Law & Law Enforcement

“Kill The Messenger” And The CIA Crack Story Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I finally saw the 2014 docudrama “Kill the Messenger,” which completed—I hope—the passenger list for a 30-year-old Ethics Train Wreck.

The film purports to be the true story of Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who wrote the sensational “Dark Alliance” series of investigative reports in 1996. The series attributed the inner city crack cocaine explosion in part to Nicaraguan anti-government Contra rebels in  the 1980s funding their efforts by drug smuggling and sales, all with the knowledge and assistance of the  CIA. The agency, the series claimed, was acting to support the Contras despite Congress rejecting the Reagan administration’s request for aid. Like most Hollywood accounts of anything, the film distorts and misrepresents facts to make a better story. Unfortunately, Webb’s story is made more dramatic by making him out to be a tragic hero and victim of a sinister alliance between the mainstream media and the U.S. Government. That’s not exactly true, fair or accurate, and in this matter, affirmatively harmful.

The fastest way to survey this particular Ethics Train Wreck is to list the distinguished passengers, more or less in order of boarding: Continue reading →

Fairness To Ben Carson: There Is Nothing Wrong With Considering A Presidential Candidates’ Religion And Its Influences

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
It's true: if you don't think an Amish man should be President, you're violating the Constitution. Or something. Wait...What was the question again?

It’s true: if you don’t think an Amish man should be President, you’re violating the Constitution. Or something. Wait…What was the question again?

As with Donald Trump, I am once again faced with having to defend a Presidential candidate who should not be running and should have fewer supporters than Ted Nugent has functioning brain cells. For the second time in two days the victim is dead-eyed, hubris-infected, “I’m not a politician so I am allowed to be a lousy speaker and campaigner” Ben Carson, the candidate for those who are so disgusted with a President with no executive experience that they want a new President with no government experience or executive experience.

The gleeful news media freak-out spurred by the doctor’s silly generalities about the qualifications of Muslims for the U.S. Presidency was already embarrassing and intellectually dishonest (hence yesterday’s post) before the latest nonsense. The current narrative is that Dr. Carson doesn’t understand the Constitution. No fewer than three columns this morning in the Washington Post alone carried that message, and all quoted the same passage: Article VI’s directive that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office.”

Dr. Carson didn’t say that there should be a religious test for the Constitution. It is critics like Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Eugene Robinson, not Carson, who apparently don’t understand the Constitution. See, Eugene, Dana Milbank, Michael Gerson, Ted Cruz, The Nation, Whoopie Goldberg, Rachel Maddow, and too many others to name, the Constitution doesn’t tell citizens, including citizens you don’t like to see running for President, that they can’t use a religious test for any office, it says that the government can’t.

Did you miss that part?

I don’t know how! Continue reading →

Let Us All Bow In Gratitude To Colorado For Generously Sacrificing Its Children And The Safety And Welfare of Its Citizens To Prove What Responsible People Knew Already: Pot Should Stay Illegal

/ Jack Marshall / 93 Comments
Hey, Que pasa! You idiot...

Hey, Que pasa! You idiot…

I’m probably going to stray a bit from strictly professional rhetoric here, but this really makes me angry.

According to a report released this month by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, there has been a 29% increase in marijuana-related emergency room visits and a 38 % increase in pot-related hospitalizations during retail marijuana’s first year in Colorado.

[ NOTE: This is a correction. The original version of the post gave the wrong impression that hospitalizations were up: this was not my intent. Thanks to Humble Talent for being persistent. Ethics Alarms apologizes for the error. We’ll try to do better.]

Now 11% of Colorado’s 12 to 17 year-olds use pot,  56% higher than the national average.There has also been a 40% increase in drug-related suspensions and expulsions in school, primarily from marijuana.

Mercy, what a surprise! Who could have predicted that? Well me, for one, as well as others neither dedicated to getting their periodic recreational buzz nor addled by moldy Sixties cant.

