Professions

Wasted Day Evening Ethics, 2/10/2020: As Your Host Tries To Salvage Some Productivity In A Messed Up Monday [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I don’t want to talk about it.

1. Is it ethical to point out that the candidate my desperate progressive friends are trying to justify supporting in the arid Democratic field is really a jerk? Sure it is! In a deft call that I missed, Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson found yet another striking example of Pete Buttigieg’s hypocrisy. He writes,

For much of the presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has championed the importance of the popular vote. In a town hall nearly a year ago, Buttigieg proclaimed: “One thing I believe is that in an American presidential election, the person who gets the most votes ought to be the person who wins.”

Yet after the Iowa caucuses, where Bernie Sanders clearly got thousands  more votes, Buttigieg has been trumpeting victory — on the basis of a metric that can subvert the popular vote, the state delegate haul from Iowa’s equivalent of the electoral college.

To be plain, the actual tally in Iowa seems to matter less to the Buttigieg campaign than building a perception of victory. On the night of the caucuses, long before any of the official tally had been reported, Buttigieg dubiously declared he had won..the Iowa Democratic Party has now released 100 percent of the state results. The current tally shows Buttigieg trailing Sanders by 2,631 votes, yet leading by 2 “state delegate equivalents” — a margin of 0.1 percent on that metric. Yet the official tally includes many documented and uncorrected errors and what the state party deems “inconsistencies in data.” The Associated Press has refused to call the election, and Democratic party chair Tom Perez has demanded a “recanvass” or recount. Despite the tenuousness of these results, the Buttigieg website now proclaims: “It’s official: Pete won the Iowa Caucuses!”.

President Trump’s election, however, was illegitimate. Continue reading →

Oscar Ethics Part II: The “In Memoriam” Snubs

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

For some reason, Luke Perry’s snub (That’s Luke above) has attracted most of the outrage, though he is far from the worst of the omissions, as you will see.

Luke Perry

(October 11, 1966 – March 4, 2019

Perry became a teen idol at 23 after he was cast as the brooding son of a millionaireon Fox’s prime time soap opera,  “Beverly Hills, 90210.”  A riot broke out when 10,000 teen girls attended one of his  August 1991 autograph sessions  While starring in “90210,” Perry appeared in the original film version of Joss Whedon’s” Buffy The Vampire Slayer” (1992). That was pretty much the high point of his film career, though he had a small role in “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.”  Mostly he was a TV actor whose career, after a spectacular launch,  settled into the typical orbit of supporting roles in various series and guest shots in everything from sitcoms like “Will and Grace” to “Law and Order: SVU.”  Between those jobs, voice-over work and regional theater paid the bills and kept him working.

He was, in short, a working professional actor who had one burst of superstardom, which is more than most. Perry was only 52 when he died of a massive stroke.

Michael J. Pollard

(May 30, 1939 – November 20, 2019)

Pollard rose to fame in 1967 as  Bonnie and Clyde’s dim-witted gang member, earning an Oscar nomination along with the other honors racked up by Arthur’s Penn’s ground-breaking, violent epic about the lover-killers. He went on to a long career as a Hollywood character actor, aided by one of the most memorable faces in screen history. That face had made him a familiar TV actor before “Bonnie and Clyde” made him famous: he played the cousin of Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” and Virgil, the cousin to  Barney Fife (Don Knotts), on “The Andy Griffith Show.” In the first season of the original “Star Trek,” he was  a creepy  teenage cult leader on a planet of children.

Pollard continued to make significant films after his Oscar nomination, such as  “Little Fauss and Big Halsy” (1970), a motorcycle racing buddy film in which he co-starred with Robert Redford. He was Billy the Kid in “Dirty Little Billy” (1972), an inept fireman in “Roxanne” (1987), the friend of a Utah gas station owner  who claimed to be Howard Hughes’s beneficiary in“Melvin and Howard” (1980), and  surveillance expert Bug Bailey in “Dick Tracy.”

Pollard was acting right up until his death: two of his films that yet to be released. Continue reading →

It’s Comforting To Know That Yale Is Educating Future Lawyers As Incompetently As Harvard, I Guess

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Actually, it’s terrifying.

