Law & Law Enforcement

Case Study In Minneapolis: The Compensatory Racial Discrimination Slippery Slope

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Or perhaps they just don’t believe in the Constitution in Minneapolis—you know, like in California. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers struck a deal last March 25 with the Minneapolis Public Schools ending a teacher strike, and among the provisions was “educators of color protections.” If a non-white teacher is first on the list to be let go for budget reasons, the school system must fire a white teacher with the “next least” seniority instead.

Got that?

The agreement reads in part,

“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.”

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Compelled Ideological Conformity In Higher Education: Part I, The Students

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is frightening, infuriating, and, of course, unethical. Sharing responsibility, however, are the supposed devotees of intellectual freedom, freedom of thought and freedom of speech who have been asleep at the switch while dedicated anti-democratic, anti-American values revolutionaries seized control over nearly all U.S. colleges and universities. Not only has the essential resistance to this siege been weak, late and under-publicized, the public’s awareness of the phenomenon is shockingly dim.

Good job, everyone.

A recent and blatant example of restrictions on ideas and beliefs comes to us from California (naturally), where the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had sued Clovis Community College after the administration ordered the removal of flyers that had previously been approved.

In November 2021, three Clovis students received permission from administrators to post anti-Communist flyers on bulletin boards inside Clovis’ academic buildings. The flyers were later removed when the school reversed its position in response to student objections. A month later, the college denied the YAF’s’s request to post anti-abortion flyers on bulletin boards in the academic buildings. Instead, the flyers were only allowed at an outdoor “free-speech kiosk” on the Clovis campus. The censored students are being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the nonprofit that has taken over the national role of non-partisan champion of free speech now that the ACLU has sided with the rising totalitarians in our institutions and government.

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Stop Making Me Defend (Ugh) Roy Moore!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Is Roy Moore the most repulsive public figure to warrant an Ethics Alarms “Don’t Make Me Defend…” posts? Oooh, tough call. I checked: the all-time leader in such posts is Donald Trump, with Joe Biden a distant second. Then we have Jack Phillips (the anti-gay baker), Sean Spicer, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Kathy Griffin, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Joy Behar, Alex Jones, Lenny Dykstra, Woody Allen, Stacey Abrams, Chris Cuomo (twice!), Nicki Minaj, Tucker Carlson, Nancy Pelosi and Pete Rose. That’s tough and nauseating competition. What do you think?

But I digress. The occasion for my rallying to Roy’s side is the $8.2 million verdict in his favor in his defamation suit against the Senate Majority PAC for a negative TV ad characterizing some of the sexual misconduct accusations against him that helped derail Moore’s failed 2017 U.S. Senate bid in Alabama.

Senate Majority PAC funded a group called Highway 31 that ran a $4 million advertising blitz against Moore, concentrating on the accounts of his pursuit of teenage girls early in his career when he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. It is beyond reasonable dispute that Moore was creepy with young girls, even Joe Biden-like. However, defamation is when one states as fact something for which there is no factual evidence and that harms another’s reputation.

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Still More Mar-A-Largo Raid Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The PDF of the unsealed search warrant and attachments is available here.

  • The central ethical conflict in this mess is between the danger of criminalizing politics, a warning sign of, as conservative talk show host Mark Levin says, creeping Stalinism, and appropriate revulsion at allowing anyone, including Presidents, ex-Presidents and would-be Presidents, to be “above the law.”
  • This inevitably leads to “whataboutism” arguments, and legitimate accusations of double standards. Hillary Clinton committed acts that other, lesser mortals have been prosecuted for, despite James Comey’s typically dishonest statements to the contrary. The Clinton Foundation, which operated–cleverly, creatively and mostly carefully—as a money laundering, pay-to-play and influence peddling operation for the benefit of Clinton family members in perpetual violation of basic non-profit practices and guidelines, mysteriously wound down to nothingness once Hillary had no influence left to peddle and no prospects for regaining any. An FBI raid of Clinton Foundation offices would have almost certainly turned up some fascinating documents, but the Trump Justice Department, which was, as we know, stuffed with Clinton loyalist holdovers, never went that far in its investigation, such as it was. There is a substantial distinction between crowds chanting “Lock her up!” and serious attempts to actually lock her up.

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Ethics Dunce (And Partisan Hack): Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Daniel Goldman earns the Ethics Alarms clip with Sir Thomas More’s scalding indictment of the character of “A Man For All Seasons” villain Richard Rich, “Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales?”

Donald Trump, fighting a coordinated (I believe) Democratic assault from all sides in a desperate effort to neutralize him (an effort than has continued unsuccessfully for a ludicrous six years!) invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination at a deposition for New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). While the ongoing January 6 kangaroo court in the House seeks to prove that Trump planned an “insurrection,” and the Justice Department raided his home ostensibly to find sufficient evidence to prosecute him for mishandling of classified documents, James is continuing her state’s long-running attempts to prove Trump engaged in illegal financial activity and/or corrupt business practices

After Trump’s non-response was reported, Goldman, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York for 10 years, tweeted,

“The Fifth Amendment ensures that people are not forced to incriminate themselves. But you don’t take the Fifth if you didn’t do anything wrong.”

