If This Poll Is Accurate, The American Public May Be Too Incompetent and Irresponsible to Live In a Democracy…

A poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek found that 18% of voters are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a candidate endorsed by pop singer Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift has been essentially dedicated to music since she was 14, though she did graduate from high school in three years. There is nothing she has to offer in trenchant political commentary besides celebrity, and to a large number of Americans, as we already know, that’s enough.

So naturally, as the buzz was in Washington, D.C. today, the Biden campaign is working hard to get Swift to endorse Joe, if possible at the Super Bowl.

It is estimated that 8 million new voters will enter the ranks of the US electorate this year, making a total of 41 million Gen Z voters. This is also a group that surveys show has a low opinion of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, free enterprise and the United States generally, so maybe they don’t even need Swift’s OK to vote Democratic. My guess, and maybe I’m whistling past the metaphorical graveyard, is that most of that 18% may be more likely to vote if Taylor tells them who to vote for, but the majority of them won’t be engaged enough to vote anyway.

If the election is going to turn on somethings as trivial and meaningless as celebrity endorsements, its not even worth worrying about. Those idiots will deserve what they get, and so will their elders, for letting society and the culture get that stupid.

About Gov. Newsom’s Claim That “We Have the Best 3-year Record of Any Modern American Presidency…”

I didn’t want to start the day with an Unethical Quote of the Month right after last night’s post, but attention should be paid to what California governor Gavin Newsom told a stunned Jonathan Karl on ABC News’ “This Week” yesterday. The full quote was: “We have the best three-year record of any modern American Presidency, period, full stop. And you look at the issue, issue by issue, they poll overwhelmingly, the American people support what Biden has done.”

What’s going on here? The most recent polling shows Biden with the worst three-year approval rating going back to Gerald Ford half a century ago (my, how time flies). How could the American people “overwhelmingly” support (“approve of” is a synonym for “support”) what Biden has done while roughly two-thirds tell pollsters that they think he’s a lousy President?

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Saturday Afternoon Ethics Catch-Up, 1/27/2024

I write this in a state of advanced disgust over the predictable but still nauseating reaction by the legal ethics community (as represented on the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, of which I am a member) to the still roiling Fani Willis scandal. This is a, I estimate, a 80%-20% woke profession, and I may be being generous. Not only did group’s hyperactive listserv conspicuously ignore the story despite it being by far the most high-profile legal ethics controversy in many months, but when the topic was finally broached yesterday, it was to brush aside the obvious conflict of interest as irrelevant to the case’s defendants, including Donald Trump. (This is a passionately Trump-Deranged group to the point that vocal dissenters are risk professional blackballing.) This CNN opinion piece by a member has been virtually unanimously praised, despite employing blatant “whataboutism”: “Willis may have engaged in nepotism (as when President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert Kennedy to be US attorney general or when Trump appointed his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner to positions in his presidential administration).” For some strange reason, the legal ethicist association seems to be willing to accept the dubious proposition that even though Willis’s alleged legal lover is profiting greatly from his involvement in the case (and that she may be receiving benefits from that profit in the form of travel and other baubles of affection), this could not reasonably be seen as a factor undermining her required independent judgment in managing the case as his supervisor.

Well, the group is still a valuable resource the 95% of the time that progressive politics aren’t involved…

1. Oh…about that headline! It’s my “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” note of the day. It’s a real headline from a real story, but dates from March 2023. Legal Insurrection wrote about its author here. But I missed it, and as the saying goes, if it’s new to you, it’s still news….

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Why is Planned Parenthood Promoting Premarital Sex?

It couldn’t be that it’s trying to drum up more abortion business, could it? Nah, that would be…unethical. Unless, of course, one likes abortions.

Watch, if you have the stomach for it, that video above, which Planned Parenthood promoted this way:

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On NYC’s “Social Media Is a Health Hazard” Advisory

New York City proudly proclaimed this week that it is the first city in the U.S. to issue an advisory officially designating social media as a health hazard, and illustrated its achievement with head-exploding nanny state (nanny city?) overreach in a “health advisory.”

What the document mostly demonstrates is the culture’s flat learning curve regarding unstoppable cultural developments. In earlier generations, it was dime novels, dancing, jazz, rock-n-roll, TV and rap lyrics that communities sought to ban to protect the young. Now it’s social media. These are desperation screams in the dark. It is amusing, I must say, to see a far-left East Coast city government like New York’s take this course: traditionally it has been conservatives and their church-going contingent in Middle America who have advocated radical steps to”save the children.” “A pool table, don’t you understand?”

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Last Chance January Open Forum

January is always slow around these parts thanks to holiday hangovers, but January 2024 was especially quiet. I have no idea why; it was certainly full of ethics news, and I know (by looking at my backed-up inventory) that I didn’t cover everything I should have.

