The New York Times reports that when so-called “social media influencers” declare their support for political candidates, they may may be getting paid to do it.

You know, like when Kamala Harris paid Oprah, Beyonce and Al Sharpton.

The Times says the practice falls “into a legal gray area.” Welcome to at least two substantive rationalizations on the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List, #4. Marion Barry’s Misdirection, or “If it isn’t illegal, it’s ethical,” and #5. The Compliance Dodge!

But neither rationalization that tries toweasel out of the obvious should be necessary, should they? When someone online, on video or on the web says they support a candidate, a policy or a political position, they are announcing that their support is genuine and not bought and paid for. It doesn’t matter whether it’s illegal to misrepresent the reason for the endorsement or the opinion, or to let audiences think that it is based on genuine belief or analysis without disclosing that it is really based on money. It’s dishonest. It’s misleading. It’s deceptive.

It is unethical.

And any candidate, PAC, organization or political party that pays for such fake support is cheating whether there is a law against doing so or not. This isn’t hard.

Since its favorite party is the main perp in this corrupt practice, the Times pronounces it bi-partisan. Yeah, some Republican scumbags do it too, but I mentioned the magic word “cheating,” so naturally the paid “influencer” scam is especially popular with the Cheating Party, Democrats.

Kendall Boyle is a TikToker in Michigan with over 21,000 followers. She told the Times she was contacted by a social media marketing agency called Activate HQ offering her a paid opportunity to post videos about “how rising costs are affecting Michigan residents in real life.” She was told that the source of the payments would be Majority Forward, a group linked to the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC. Activate HQ explained that “disclosure is not required and the paid partnership label will not be included in any posts.” A condition of the deal would be that Majority Forward “will not be mentioned” in her content.

Boyle declined, telling the Times that “It was one of those things where something isn’t fitting right.” Ya think? Gee, what a well-honed set of ethics alarms she has!

The only way I could embed this video was to include the X-user’s commentary. No, liberal women are not “literally” brain dead.

However, it is hard to imagine a woman hearing such unethical, nonsensical junk escaping her mouth and not exclaiming, “Wait, did I really say that?” And useful research could and should be performed to determine how a woman ends up capable of thinking this way.

“The best way to protect my baby is to kill my baby.” This makes sense only in rare, dire circumstances such as when both mother and child are about to be eaten alive by a velociraptor or a ravenous zombie. With those remote exception, its an idiotic thing to say, or even think

I have three substantial posts to get up already this morning, but the swirl of billable time and EA time had me a bit scattered. Here are a few flickers from the neurons that are early risers:

• For some reason, traffic here was way up all day yesterday, and I have no clue why or whether a particular topic was driving it. Theories welcome.
• On the other hand, as Captain Hook never would say, I find the lack of interest in this post puzzling. 1) Arbitration is routine in so many disputes now, and the system, and the arbitrators, are untrustworthy. Attention should be paid, and 2) the arbitrator’s decision at the heart of the essay is particularly indefensible, blocking a major newspaper from firing a partisan, racist hack who lied in a social media post because—lying and being a racist (anti-white, of course) is not sufficient cause to fire an opinion columnist?
• The personal mission I alluded to on Sunday took up most of the day, caused me to miss two deadlines, aggravated an injury to my ankle and left me exhausted. Never mind. A little dog found her “forever home” (why that cheesy phrase gets me all choked up is a long-running embarrassment, but I can’t help it) and my sibling has been the happiest I have seen since her very first dog perished over a year ago. The Power of the Dog.
• On gross baseball nick-names: the Seattle Mariners catcher, Cal Raleigh, is called “The Big Dumper.” The Mariners broadcasters love to use it, presumably because their maturity level is at the approximate level of a 12-years-old. For some reason, Seattle seems to like such snicker-inspiring monikers. The Mariners also originated the nickname for 6’10” Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson: “The Big Unit.” Yes, that meant exactly what you’re thinking. Ew.
• This:

True gaslighting, and another fake protest, like the “No Kings” nonsense. Sharpton and his Axis allies don’t want to “protect the vote,” they want to keep elections vulnerable to fraud and fixing.

Much of today will be occupied by my driving my little sister to West Virginia where she will finally adopt a new dog more than a year after her beloved canine companion, a sweet Havanese, perished of old age. From experience, I know bring a new dog home is a two-person job. I won’t be able to post on developing ethics catastrophes until this afternoon, but I am hoping to leave enough metaphorical bread crumbs behind to prompt some lively discussion.