A core function of lawyers in our society is to give everyone equal access to the law irrespective of their believes, interests, or motives. Without them, the public and all of its entities, institutions and organizations become slaves and victims of laws rather than beneficiaries of them, with an elite and corrupted professions using their knowledge and skills to distort democracy rather than protect it.

The relentless ideological corruption of academia is slowly but surely corrupting the professions it is trusted to train, with lawyers being a striking example. Now law students are increasingly taught that their interests, not their clients, should be the focus of their passions, and those interests have been dictated by progressive and leftist agendas, with the aim of transforning a profession designed to be equally accessible to all into a tool of dominance by one side of the political spectrum over the others.

This developments is the reason ethics alarms must sound over the students of both Yale and Harvard Law Schools condemning a major law firm’s choice of clients. They are trying to build a national law student boycott of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison until the firm drops  ExxonMobil as a client. Climate change, you know. As we increasingly see, the environmentalist cult is being used to justify weakening democratic institutions and principles.

A pledge is circulating declaring that top students will no longer interview for summer associate positions or work at the firm until Paul, Weiss, and of course there will be other firms, no longer represent the oil and gas giant, and, inevitably, other energy companies.  Providing Exxon with competent representation in a series of climate change lawsuits makes firms complicit in the planet’s destruction. Thus the legal system must be rigged against them.

The last sentence is my fair and accurate translation of the objective behind the pledge, which reads, Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, 2/8/2020: “Procrastinating To Delay Writing About Another Debate” Edition [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Good morning.

Way, way too much ethics-related politics this past week. I keep getting complaints about all the political content, and it annoys me too, but I don’t know what kind of alternatives I have. Back in the sane days, the idea of a House Speaker planning on tearing up the official copy of the State of the Union speech would have been the stuff of Saturday Night Live…when SNL would make fun of Democrats, anyway. I’m trying to keep the politics to a minimum. I swear.

1.  The Astros cheating scandal, cont. Would you wonder about this answer? A.J. Hinch, the ex-Houston Astros manager who was fired and suspended by Major League Baseball for allowing an illegal sign-stealing scheme to be used by his players for the entire 2017 World Champion Astros season, finally sat down for an interview.   When he was asked whether Houston players had utilized buzzers in their uniforms to receive signsduring the 2019 season as some have claimed based on inconclusive evidence and rumors, Hinch only would answer, “The Commissioner’s Office did as thorough of an investigation as anyone could imagine was possible.”

Why not “No”? That was what reporters term a “non-denial denial.”

2. If they advised her to run her sick child through the washing machine and he drowned,  would that be their fault too? The death of a four-year-old boy named Najee is being blamed on an anti-vaxx Facebook group.

The boy had been diagnosed with the flu and the doctor had  prescribed Tamiflu. His mother sought advice from the Facebook group “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” on how to treat her son’s’ illness. The members told her to give the boy vitamins, botanicals, zinc, fruits and vegetables, and to skip the medicine.

“Ok perfect I’ll try that,” she responded. Later that night, Najee had a seizure and died. Continue reading →

Did Trump’s Impeachment Lawyer Lie To The Senate?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Pat Cipollone, one of President Trump’s lawyer,  stated  that Republicans weren’t allowed to participate in House depositions. This wasn’t true: 47 Republicans who served on the appropriate committees had the right to attend these depositions, and many did attend. Naturally the “Get all Trump allies’ resistance mob regards this an intentional lie, and is demanding that Cipellone be disciplined for professional misconduct.

Wrong.

Writes legal ethics expert Stacie  Rosenzweig, “This is almost certainly a lie rather than a misstatement or misapprehension; I can’t imagine a scenario in which a lawyer with a three-decade career and a reputation for being “well-prepared and even-keeled” would simply not know that.” Her logic is exactly upside down: a lawyer that experienced would not deliberately utter a lie in such a high profile forum where it would certainly be noticed, undermining his credibility to no good end.  Sure enough, the factcheckers were on his misstatement like a shot.