This is the last chance to salvage the month’s honor and send us into February with some momentum.

So belly up to the bar….

Mutual Assured Destruction in Arizona

At least I hope so.

What’s going on here?From my perch, I see two Arizona politicians I wouldn’t trust to take out the trash setting each other’s career on fire. And, with any luck, both will burn to the ground.

The chairman of Arizona’s Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned this week a day after The Daily Mail released a 10-minute recording of his conversation with Kari Lake, the recent losing GOP candidate for Arizona governor, seemingly offering her a bribe to drop her plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024.

The recording reveals Jeff DeWit, the state party chair, telling Lake that there are “very powerful people that want to keep you out” of the race. He says they told him to ask her if “there any companies out there or something that could just put her on the payroll and give her — to keep her out?” DeWit repeatedly urges Lake not to repeat what he is saying to anyone, and asks, “Is there a number at which — ” before Ms. Lake interrupts, saying “I can be bought?” “Not be bought,” he answers, just, you know, wait a few years before running. She sounds offended by the offer. “That’s immoral — I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” she says on the recording. DeWit persists: “I actually just wish you’d give me a counteroffer that’s big. Lake answers: “I can’t be bought.”

Holy cow, as Phil Rizzuto used to say.

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NOW Will You Sign My Petition?

I got a lot of eye-rolling, real and metaphorical, after I announced my petition aimed at persuading the Harvard Corporation to address the university’s credibility problem in the wake of the Claudine Gay scandal by offering the Harvard presidency to Barack Obama. As far as I can tell, I was among first to make the suggestion in print.

Today the New York Post reports, “Last week the Harvard presidency job was offered to Obama. He deferred the suggestion. Didn’t outright reject. Deferred.”

My Change.org petition pretty much died on the vine last week. Maybe a surge of support could tilt O toward Cambridge and give him something to do besides operating a shadow third term in the White House.

See? I’m smart! Not like everybody says, dumb! ….

On Re-Making Classic Films, Hubris, and Race for Race’s Sake

Here is news you have all been waiting for, I’m sure. Kenya Barris, the black film and television writer, producer and director, is best known as the creator of the ABC sitcom black-ish as well as for writing or directing a number of mediocre-to-terrible movies like “You People,” “Coming 2 America,” and the “updated” versions of “Shaft,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” “The Witches,” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Now he has announced that he will be writing and directing new versions of “The Wizard of Oz” and “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

In a recent interview Barris revealed that his screenplay for “The Wizard of Oz” is completed, with the new Dorothy being black and not in Kansas any more, but rather a girl who lives in the Bottoms, a huge apartment complex located in Inglewood, California. “The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ took place during the Great Depression and it was about self-reliance and what people were going through,” Barris said. “I think this is the perfect time to switch the characters and talk about what someone imagines their life could be. It’s ultimately a hero’s journey, someone thinks something’s better than where they’re at, and they go and realize that where they’re at is where they should be. I want people to be proud and happy about where they’re from. But I want the world to take a look at it and I hope that will come through.” 

I’m so excited.

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In Case You Were Laboring Under The Delusion That Conservatives Are Any Less Inclined To Approve Unfair Attacks On Donald Trump…They Aren’t

The majority of the conservative pundits writing at conservative opinion juggernaut PJ Media are not Trump fans, though they of course will support him over Joe and his aspiring totalitarian party. One would think that the cheap tactics and strategies of misleading the public with assorted Big Lies used by the Left against Trump from at least 2015 on would be anathema to this group, and one would be tragically wrong.

For example, here is often amusing and occasionally trenchant columnist Stephen Kruiser bemoaning the failure of Ron DeSantis to gather any momentum in the primaries, and second guessing his approach:

Ron DeSantis became Public Enemy Number One-and-a-Half (after Trump, of course) largely because of the brilliant way he handled Florida’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He essentially gave the finger to Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and every other egomaniacal bureaucratic tyrant.

DeSantis’s handling of COVID was his — I have to say it — trump card in his effort to catch Trump. It was Trump who weaponized Fauci, no matter how much he and the MAGA faithful deny it. That alone should have been mentioned by the DeSantis campaign as often as possible.

What DeSantis needed to do was ignore Haley, Vivek, and the rest of the Island of Misfit Republicans and hammer Trump on COVID. I’m pretty sure that’s what Trump and his people thought DeSantis would do because Trump and his online army were rewriting the history of his and DeSantis’s COVID responses from the moment the governor got into the race…

I am not at all positing that DeSantis would have fared better had he gone with a COVID-centric strategy; I’m saying that it was his only real shot.

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