For instance…

1. I know I alluded to AOC’s head-exploding statement on ABC’s “This Week” a week ago that “Woke 1 was crazy” but attention should be paid. Then she said, “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” How can anyone trust a politician who would say something that cynical and damning? “Oh yeah, my party and I advocated all sorts of crazy stuff way back then (a few years ago!), but come on, don’t hold us to that nuttiness.” This is a back-room consultant’s solution to problem of the Axis embracing so many so-called 80-20 positions—let minors get their genitals mutilated with “gender affirming care,” defund the police, abolish prisons, forgive student loan debt, “et cetera, et cetera,” as the King of Siam would say. Funny… in my world, people who say they believe ridiculous things are regarded as, in fact, ridiculous: untrustworthy and irresponsible even if they bleat “I didn’t mean it!” later.

2. Oh good: I haven’t had a “Yankees suck!” topic for a while! An upsetting essay (gift link) in the New York Times begins…

“On one side of East 161st Street looms Yankee Stadium, the baseball fortress in the South Bronx that is the home of baseball’s $10 billion franchise, the richest in the sport. On the other lies a park in one of the Bronx’s poorest communities, built on the site of the former Yankee Stadium after the old home of the Yankees was torn down in 2009 and 2010. Macombs Dam Park was originally intended to serve as a shrine to the team’s history. Plaques commemorate great Yankee moments, as does the iconic facade that was stationed above the original entrance. Quotes from Yankee greats make up the park’s signage, and Elston Howard Field was created as a replica of a stadium that stood for 85 years. The park is about 44 acres, and also includes a track, playground and basketball courts. Yet over the past decade, the park has fallen into a state of decrepitude, trash littering the venue. The playing surface, with uncut grass and sprouting weeds, is uneven and unsafe. The field, when untended, is largely unplayable.”

The story continues to tell us that kids have broken ankles and legs trying to play on the field because of all the holes, and that parents in the area, one of the state’s poorest, feel betrayed and ignored. Nonetheless, however, none of the parties with interests in the project have stepped forward to fix it—not the state, not the city, and not the New York Yankees, as they all point to each other and generally refuse to respond to the news media’s inquiries.

Ethically, the #1 villain is obvious, to me, anyway. The Yankees should clean up and maintain the park. It’s that team’s history that resides there, and there is no question that the Yankees can afford it without having to plow through the red tape the community would have to navigate to get results. The team pays 8 figure annual salaries to utility infielders. The state of its legacy field is a disgrace to the memory of the Babe, Joltin’ Joe, the Mick and Lou Gehrig. (Okay, I have to say it: naming the field after Elston Howard, the first black Yankee star, is DEI crap, and I loved Elston. But Yankee Stadium was long called “The House that Ruth Built,” and Babe was the greatest Yankee.

More “Woke 1”?

3. Speaking of baseball ethics and the hugely profitable sport being cheap, last week the Baltimore Orioles lost a game they thought they had won in dramatic fashion when an apparent home run by slugger Pete Alonso was ruled foul by the umpires. The potential home run ball was so high that it soared far over the left field foul pole, and the videos of the blast were inconclusive. The technology is available to make such calls with certitude, but stadiums haven’t installed it, presumable because it is expensive and the situation doesn’t arise that frequently. However, the outcome of single games can affect careers, seasons. championship and franchises. The story in The Athletic ends,

“Everyone acknowledges more needs to be done…No one was able to offer clear answers or timelines.This week, MLB players fumed at a fair/foul call like generations of ballplayers before them.In 1963, an umpire’s foul call on Willie McCovey’s towering ninth-inning fly ball elongated the game into a 16-inning marathon. “He didn’t make the call right away. I hit it so high and far, he waited until it landed … which was in Oakland,” McCovey said in 2013, still grumbling as the 50th anniversary of that epic game approached. “He was the only person in the ballpark who thought it was foul.”

…“It seems odd to me that we don’t have cameras on foul poles,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “That’s the one thing that is not different in every ballpark.” New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone acknowledged that while it’s natural to want to use every available tool to get calls right, it’s likely more complicated than a quick install that fixes everything.

“That’s a little above my pay grade,” Boone said.

I really hate it when people say that.

3.8 thousand “hearts.”

NPR, in an abominable piece of deceitful journalism two years ago about Ferguson, Mo. ten years after a young black thug there got himself shot in self-defense by a police officer, and his buddy’s lies were immediately accepted as truth by a biased, corrupt news media, wrote in part…

Right. “Many” maintain that justice was never served because of lying, divisive, race-huckster, police-vilifying ethics villains like Rep. Tlaib, who deliberately and repeatedly maintain that facts don’t matter. It isn’t an opinion that Mike Brown was murdered. It is a destructive false narrative designed to keep racial distrust and anger perpetually high. She is a member of Congress. For a House member to make a public statement so irresponsible, dishonest, and corrosive to society isn’t just grounds for censure, it demands censure.