The lawyer probably made a mistake, contrary to Rosenweig’s unjustfied certitude.This may have occurred because the false claim that the GOP was shut out of the depositions was a frequent right-wing talking point, and he didn’t check it. The assertion was at best tangential to his argument; I guarantee that no bar association would discipline any lawyer by using the argument, “You’re too good and experienced to make a stupid mistake.” Good and experienced lawyers made mistakes, sometimes astonishing ones.
Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 2/2/2020: The “Let’s Not Watch The CTE Bowl And Think About Ethics Instead” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Good Afternoon!

I almost managed to ignore football completely this season, and I’m proud of it.  There were few rogue kneelers in the NFL this year, and the New England Patriots, my hometown role models for the Houston Astros, finally bit the dust. Meanwhile, there was little new on the CTE front, not any more is needed to prove that cheering young men in the process of destroying their brains for a handful of well-compensated seasons as football heroes is immoral and unethical.  I did recently watch the Netflix documentary, “The Killer Inside,” about Aaron Hernandez, the Patriots star who murdered a friend and perhaps two others. I didn’t know that after his suicide in prison, it was found that Hernandez suffered from CTE, and that  his brain was one of the most damaged scientists have ever seen.  The documentary also says that the New England Patriots coaching staff saw signs that he was deteriorating and becoming unstable, as well as using drugs, and they made no effort to intervene. After all, he was playing well, and the team was winning.

That’s pro football. To hell with it.

1. “The Chop.” I have written about this perpetually silly issue a lot, and recently, but the New York Times, being the Official Paper of the Woke, has felt it necessary to publish three pieces this week on the the so called “Kansas City Chop,” the tomahawk motion used by Kansas City Chiefs fans (The Chiefs are in the Super Bowl, you know) when cheering on their team. The chop is most identified with the Atlanta Braves (How satisfying it was to watch Jane Fonda dutifully chopping along with then husband Ted Turner when the  Braves finally made the world Series in 1991!), but Chiefs fans started copying Braves fans. It is, of course, intended to rally the team, has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of commentary on Native Americans, those who pretend to be seriously unsettled by what fans of an NFL team do to show their affection for their team are either faking or need psychiatric care. But here’s CNN:
 Continue reading →

#MeToo Ethics: Prosecuting To Stigmatize The Accused

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

It’s not just the impeachment..apparently prosecutors are beginning to adopt the Democratic Party’s theory that it is appropriate to force a trial when there is no chance at conviction just to stigmatize the accused. This is a clear breach of prosecutor ethics, but ethics schmethics, the ends justify the means, right?

The area in which this despicable strategy is surfacing is—and this should be no surprise—the realm of #Me Too. In Maine,  Natasha Irving , who is the top prosecutor for Knox, Lincoln, Sagadahoc and Waldo counties,  wants to reform how the legal system prosecutes sexual assault cases, believing all women so those who come forward know they’ll be “supported.” This means, according to  Irving, that prosecutors shouldn’t decline to prosecute a sexual assault case just because they “think it’s too hard to prove.”

“Individually, I think that response is very damaging to a survivor,” she says. “If they weren’t believed initially, they don’t have faith that they’re going to be believed if they come forward again. Or that they somehow will be put on trial for what happened instead of the perpetrator. There’s a lot of shame and blame that the victims often carry.”

Yes, that’s a problem. A greater problem is prosecutors bring cases to trial when the don’t have enough evidence to prove the defendant guilty. Then they are just counting on an incompetent jury, which isn’t that much of a longshot. The attitude Irving is endorsing is how black men end up in prison for murders they didn’t commit. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Now THIS Is A Level 8 Apology!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In this concise but rich Comment of the Day, Isaac takes on the challenge of re-writing the wildly inadequate and unconvincing apology offered by the Catholic priest who was pressured to recant his negative comments about Islam in a Sunday service.

The apology offered three days later by the chastened priest, Fr.Nick VanDenBroeke:

My homily on immigration contained words that were hurtful to Muslims. I’m sorry for this. I realize now that my comments were not fully reflective of the Catholic Church’s teaching on Islam.