Of course making pot legal and widely available for adults would cause an epidemic of use by kids, who, the evidence increasingly shows, may suffer long term adverse effects.  Of course it is causing accidents. Of course adding a third harmful legal drug to the devastating and deadly duo of alcohol and tobacco is going to make society dumber, less safe and less productive. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Update: The Borgata Babes

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Borgata Babes

Twenty-one female servers at Atlantic City’s Borgata Casino sued their employer,  claiming that they were objectified, discriminated against and demeaned by being forced to maintain slim and fit figures  as “Borgata Babes.” I wrote about this case in 2013, saying,

“While it is true that physical attractiveness can be an employment asset in virtually any job—note #2 on fired TV reporter Shea Allen’s “confessions”— there are some jobs for which it is the primary, or at least a substantial and thus legitimate requirement. Strippers, of course. Fashion models. Cheerleaders. Actresses. Personal trainers. Fox newsreaders. Hooters girls, and pretty obviously, Borgata Babes. To say that a business can’t make a decision to have fantasy sex objects as part of its appeal is an excessive use of political correctness grafted to state power. Essentially, the suing Babes are arguing that they can pull a bait and switch—use their well-toned beauty to get hired, agree to maintain the high standard of visual perfection that they presented to their employer, then go to pot and sue if their employer objects. Beauty is an asset in the workplace and a tangible one: the pressure on the culture to behave as if that asset doesn’t exist (the pejorative labeling of a preference for the lovely over the hideous as “lookism” is the weapon of choice) and to prohibit employers from ever hiring on that basis in jobs where it is a substantial and relevant qualification is as unfair to the fit and comely as requiring an investment banker to look like Kate Upton….”

Now a state appellate court  has ruled that the casino can impose appearance requirements as long as it does so fairly and equally.

Score a victory for the freedom to acknowledge that beauty can be a legitimate job qualification, and against ludicrous political correctness.

_____________

Pointer: Res Ipsa Loquitur

Unethical Quote of the Week: Donald Trump’s 2nd Amendment Position Paper

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

constitution_gun

“The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear. The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period.”

—The first sentence of “Protecting Our Second Amendment Rights Will Make America Great Again ...Donald J. Trump on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms,” released today.

You can debate the various policy ideas in this typically simplistic approach to a complicated problem; that’s not my purpose. My purpose is to point out that a position paper on the Second Amendment that begins by misstating that amendment while saying the amendment is “clear” cannot and should not be taken seriously. Nor should its author.

Is he stupid, and not know that it is ludicrous to state what is not the text of the amendment with the emphatic “Period” ? Is he ignorant, and unaware of the wording of actual amendment that he proceeds to say “is America’s first freedom”? Or is he lying, using a false version of the Second Amendment to mislead his many followers who either haven’t read the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, or can’t read at all?

The Second Amendment may be many things, but clear is one thing nobody with any knowledge of the subject believes it is. It is not clear. It is, by far, the least clear of all the amendments, and that is why it is still controversial after centuries. The fake Second Amendment that Trump’s position paper uses is clear; too bad that’s not the real one. If the Second Amendment read “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon,” it would be clear, and opponents of gun ownership wouldn’t have any argument except to insist that we repeal  it.  The real Amendment, however, reads,

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

That could mean the same thing, or it might not. It would seem it was intended to mean something else, otherwise why wasn’t it worded as in the Trump version? The seas of ink that have been spilled over the interpretation of that strangely constructed sentence could flood Texas, and educated, thoughtful people who are honest, erudite and not simpleminded (unlike Trump) have written provocatively on the subject, often disagreeing, as in.. Continue reading →

Ahmed Mohamed, Justin Carter, And White House Priorities

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments
Wrongly accused Texas kid on the left goes to the White House; wrongly accused Texas kid on the right goes to jail. Explain.

Wrongly accused Texas kid on the left goes to the White House; wrongly accused Texas kid on the right goes to jail. Explain.

Let us stipulate that Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Texas high school student who was the latest victim of public school cruelty, police incompetence, child abuse, and school-attack hysteria, resulting in an arrest for the Kafka crime of making a “hoax bomb”—that is, a thing that isn’t a bomb and the maker didn’t say was a bomb, but some idiot teacher thought looked like a bomb, and thus assuming  it must have been intended to make idiot teachers think it was a bomb even though even the idiot teachers knew it wasn’t— deserves every kindness and compensatory trip, photo op, meeting and accolade imaginable as a societal apology for being treated like a mad bomber by unethical adults no more qualified to teach the young than they are to fly to Gibralta using their arms as wings.

