Law & Law Enforcement

Campaign Contributions During Key Votes: Call It Bribery

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The quote from Sen. Max Baucus’s spokeperson instantly becomes a leading candidate for “Lie of the Year.”

“Money has no influence on how Senator Baucus (D-Montana) makes his decisions,” Kate Downen told the Washington Post. “The only factor that determines Senator Baucus’s votes is whether a policy is right for Montana and right for our country.” Is there any American so naive as to still believe this, not just about Baucus but about any member of Congress? The Post reports that despite Senate and House rules forbidding it, campaign contributions routinely spike when important bills are about to be voted upon. The sources of the sudden gifts to the lawmakers? Individuals, organizations and corporations who will benefit from the law’s passage or defeat. Continue reading →

“Million Dollar Drop” Ethics: Not So Fast, Fox— Fork Over Some Money!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It’s one thing for Fox to post misleading headlines on its website and for Fox hosts to slander an international philanthropist but now its game show ethics have crashed and burned. An ethicist can only stand so much, dammit!

In the very first episode of the latest Fox effort to attract a prime time audience without adding anything of value to the culture or American thought—a combination quiz and gambling show called “Million Dollar Drop”—a couple bet $800,000 that they knew whether Post-It notes or the Sony Walkman  was “sold in stores” first. As the audience held its collective,breath, rooting for Gabe Okoye and his girlfriend, Brittany Mayti  to win big money in advance of their approaching wedding, game show host Kevin Pollack revealed that they were—awwwww!— wrong. The Walkman hit the stores first. Shortly thereafter, the couple lost the rest of their money (the show “gives” its constestants a million dollars that they have to risk on a series of questions) and went home poorer and dumber. Why dumber? Because the show’s researchers had arrived at the wrong answer, not Okoye and Mayti. Post-Its were sold first, though only regionally. Continue reading →

Unintended Consequences of Carelessly Written Ethics Rules Dept: Alaska Admits That Palin Was Victimized

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Once she had annoyed the Left and  sparked a media vendetta against her during the 2008 presidential campaign, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was a marked woman. She had made some serious ethical missteps in the handling of her ex-brother-in-law’s employment with the state, but most of the ethics complaints made against her—there were over twenty-five—were pure harassment, generated by political foes. Unfortunately, Alaska has previously responded to its long history of official corruption by establishing a system that allowed any citizen to file an ethics complaint against a governor and trigger an investigation, leaving the targeted official to foot the bill. Nothing in the procedure prevented frivolous or malicious complaints, and that’s what most of what the complaints against Palin were.

Now, as of December 22, the law has changed. Continue reading →

Hero, Villain or Hypocrite: The Dilemma of the Undercover Dog-Fighter

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The limits of absolutism and the drawbacks of utilitarianism both come under scrutiny in assessing the strange saga of Terry Mills, whom the ASPCA recently appointed as its Animal Fighting Specialist.

Beyond question, this is a job he is uniquely qualified to hold. In 2008, Mills worked for the FBI’s domestic-terrorism task force, and went under-cover for more than a year to expose and break up a national dog-fighting ring. His efforts resulted in many arrests, and the rescue of more than 500 animals. Accomplishing all of this, however, required Mills to become part of the culture he was attacking. He trained and fought his own dogs, engaging in the very cruelty he was working to prevent. Continue reading →

Ethics and Altzheimer’s Testing: An Easy Call

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sometimes I think bioethicists spend too much of their time looking for new ethical dilemmas rather than giving thoughtful guidance on the dilemmas we already have. A recent example: the New York Times wrote about a supposed ethical dilemma appearing in the wake of new tests that reveal the likelihood of whether an individual will get Alzheimer’s at some point in the future. As the article put it:

“Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s, is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?…It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms. At the same time, many of those diseases have no effective treatments. Does it help to know you are likely to get a disease if there is nothing you can do?”

My question is: “What’s the dilemma?” Continue reading →

Ethics Fouls and Julian Assange’s Rape Case

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Well, well, well, Mr Assange!

How does it feel to have your own embarrassing and confidential information leaked to the media and publicized to the world?

On the sound ethical principle that two wrongs doesn’t make a right, The Guardian acquiring and publishing the leaked police report relating to Assange’s rape charges in Sweden is no less unethical because Assange is a smug foe of confidentiality. Nevertheless, it is hard to recall an instance when seeing the tables turned on someone was so satisfying. Ethics foul: Whoever leaked the records, and The Guardian for printing them. But thanks anyway.

It is satisfying for reasons other than delicious irony. Continue reading →

Scalia’s Latest Controversy: Does An Appearance of Impropriety Have to Be Reasonable?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is once again under critical fire for appearing to feed a conservative bias. He accepted G.O.P. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s invitation to address the Tea Party Caucus next month, as the group holds its first Conservative Constitutional Seminar. Some are claiming that the meeting is unethical, raising the specter of an “appearance of impropriety.” Continue reading →

“Lie of the Year”? Hardly.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

PolitiFact, the political fact-checking website, has once again announced its “Lie of the Year”:

“PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections. Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times’ independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year’s most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)”

This tells us a lot about PolitiFact. Continue reading →

Anatomy of an Unethical Class Action Lawsuit, Badly Reported, Exposed by a Blogger

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Here is how the Washington Post begins its story about the most recent assault on McDonald’s by the people who want to control your eating and parenting habits:

“The D.C.-based nutrition watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest has helped a California mother file a class-action suit against McDonald’s, demanding that the burger chain stop marketing toys to children. The woman, Monet Parham of Sacramento, claims that the marketing of Happy Meal toys has interfered with her ability as a parent to provide her two children with a healthful diet. Here’s a quote:

“I am concerned about the health of my children and feel that McDonald’s should be a very limited part of their diet and their childhood experience,” Parham said. “But as other busy, working moms and dads know, we have to say ‘no’ to our young children so many times, and McDonald’s makes it that so much harder to do. I object to the fact that McDonald’s is getting into my kids’ heads without my permission and actually changing what my kids want to eat.”

This is fairly typical of the hundreds of news stories on the web about the lawsuit. Over at Popehat, Patrick, the wittiest of the site’s witty staff, performs a crushing dissection of the lawsuit, the story, and the media’s incompetent reporting of it. You see, he writes..

“…Monet Parham is really Monet Parham-Lee.  Monet Parham-Lee is the name that Monet Parham uses professionally.  Monet Parham-Lee is represented in the suit by attorneys affiliated with the Center for Science in the Public Interest.  Meaning Ralph Nader.  Monet Parham-Lee is an employee of the California Department of Public Health. Monet Parham-Lee works in the “Cancer Prevention and Nutrition Section” of the California Department of Public Health. Meaning that Monet Parham-Lee is tasked, professionally, by the State of California with ensuring that Californians eat their vegetables.  The power that the State of California grants Monet Parham-Lee evidently is not enough.  Monet Parham-Lee is taking the law into her own hands, to ensure that not only her own children eat their vegetables, but that everyone else is forced to make their children eat vegetables.” Continue reading →

The Final Proof That Michael Vick Doesn’t Get It

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In the finale of “Animal House,” after the expelled Delta House members have sabotaged Faber College’s parade causing wanton destruction, mayhem, panic and riots, the fraternity’s  president approaches the dean (who is lying in the ruins of the stands toppled by the Delta House “Deathmobile”) and hopefully asks for “one more chance.”

I thought of this classic moment when I read that Michael Vick, the serial dog-abuser now seeking redemption by winning football games for the Philadelphia Eagles, had told an interviewer that he really missed owning a dog and hoped to have one as a pet some day. Continue reading →