Pulling fire alarms? Child’s play. Challenging a Senate hearing witness to a rumble? Peanuts!

Felicia Franklin was relieved of her job as Clayton County (Georgia) Board of Commissioners vice chair after the September incident above, recorded on police body cameras. Her condition was apparently caused by downing three 40-proof Hennessy and Grand Marnier drinks, a glass of wine and some beer, along with cannabis oil.

Franklin is suing the county, claiming that she was drugged with GHB, but, as you can hear in the video, there was no evidence of that. She’s a class act, to be sure: after she was roused from her unconscious state on the sidewalk, lying in her own urine, Franklin began screaming, crying, cursing at and pushing away the first responders.

“The Clayton County Board of Commissioners deemed the removal of Franklin as vice chair and additional sanctions in the best interest of the county, citing behavior unbecoming of the position,” county officials said in a statement. Ya think? “The Board finds its citizens expect its elected officials to behave in a manner which brings a positive reflection on the citizens, businesses, and employees of the county,” it went on to say.

Do citizens still expect that? If so, how do people like Franklin, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and Senator Markwayne Mullin get elected? Margaret Bryant, a county resident and Franklin supporter, shows how: she told reporters the board should have been more forgiving.

“I think it was a bad move and an unfair move,” Bryant said. “Who hasn’t done something they are ashamed of?”

Good point. What elected official hasn’t gotten roaring drunk, passed out on the sidewalk, fought with EMTs as they were taken to the hospital, then lied about it? Come on! Be fair!

Well, at least the troll presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has some uses. His hectoring pulled an “A Few Good Men”- style “You’re goddamn right I did!” confession from ex-CNN pretty boy hack Chris Cuomo. Fredo wasn’t admitting that he ordered a “Code Red,” though/ Instead, Cuomo spat out proof not just of his own lack of journalistic ethics but also of the ethics void in U.S. journalism as a whole.

At one point in his contentious interview on Cuomo’s NewsNation cable show, Ramaswamy challenged the host to “Look the audience in the eye and tell them how you covered for your brother.” Cuomo immediately shot back, “You don’t want to take care of your family, that’s fine. Of course I covered for my brother. Of course I help my brother. Of course I do.”

From this we can conclude that:

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It is depressing to me that I feel it necessary to write anything here at all, other than to post the video above.

Mullins decided to make a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing about personal animus between him and Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien. He read into the record tweeted insults by O’Brien, who had called the Oklahoma Republican a “moron” and “full of shit” among other juicy descriptors. This precipitated the disgusting display above, with Mullin daring O’Brien to a fistfight, “right here, right now,” and both men apparently preparing to due battle in the U.S. Capitol. “If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” Mullins said.

Luckily committee chair Bernie Sanders appeared to have some sense of honor and decorum, and ordered Mullin to stand down, saying, “You are a United States Senator! Sit down!” Mullin is a former professional MMA fighter, and apparently needed reminding.

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For unexplainable reasons, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of “48 Hours” of late. You know the show, I assume: the CBS documentary/news magazine has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988, though in periodically mutating forms. It is currently the only remaining first-run prime time shows appearing Saturday nights on the four major U.S. broadcast TV networks, and as such illustrates what dinosaurs those networks are and where they are headed.

“48 Hours” illustrates a lot of other things too, I have discovered, many of them carrying useful, disturbing, or surprising ethical and cultural implications. Although the show’s format is sometimes chucked to cover a breaking news story, most of its astounding number of episodes are devoted to “true crime” tales, usually mysteries and recently solved cold cases.

The formula seldom varies: we get a quick description of a U.S. locale, snippets of local citizens describing it in glowing terms, then an ominous overview of the participants in the ugly event we are about to hear, almost invariably a shocking murder. Then the CBS host—here’s how old the show is: the original host was Dan Rather—is shown interviewing family members, witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, lawyers, jurors and other participants. The show is carefully apolitical, but it is still a fascinating series of snapshots of our society and the treatment of it by the news and entertainment media.

Among the striking impressions that emerge from the accumulated impact of “48 Hours”—

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Properly, “salmagundi” describes a salad or cold plate made from disparate ingredients that may include meat, seafood, eggs, cooked and raw vegetables, fruits, pickles, or something else. Metaphorically, the word is sometimes used to describe a chaotic confluence of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent mess. That is how Ethics Alarms will use the term going forward. An Unethical Salmagundi (U.S.) will describe one of those mass collisions of people, situations and institutions that are devoid of ethical logic, discipline or comprehension. An ironically named U.S. will be more disorderly and incomprehensible than an ethics rain wreck, and impossible to sort out. Here is an example from the weekend’s news:

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One reason (out of , oh, a thousand or so) that I dread another four years of Donald Trump is the inevitable avalanche of “get Trump!” stories from the mainstream news media, trying to instill fear based on what he reportedly said or thought or considered as reported by some malign mole, or, as in this case, deliberately spinning some off-the-top-of-the-head careless musings into existential threats to the nation. These are sinister and disgusting breaches of journalistic ethics supporting Trump’s description of the media as “enemies of the people,” or, in the alternative—there’s that darn Hanlon’s Razor again!—move evidence that bias makes you, or in this case, them, stupid.

I have a confession: when I read the multiple headlines screaming that Trump had said that he would prosecute political foes if he was elected President, I just assumed that he really said that. What’s the matter with me? I know all of these sources are corrupt, dishonest, and determined to undermine Trump’s candidacy by any means necessary, and yet I still default to the romantic, Pollyanna notion that journalists can be trusted.

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