BUT…

…So do all the other teens (and younger) who have been treated this badly or worse in recent years—the kids punished for gun-shaped pizza and pastries….or the students who were punished after taking weapons away from fellow students and turning them over to teachers, only to find that they were the caught in the Catch 22 of  “no tolerance” madness, seeded in part by the fear-mongering inflicted on our society by President Obama and his political allies.

Like Ahmed, Justin Carter particularly warranted high-level official mea culpas—remember him? He was another Texas teen who languished in jail for months because he made a joke on Facebook about school shootings. Nobody lifted a finger to help him, because, you see, he wasn’t one of the favored minorities to this administration. Don’t you dare argue that the distinction is that Justin made his “terroristic” comments in the context of a computer game, while Ahmed’s home-made clock was proof of special talents. Typical kids deserve fair treatment as much as budding geniuses.

Don’t

You

Dare.

In a 2013 post titled, If Only Justin Carter Were Black…Or Muslim…, I wrote Continue reading →

The Ethics Verdict On Rep. Polis’s Apology For Recommending That Students Be Expelled For Sexual Assaults They Probably Didn’t Commit

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Apparently the demon Pazuzu and the Congressman from Boulder agree!

Apparently the demon Pazuzu and the Congressman from Boulder agree!

My rule: if you say something clearly and unequivocally with all the available evidence and defend it later in another forum, all your subsequent apology means is “Gee, I didn’t expect to get in so much trouble for that. I guess I better apologize and pretend I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

Rep. Polis of Colorado, a Democrat and clearly no student of American justice, inherited the wind with his statements in a Congressional hearing suggesting that the already manifestly unjust “predominance of the evidence standard” that the Obama administration forced on universities (you know, so women could get as many male students punished as sexual predators as possible) was too fair. First he said…

“I mean, if I was running [a college] I might say ‘well, you know, even if there’s a 20 or 30 percent chance that it happened I wouldn’t want … I would want to remove this individual. Why shouldn’t a private institution, in the interest in promoting a safe environment, use an even lower standard than a preponderance of evidence, like even a reasonable likeliness standard?”

Then he said…

“I mean, if there’s 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people. We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university.”

Later, interviewed over the phone by Reason well after the hearing, Polis was unambiguous, and extensively defended his statements in the hearing, with no equivocation or doubt. Ah, but he did not expect so many publications, pundits, bloggers and ethicists to have such an adverse reaction to, you know, discarding due process, fairness, and basic principles of justice just to make the Democratic Party’s man-hating feminist base happy. So he apologized.

Absurdly.

He began with the Full Pazuzu: Continue reading →

Donald Trump Is Despicable, But Gavin Newsome Is About The Last Guy I Care To Hear Say So

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
Full disclosure: I don't trust anyone who poses for photos like this. No, it's NOT the hair! Well, not just the hair...

Full disclosure: I don’t trust anyone who poses for photos like this. No, it’s NOT the hair! Well, not just the hair…

Gavin Newsom, California’s current Lt. Governor and formerly the rogue mayor of San Francisco, should license his image to be placed by the definition of “hypocrite” in the dictionary. A vocal critic of Kim Davis and others who use their conscience to justify defying the law on gay marriage, he initially gained fame by defying California law and authorizing same sex marriages in his city.

He is shameless.

I just watched Newsom on CNN while trying to keep my gorge down, as he was piously condemning Donald Trump for (correctly) opposing illegal immigration. Then he said—and this takes pathological gall— that this is what makes California “so great”: it not only embraces diversity,  but benefits from it.

Thus we have the willfully Orwellian progressive definition of “great.” California is out of water thanks to decades of mismanagement. It is a fiscal disaster. Businesses are fleeing the state; a huge tax increase looms. It protects illegals from law enforcement, and some of those illegals are exactly the ones Trump was talking about. They kill people. Ask Kate Steinle about how great California is. Meanwhile,the state is at war with itself; some would like to break it up entirely.

The state’s definition of diversity is also straight out of Bizarro World, as is its skewed version of tolerance. The University of California Board of Regents, for example, is considering a policy to make the university system “free from acts and expressions of intolerance.” Translation: You must adopt the prevailing progressive cant in speech and attitude on campus, or you will be crushed. Continue reading →

In College Sexual Assault Cases, False Accusers No Longer Deserve Guaranteed Anonymity

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments
"You better be telling the truth, or this is coming right back at you..."