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The FBI Raid On Mar-a-Lago

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Above are some of Andrew Yang’s tweets regarding the raid on Donald Trump’s resort residence in Palm Beach,Florida yesterday, executed by the FBI reportedly to find and retrieve classified documents that the former President improperly kept after leaving the White House. Yang is a tech executive and an amateur politician at best, but he’s smart and perceptive, and as the recent founder of a (doomed) centrist third party with national aspirations, is arguably more objective than most observers.

Except Ethics Alarms, of course…

Here is what we know: The Times reports…

Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach, Fla., home and had broken open a safe — an account signaling a major escalation in the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.

The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Mr. Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.

Mr. Trump delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them. The case was referred to the Justice Department by the archives early this year….

The F.B.I. would have needed to convince a judge that it had probable cause that a crime had been committed, and that agents might find evidence at Mar-a-Lago, to get a search warrant. Proceeding with a search on a former president’s home would almost surely have required sign-off from top officials at the bureau and the Justice Department.

Trump’s statement regarding the raid was classic Trump:

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Performing Arts Ethics: Amateur And Professional Ethics Dunces, Part 2…The Amateurs [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

In Part 1, I wrote: “Performance artists generally and across all levels and regions tend to be incompetent at ethical analysis, and their ethics alarms aren’t merely dysfunctional, they are warped.” Unfortunately, this applies to aspiring performance artists among amateur ranks as well.

RGV Productions works  with The Door Christian Fellowship Ministries of McAllen, and thus was responsible for live-streamed performances of a youth production of the Broadway hit “Hamilton” this weekend at the Door McAllen Church in McAllen, Texas. The production added scenes and dialogue and changed lines. During the climactic (and historical) duel between Aaron Burr and Hamilton, for example, the titular character says, “What is a legacy? It’s knowing you repented and accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ that sets men free. You sent your sinless son of man on Calvary to die for me!”

Sure doesn’t sound like Alexander to me! At the end of the show, a pastor delivered a sermon that included a passage you will never hear on Broadway, except as satire: “Maybe you struggle with alcohol, with drugs, with homosexuality, maybe you struggle with other things in life, your finances, whatever, God can help you tonight. He wants to forgive you for your sins.”

Uh, can’t do that.  The licensing rights to perform any show that hasn’t passed into the public domain specifically forbid it. Now, to be fair, RGV Productions and the church never obtained the rights: they are still unavailable, as is the norm when a Broadway show is in its initial run. Never mind: these disrespectful scofflaws did the show, or their mutant version of it, anyway. Continue reading →

It’s “Be Kind To (Cute) Rapist Teachers Week” In Texas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s former Houston-area middle school teacher Marka Bodine above. Isn’t she pretty? Much too pretty to have to be in an icky old jail. So despite the fact that she was convicted of grooming, harassing, raping and continuously sexually abusing a 13-year-old student until he was 16 years old and finally alerted authorities, Bodine was only sentenced to to 60 days in jail with 10 years of probation. Shades of the infamous 2005 case of Debra Lafave, another sick but comely teacher who raped one of her 14-year-old students! Her lawyer successfully convinced the judge that their client was “too pretty for prison,” and honestly, who can argue with that? Here’s Debra:

As you can see, Marka isn’t quite the hottie that Debra was, so it’s only fair that she got some jail time. But wait! There’s more! Because Marka had given birth shortly before her sentencing (the baby was not her rape victim’s—Whew!— that would be the saga of teacher rapist Mary Kay LeTourneau), Harris County Judge Greg Glass postponed her imprisonment for a full year. Continue reading →

Minnesota’s Religious Freedom Pharmacist Case

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

In  2019, Andrea Anderson’s primary birth control method had failed, so she called her health care provider to ask for a prescription to Ella, an emergency contraceptive tablet. But when she went to  the local McGregor Thrifty White pharmacy in Aitkin County, Minnesota, pharmacist and local pastor George Badeaux refused to fill the prescription, citing his religious beliefs. He told her that a pharmacist working the following day could fill her needs if a snowstorm didn’t prevent the pharmacist from getting to work.The desperate woman ended up driving three hours round trip to Brainerd during a snowstorm to get her pregnancy-terminating pills.

Anderson sued under the Minnesota Human Rights Act, alleging sexual discrimination. The jury ruled against her.

Ethics Alarms verdict: the jury was right on the law, but the pharmacist was unethical. Continue reading →

Most Incompetent White House Press Secretary Ever!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

There is no longer any doubt; indeed, this conclusion seemed unavoidable almost from the beginning of Karine Jean-Pierre’s tenure as President Biden’s paid liar. It was clear immediately that she, like so many other Biden Administration hires, was chosen to check off tribal boxes—female (check); black (check); lesbian (check)—and actual skill and qualifications were afterthoughts, if considered as factors at all. However, the bar for this position is lying-on-the-ground low; there was always a substantial chance that Jean-Pierre might prove barely capable at her job by pure luck, or charm, or something.

Nope. She’s the champ, and I can’t see any future White House spokesperson being worse unless one just froze in front of the cameras and twitched. What clinched it? This statement Jean-Pierre made yesterday:

“There has been an urgency from this President from day one, when the Supreme Court made this extreme decision to take away a constitutional right, it was an unconstitutional action by them.”

Wow. Even allowing for political hyperbole, stating that a Supreme Court ruling is unconstitutional is moronic, making every listener inclined to trust the President and his spokesperson instantly dumber. Continue reading →