Law & Law Enforcement

The U.S. District Court for D.C. Finds That Google’s Search Engine Is An Illegal Monopoly: 1) Of Course, and 2) Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The ruling found that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. Ya think? The statistics showed that Google had about 95% of the online search market, that “google” had become synonymous with “online search,” and that internal memos showed that executives acknowledged that Google’s quality of search could decline without having any negative impact on the company.

This is essentially the attitude and conditions that prevailed before the court-ordered break-up of Bell Telephone’s monopoly. “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” had a running joke with Ernestine the Bell Operator (Lily Tomlin) snorting and responding to complaints with “We don’t care! We don’t have to care: we’re the phone company.” The D.C. District Court found that Google is like that.

The ruling doesn’t come soon enough to stop Google from trying to manipulate voter opinions and votes as November approaches, and the company that once had the motto “Don’t be evil” has been turned to the Dark Side for a long time. Nonetheless, this development is an important steep toward disassembling an unethical and dangerous source of power and influence in American society.

You can read the opinion here.

There is hope.

Perfect! NYC’s Democratic Mayor’s Lawyer Reveals That Party’s Attitude Toward the Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As anyone who can read could have predicted, even New York’s wildly left-leaning Supreme Court ruled against Mayor Eric Adams’ unconstitutional attempt to stop buses full of illegal immigrants from dropping them off in that hallowed “sanctuary,” New York City.

In January, the mayor filed a lawsuit against 17 charter bus companies that had transported asylum seekers to New York City from Texas and Florida.. The lawsuit alleged that the bus companies violated New York’s Social Services Law by dropping off the illegals without providing a means of support, and sought over $700 million to compensate the city for the cost of shelter, food and health care. The suit was breathtaking in its hypocrisy—sanctuary? Hello?—as well as about as close to frivolous as a law suit can be without making me file an ethics complaint against the lawyers. The New York Civil Liberties Union said that the Mayor’s actions were unconstitutional. The court agreed.

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Before Offering Second Thoughts J.D. Vance’s “Childless Cat Ladies” Controversy, These Relevant Horror Stories:

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I was literally in the middle of a preparing a post about the cultural sickness J.D. Vance was allegedly trying (and failing miserably) to focus public attention on when he mocked “childless cat ladies” dictating U.S. policies when these two awful stories came across my screen.

In the first, I learned that Parker Scholtes, 2, was found dead in her parents’ Honda SUV parked outside their home in the Tucson suburb of Marana. Her father, an irresponsible man-child named Christopher Scholtes, had left the baby “to nap,” that is, to broil, for more than three hours on July 9. He said he left her in the car with the air conditioner on (like a good dad, or his warped idea of one), but got involved playing PlayStation video games and didn’t check on her until three hours had gone by. He confessed to police that he knew the car’s engine would automatically shut off after 30 minutes, but just got, you know, carried away and lost track of time. You know how it flies by when you’re having fun.

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Somebody Please Explain To the Palm Beach County State Attorney, the Secret Service and Judge Cymonie Rowe That Being An Asshole Is Protected Under The First Amendment…

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’m truly sick of this stuff. What we have here isn’t even a close call. Michael Wiseman, 68, from Jupiter, Florida, was arrested by local police officers on July 19 because he posted ugly comments on social media expressing disappointment that former President Trump wasn’t assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. “The shooter missed,” he wrote on X. “He can’t be the only patriot. Cocksucker, mother and daughter fucker Trump.” And, “Why is Trump allowed to be alive? We need to train patriots. Thomas Matthew Crooks deserves a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, a stamp, and a national holiday.”

And, “Some people need to be better shots if they know they are going to kill a monster.” Shortly before his arrest, Wiseman wrote, “I am advocating Trump and Vance’s daughters get raped and THEN tell me they won’t fly their kids out of the USA for an abortion.”

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Meet Sara Morris, the Running Fick [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I referred to someone as a fick last week, and realized Ethics Alarms hadn’t exposed any of that particularly loathsome breed recently. Upon checking, I discovered that the last official Ethics Alarms fick was designated way back in 2021. It was Bennett Madison, a columnist at the now (thankfully) defunct Gawker site. He had openly boasted about deceiving advice columnists and their trusting readers in his article titled, “Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published.”

Sara Morris says, “Hold my beer!”

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Ugh. Could Someone PLEASE Explain the First Amendment to Donald Trump? Quickly?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

This morning, I was simultaneously listening in on CNN (hyping Harris absurdly), MSNBC (well, you know) and Fox News, where the morning trio of hyper-partisan clowns were hosting Trump in a 30 minute phone monologue. First, I got a laugh when a CNN reporter commented on Harris having to navigate the complexities of Israel’s war with Gaza (Hamas). He actually said, first, “This is a major issue for Harris” and five seconds later that “Republicans are trying to make an issue out of this.” Yes, Harris was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease fire in Gaza, essentially making sure Hamas’s adverse consequences for slaughtering and raping Israel civilians on October 7 were minimal, but because she was only a VP at the time, and, after all, Kamala Harris, Idiot, nobody paid much attention to how irresponsible that position was. It is an issue, of course, but CNN will try “Republicans pounce!” even when everyone should pounce.

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Incompetent Elected Official of the…Let’s See Now…HOUR?: Taunton (Mass.) Mayor Shaunna O’Connell

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

She’s a Republican, incidentally. Ah, Taunton. Population: About 60,000. I remember it well from my Boston days. The city is famous for its dog-racing track. My Uncle Charlie, my mom’s youngest brother, a nice guy who blew his money on the greyhounds, went there often. And lost.

But I digress. Taunton Mayor Shaunna O’Connell was arrested and appeared in court to be arraigned on charges of charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and domestic assault and battery. Police arrested her after when her husband called police during a fight.

She hit him with a crowbar. Allegedly.

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It Depends On What the Meaning of ‘Conservative’ Is…Ethics, Language, Law, Art and Priorities Clash in a Strange University Case

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That’s “Rust Red Hills” (1930), by Georgia O’Keeffe above. Does it seem “conservative” to you? Does “conservative” even seem like a word that can be relevant to such a painting?

Welcome to the weird court petition filed by Valparaiso University in Indiana. The school wants to be able to get around the terms of a large testamentary gift that it happily accepted in 1953. Percy Sloan donated millions of dollars and hundreds of fine art works in honor of his father, Junius R. Sloan, a famous artist in the Hudson River School. His will directed that any art acquired with the funds must be “exclusively by American artists preferably of American subjects” and “of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American art.” The University wants to sell some of the most valuable paintings it purchased with Sloan’s bequest, including the one above, to fund the construction of new dormitories.

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Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.

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Ethics Villain and Contender for “Asshole of the Year”: Sumaya Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

18-year-old Sumaya Thomas of North Liberty, Iowa was supposed to go on a blind date with a young man she had met on an online dating app. But by the time her date arrived at her abode to pick her up on the evening of June 16, Thomas had changed her mind. Did she tell him that to his face, like any normal, decent human being, apologizing for wasting his time and dashing his hopes? Oh noooo. Did she text him, the weenie’s way out? No. Did she just leave him on her doorstep, knocking and buzzing while she hid under the bed? No. Did she sneak out the back door? No, not that either.

Instead, Thomas called 911 and said her abusive ex- was outside harassing her because she was seven months pregnant with their child. She said she needed the police to get him off her property as he was threatening to “hit, punch, kick and stab her.”

Nice! A police car was dispatched, and when officers arrived they found an apparently calm, confused young man in the process of walking away. Upon being questioned about the situation, he explained that he had arrived to go on a date with the woman inside the house, and that he had only met her online a week ago.

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