 

Here is Isaac’s alternative, his Comment of the Day on the post, “Now THIS Is A Level 8 Apology!”… Continue reading →

Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, Feb. 1, 2020: A New Month, Post Fake News Shame, And Impeachment Failure Freakout Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The good news: Other Bill’s get well bouquet (above) from the Commentariat to the fallen “Mrs. Ethics Alarms” is still thriving!

1. Humbly grateful...for all the gracious notes of forgiveness for the “Unethical Quote Of The Century” fiasco, explicated here in the early morning hours. Imagine: with all the hysterical, dishonest, apocalyptic declarations flying around the airwaves, news media and  web, I managed to write about one that was never said.

2. Ann Althouse on “rigged.” The politically neutral bloggress gave me a much needed laugh with this: Responding to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank’s unhingery in “The Senate impeachment trial was rigged!,” Ann wrote,

Yeah, it was rigged. Everything is rigged. The election was rigged. Trump isn’t really President. The impeachment trial was rigged. The acquittal won’t count as an acquittal. If Trump wins reelection, it will be because it was rigged. It’s all rigged. The Constitution itself is rigged. What’s with that 2/3 vote requirement? Rigged. Electoral college? Rigged! Life itself is rigged!…

Bingo. Do all the people screaming about the decision not to allow witnesses remember that the Clinton impeachment trial has no  witnesses, and neither Republican nor Democrats complained?  The ones who do are hypocrites, the ones who don’t. most. I think, are inexcusably ignorant. I’m not certain the Democrats really wanted witnesses, since their alleged “bombshell” witness, John Bolton, was not going to testify that he knew the reason Trump was pushing for a Ukrainian investigation was to “rig” the election, and the GOP was going to demand to question Biden and son. as well as the “whistleblower.” I suspect that the Democrats assumed that calling witnesses would be voted down, giving them a theme that Republicans were covering up for Trump. Or maybe not. Nothing about the Plan S impeachment sham makes sense. However, the screaming at the sky over a result that was inevitable and widely known to be so years ago was also inevitable, and, one would think, embarrassing. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/29/2020: Dogs, Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden, D.C., Jimmy Kimmel, Threatening Deplorables And Restricting Rights

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Well, dogs are good, anyway…

1. Stop making  dogs defend Mike Bloomberg!…Is there anything too trivial that people won’t use to attack politicians? A CBS News video began circulating online yesterday afternoon showing Michael Bloomberg shaking hands with a man in Burlington, Vermont, then taking his dog’s upper jaw  in his hand and “shaking” the dog’s  snout  He then scratched the dog’s ears. The social media mob called him a dog abuser.

Morons. That’s a move that most dogs enjoy, as well as someone grasping their whole muzzle. It shows Bloomberg is comfortable with and knowledgeable about dogs. I used to do both moves with our 165 pound English Mastiff, and our Jack Russells.

2.  I know this is of interest to almost nobody who isn’t a lawyer, but trust me, it’s a big deal. The District of Columbia has long been the only U.S. jurisdiction that allows law firms to have non-lawyer partners, a structure prevented everywhere else by the general prohibition on lawyers sharing their fees with non-lawyers. When D.C. adopted its revolutionary approach, it assumed that the states would soon follow, with the American Bar Association’s assent. Because that hasn’t happened, a state-licensed lawyer with a D.C. license participating in a legal firm in D.C. could technically be found to  be violating that state’s ethics rules , though the District has negotiated a truce in that potential controversy.

Meanwhile, those special law firms with non-lawyer members are proliferating like legal rabbits. Now  a Jan. 23 press release tells the world that the District of Columbia Bar is taking comments regarding proposed changes to its ethics rules that could allow external ownership of law firms, as well as blended businesses in which lawyers and non-lawyers provide both legal and nonlegal services, like accounting. Or massages–who knows? Right now, law firms by definition can only practice law.

Perhaps even more significantly, California, Utah and Arizona are also studying changes that would relax ethics rules barring non-lawyers from holding a financial interest in law firms. Continue reading →