“You better be telling the truth, or this is coming right back at you…”

Especially now that the Obama administration has demanded that colleges strip away the basic rights of students accused of rape, the practice of not releasing a false accuser’s name to the media must end.

The compelled switch to a “predominance of the evidence” standard in such cases has led to too many false charges, too many wrongly punished male students, and too many scarred lives. High profile national leaders like Hillary Clinton are undeterred in supporting this power play by feminists, and university officials apparently don’t have sufficient regard for fairness or even basic logic: the Department of Education threatened their income stream, so if a few male students get railroaded out of school and haunted for a lifetime with the stigma of being a rapist, the college leaders consider it a necessary sacrifice to the greater good.

It is only one case, but if the facts of the University of Michigan’s persecution of student Drew Sterrett are as they appear to be, this is signature significance: one incident this irrational  proves that campus sexual assault  hysteria has turned into a genuine, bona fide witch hunt, with the metaphor appropriate for once. There must be accountability, and the Obama Administration, the schools, their administrators, irresponsible leaders like Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Jared Polis, and, yes, sorry, false accusers must share it.

Sterrett was forced to leave the University of Michigan in 2012 during his sophomore year, after a female’s student’s accusation of forced sexual intercourse was upheld under circumstances that would have made a kangaroo court, with real kangaroos, an improvement. He sued the university in federal court, arguing that  his 14th Amendment rights to due process had been violated. The only possible response to his claim, once one reads the account published in Slate, is “Ya think?” It is disturbing that anyone should have to sue to get such treatment recognized as outrageous. Apparently no one at the University of Michigan who has power possesses any ethical twitches whatsoever, while nobody with a passing knowledge of right and wrong has any power.

From Emily Yoffe: Continue reading →

Well, So Much For Brian Banks’ Vote, The “To Kill A Mockingbird” Admirers Vote, The Bill Cosby Fan Vote, The UVA Fraternity Vote, The Bill Clinton Sup…Uh, I Don’t Think Hillary Thought This Through…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
In the bright side, I think Hillary has Wanetta Gibson's vote locked up!

In the bright side, I think Hillary has Wanetta Gibson’s vote locked up!

You see, even if Hillary Clinton was honest, which she isn’t, and trustworthy, which she definitely isn’t, or had a record of a accomplishment, which she doesn’t, there would still be this habit she has of making jaw-droppingly stupid, pandering and unethical statements.  There was when she suggested that Donald Trump was  responsible for the Charleston Church massacre.  There was her statement that we shouldn’t “let” people hold minority viewpoints that the majority finds upsetting. This, however, is special.

In today’s “Women for Hillary” event, bolstered by an audience that somehow believes the myth that she is a feminist,she actually said (and later tweeted)

“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

There is no right to be believed, although this is an oft repeated “right” pushed by anti-male, crypto-Victorians who are dedicated to making the act of consensual sex so risky for men that Caitlyn Jenner may be the gender’s most viable future. It is also the underlying position behind the un-American recommendation by Colorado Rep. Jared Polis that a 20% chance that an accusation of sexual assault  should be sufficient to kick a male student out of college. Law enforcement treating dubious rape accusations as if there is a “right to be believed” resulted in lynchings in the past and successful, life-wrecking scams by the likes of Wanetta Gibson in the present. It allowed the despicable and probably batty Emma Sulkowicz, a.k.a. “Mattress Girl,” to harass her supposed attacker on the Columbia campus even after her story had been thoroughly discredited. The sexist principle relieving women of having to provide more than an accusation alone allowed the false Rolling Stone “Jackie” story of a fraternity gang rape to slander every fraternity on the University of Virginia campus, which were punished by the school’s “right to be believed”-addled president.

Yes, women who claim to be victims of sexual assault deserve to be heard, and they deserve to have their accusation treated like every other accusation, while those they accuse are provided with the presumption of innocence, due process and a fair hearing as well. A right to be believed. however? That’s sexist, reckless, and wrong.

But Hillary doesn’t really believe this stuff. I assume she barely thinks about it. These are just “things you say to get to be President” to her.

Still, you would think Hillary would be a bit more careful; after all, her husband was accused of sexual assault or worse by Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broderick and Paula Jones. Why didn’t they have a right to be believed?

__________________

Pointer and Spark: Mediaite