduct by administrators and managers. It’s an agency that exists to bolster courage, integrity, transparency fairness and justice in government, so one would assume that the MSPB would either be as popular in this administration as a toothache, or, in the alternative, so corrupted by the culture emanating from this White House that it cannot be trusted any more than any other agency comfortably seated on board the Obama Administration Ethics Train Wreck.
This opens a fascinating inquiry. Is it unethical for a state to appear stupid? Is appearing to be unethical inherently stupid? If something looks incredibly unethical but is really just stupid, then is it unethical anyway?
Welcome to Alabama.
Alabama is in a dire budget crisis and must cut state services. So this week it announced that 31 satellite state Motor Vehicle Division offices would no longer have access to driver’s license examiners as a result of the cuts. Alabama added a controversial voter photo-ID law last year, and opponents who argue, like the Obama Dept. of Justice, that the idea of making sure that voters are who they say they are is part of a plot to deny the vote to African Americans could not have asked for a smokier gun. Of the ten Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters—Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office—Alabama is closing driver license bureaus in eight of them. Every county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see satellite DMVs closed.
If Alabama was looking for a way to validate the “disparate impact” principle where a state can be found to be racist by the impact of its actions whether or not there was racist intent, it could not have done better. If it was trying to give ammunition to those who have argued that the Supreme Court “gutted” the Civil Rights Act when it ruled that the 1965 criteria that allowed the Justice Department to assume racism when an old Confederacy state was involved was out of date, and either new data had to be used or states with Stephen Foster songs as their State anthems were going to have to be treated like all the other states and allowed to govern themselves, it could not have been more effective.
“Make IDs essential to vote, then make it harder for blacks to get drivers licenses! What an ingenious plan! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Nobody’s going to see through that!
Or was it:
“Well, gotta cut somewhere—hey, lets; close the DMVs in these counties I just hit with those darts. What? Oh, who cares what the demographics are…we aren’t trying to target anyone…everyone knows that Alabama has a history of being fair and just! Want to go out back and juggle chain saws with me?”
What a conundrum. Stupid? Unethical? Stupid and unethical? So obviously unethical that it’s self-destructively stupid? So stupid that it is unethical for anyone that handicapped to be placed in a position of influence? Continue reading →
1) In the clip above, the National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke asks MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin and “Morning Joe” house progressive Mika Brzezinski to explain what kind of measures would satisfy the hysterical calls of a Morning Joe panel to “DO SOMETHING!!!” about gun violence. Cooke referenced the President’s angry (irresponsible, partisan, useless) attack on Congress’s failure almost immediately after the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, and accused ant-gun forces of acting as if they had solutions to gun violence (that don’t involve trashing the Bill of Rights) when they don’t. [I pointed out in yesterday’s post that they don’t because there aren’t any.] He said to Halperin:
“Joe Biden doesn’t know how to fix this problem. I don’t know how to fix this problem. I think it’s fair to say you don’t know how to fix this problem. It’s a very complex question in a country with 300 to 350 million guns on the street. The way they talk is as if they have the answer and there are these recalcitrant forces in the country that say ‘no, no, no,’ even though deep down they know their legislation will work. That’s simply not the case. It’s far more complicated than that.”
As you will see, Halperin had no actual proposals, ducking the issue by saying that he’s “not an expert in the field.” But he said that he wanted leaders to “have a thirst and hunger and passion to try to come up with solutions.”
I will accept this as a legitimate argument as soon as I hear any plausible solution that does not involve banning guns, making it excessively difficult for law abiding citizens from arming themselves, or engaging in pre-crime measures against citizens who have had episodes of mental illness or who are suspected of having such episodes. The proposals I have heard are incremental and will not accomplish the goal, ergo more obtrusive measures will be proposed and pushed by identical arguments and hysteria, until…we end up banning guns, making it excessively difficult for law abiding citizens from arming themselves, or engaging in pre-crime measures against citizens who have had episodes of mental illness or who are suspected of having such episodes.
Either anti-gun “DO SOMETHING!” advocates like the President, Mika and Halperin know this, intend it and are not being honest about it, or they are naive.
2) Jeb Bush responsibly addressed the impulse to stampede support for ill-considered solutions in the wake of tragedy…
The text:
“Yeah it’s a — we’re in a difficult time in our country, and I don’t think more government is necessarily the answer to this. I think we need to reconnect ourselves with everybody else. It’s just, it’s very sad to see. But I resist the notion, I had this challenge as governor, because, look, stuff happens, there’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something, and it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.”
You will note that Bush did not shrug off the Oregon shooting by saying “stuff happens.” Nonetheless, the completely principle-free Debbie Wasserman Schultz mischaracterized what Bush said with a fatuous tweet:
“A message for Jeb Bush: 380 Americans have been killed in 294 mass shootings in 2015 alone. “Stuff” doesn’t just “happen.” Inaction happens.”
Inaction regarding what, you shameless hack? What action are you proposing that would actually prevent a shooting like this week’s? Or the Norfolk shooting of the TV reporter? Bush is absolutely correct: bad stuff happens, and that does not mean that the government can or should rush to “DO SOMETHING!” Continue reading →
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican Ambassador, now residing under a bus…
The blatant dishonesty of Pope Francis posing as an apolitical moral authority while engaging in outright political advocacy before the U.S. Congress, as he accepted accolades from manipulative partisans who have no interest in religion but who nonetheless were delighted to exploit his influence for their own purposes, was nauseating. Nearly as nauseating was the furious attempts by Catholics as well as these Pope fans-of-convenience to spin his comments and his conduct in support of Kim Davis, and by extension, her rejection of gay Americans and the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.
After several days of stonewalling, the Vatican decided on a strategy that should be familiar to anyone who follows U.S. politics: make a lesser official the scapegoat. The difference, of course, is that because this is the Pope, we are supposed to accept such standard duck-and-cover strategies as (heh) the gospel truth. I was preparing to write a post about the furious spinning going on to excuse the Pope’s inexcusable conduct when the Vatican spoke up, and Rich in Ct did an excellent job analyzing the ethics carnage.
This morning on New Day, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota this morning hectored and badgered a GOP Congressman—as soon as I find the video, I’ll add his name–on the issue of gun regulations in the aftermath of the most recent mass shooting. Her fevered attitude and rhetoric, combined with the Congressman’s measured responses, should serve as a template for the commentary on future shootings.
It was an infuriating conversation, and like all recent conversations and speeches about guns, including the President’s irresponsible statement following yesterday’s shooting, it springs from an unwillingness to face facts, accept the nature of rights, and to be straightforward about what gun control proposals really mean.
The following are facts. Alisyn Camerota, like the President, and like her partner Chris Cuomo, who opined that anyone opposing gun control was “delusional,” either can’t accept them, or is unwilling to be honest and candid about their implications.
1) Rights, if they exist and are upheld by the government, will always be abused by some people.
2) The only way to stop people from abusing rights is to end the rights.Continue reading →
Sonia Sotomayor is far from my favorite Supreme Court Justice, as she is the court’s most vocal advocate for pro-minority discrimination and a practitioner of touchy-feely law. Still, I assumed she had integrity, or at least my skull did, because it exploded all over the place when it learned the truth.
Federal employment law forbids employers from having unpaid positions unless they meet stringent requirements of providing genuine educational experience to such workers while not personally (as opposed to professionally) benefiting from their services. Nevertheless, Sotomayor has used unpaid interns as her servants —not law clerks or researchers, but servants—since 2010. Continue reading →
Ethics Alarms 