Color me unimpressed.

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Party Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a bi-partisan rebuke of Florida Republican Dan Bilzerian, one of several Republican candidates in Florida’s 6th Congressional District running in the primary today. Bilzerian, a veteran, has run a bare-knuckles campaign to put it mildly, and his latest campaign ad crossed more ethics red lines than any such production in memory. In the process of attacking incumbent Rep. Randy Fine, one of his opponents in the primary, the ad uses AI-generated images (the one on the left accompanies the ad hominem slur “fat Jew”) and such blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric as “Shylock,” “Jewish supremacist” and “satanic whore” while suggesting that Adolf Hitler’s “opinions” many have some validity after all.

Nice. Stay classy, Republicans.

Rep. Fine is among the most vocal and determined supporters of Israel in its war with Hamas and Gaza. Jeffries and Johnson both condemned Bilzerian. “The hateful campaign being run by Daniel Bilzerian in Florida is blatantly antisemitic and shocks the conscience,” Jeffries said. “People of goodwill regardless of political affiliation must reject his vile attacks on the Jewish community. This cannot and will not stand.” “The vile attack ads against Congressman Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th District are disgusting and should be condemned by all political leaders on the Right and Left,” Speaker Johnson said in a statement the same day. “Antisemitism and outward hatred of Jewish communities have no place in our politics or in America.”

There’s no argument that Bilzerian deserves those rebukes and more, but I see no actual principles involved in the decisions of Jefferies and Johnson to attack him. It’s easy for Jeffries to condemn an outlier and rogue GOP candidate for vile attacks on the Jewish community, and it is also hypocritical. His party has extolled and supported plenty of anti-Semites who managed not to be as brazen as Bilzerian, but their statements and transparent attitudes have been “vile” nonetheless. Indeed, Jeffries’s whole party is increasingly sliding into routine Jew-hate, notably on college campuses.

The doctrine of subsequent remedial measures holds that evidence of safety improvements, fixes, or changes made after an accident cannot be used in court to prove that a defendant was negligent. However, when a miscreant reacts to an incident of negligence or wrongdoing by taking measures that make it look more guilty without fixing anything, what do you call that? I vote for “really stupid.”

In the wake of its worldwide humiliation in the Jason Arday scandal and its craven, mealy-mouthed public declarations as the mess reached its climax with the fraudulent professor’s death, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education decided to hide its faculty. The staff list is now offline. When one tries to access it, the screen above appears.

A double-secret faculty! Cool!

Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice promised that the investigation of how an emotionally disturbed fantasist who fabricated credentials, his biography and his scholarship yet nonetheless was passed into the faculty of one of the most prestigious universities in the world would be “thorough and transparent.”

That’s nice, but forgive me for being skeptical: how transparent is Cambridge likely to be when it won’t reveal who’s on its faculty? I suppose it’s possible that the professors are so embarrassed to be associated with Cambridge now that they will enter the Professor Protection Program and are only going out in public wearing Groucho glasses.

I won’t decide what the subtitle of this collection post will be until I finish it, but the photo above has me tempted to use “Going Crazy Edition.” [Update: finished, and yes, that seems like the appropriate heading]

Congresswoman Nancy Mace, Republican, conservative, a military veteran and one of the “hot,” frequently embarrassing GOP women in Congress, just revealed her full arm tattoo “sleeves.” I have an associate, also fully sleeved, who is a veteran, a Camp Lejeune victim, suffers from Complex PTSD, and is a survivor of a chaotic upbringing, the death of a child, and other personal tragedies. He has explained to me that excessive, visible tattoos like Mace’s (and his) are often, even usually, a form of self-harm to cope with serious emotional damage.

Mace is notable for various rogue positions as well as conduct that Ethics Alarms had criticized as being inappropriate for members of Congress, most recently here. Last year, Mace delivered a 50 minute diatribe accusing her ex-fiancé and three other men of rape, sex trafficking and other sex crimes against her and other female victims, and accused South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson of failing to prosecute the men after, she said, she presented his office with evidence.   Mace is not stable (she is a lame duck, having failed to run in the primary for her seat to run for the Republican governor nomination, failing badly), and is one more example of how the parties and voters need to stop letting such troubled people reach national leadership position. To be fair, I have determined that being a little (or a lot) nuts is a common trait among our elected Presidents, as is having a traumatic life. Those driven with a passion to lead are by definition abnormal. A congresswoman who feels compelled to say “Look at me! I’m a mess!” by getting “sleeves,” however, should start ethics alarms ringing.

Meanwhile…