U.S. Society

The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Jumps The Rails In Tennessee

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It’s understandable that people of good will lose their minds, perspective and good judgment over the emotion-packed problem of school shootings, but someone has to stay rational and ethical. It might as well be me.

There are three major public affairs sagas currently occupying the media’s efforts and the public’s mayfly-like attention: Donald Trump’s indictment, Clarence Thomas’s betrayal of his sacred obligation as a Supreme Court justice, and the messy aftermath of the latest school shooting, this one by a transsexual with a history of mental health issues. The first is the culmination of one of our most long and continually-running ethics train wrecks. The second is a dangerous, Titanic-leval gash in the side of an American institution crucial to the survival of our democracy. The third is arguably more noise and angst than substance, but a more spectacular example of the ethics train wreck phenomenon that either of the other two. As the genre requires, everyone boarding the thing is acting unethically, including the journalists covering it.

I am going to, for once, only lightly touch on the mainstream media’s unethical handling of the shooting and the reactions to it by pointing out this: The New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad reported last week that CBS News ordered its staffers to avoid “any mention” that Tennessee school shooter Audrey Hale was a transgender individual. The apparent theory is that doing so will undermine the cause of transgender activists, so the news must be scrubbed to advance the greater good, or something.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

After the tragedy, the mindless took over. There has been a powerful, passionate anti-gun movement in the U.S. for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, it was handguns that the activists wanted to ban. Now it is semi-automatic weapons. The immovable object then and now was the Second Amendment; it just isn’t going anywhere, and that increasingly drives gun-haters crazy with frustration, as banging one’s head against a steel wall will do. This became a full-fledged ethics train wreck in 2012, when a mentally-ill 20 year-old man, Adam Lanza, stole his mother’s guns and attacked the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, murdering 26 people, twenty of them children between six and seven years old. It was a previously unimaginable act of pure evil, and it propelled the anti-gun crusade into hyperdrive by adding the pure emotion of the “Think of the children!” rationalization (#58) to what was already a witches brew of propaganda, bad facts, bad civic literacy, historical and cultural ignorance, hysteria, incompetent ethical analysis and cynical partisan exploitation. In the intervening 20 years, every active shooter on a college campus or in a school has set off another intense outburst of the vile “Second amendment supporters care more about guns than the lives of our children!” mantra. (more about that shortly.)

On March 30, Democratic state representatives Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson joined demonstrators in the statehouse who disrupted the legislature with a boisterous protest to demand “stricter gun control laws,” despite there being no evidence at all that any such measures would have prevented Hale’s rampage. The three House members assisted in the disruption in the chamber, even leading chants of the ever-popular “No Justice, No Peace!” through a bullhorn. Jones held up fatuous a sign that read “Protect kids, not guns.”

Continue reading →

The Complete List Of Rationalizations To Excuse Justice Thomas’ Gross Betrayal Of Judicial Ethics, And Other Updates (Part II)

/ Jack Marshall / 72 Comments

There are three matters I intended to include in Part I, but somehow failed:

1. Thomas’s wife, the hard right activist Ginni, is more of a toxic influence on Clarence that I had thought or hoped. It still doesn’t justify the Justice being accused of a conflict: as a society we simply cannot embrace the idea that husbands are responsible for the activities of their wives or vice-versa. However, Ginni’s fingerprints seem all over this mess.

2. To be clear: assuming Thomas was legally obligated to report the benefits of the vacations that did not meet the statuary exceptions for hospitality, that would not be legitimate reason to remove him. Far more serious, and in my view why he should resign, is whom he took the vacations with, as well as who paid for them. Those details are what raise the appearance of impropriety, and it is that, not the technical failure to report, that makes his conduct unforgivable in a Supreme Court Justice.

3. When the next Gallup poll regarding public trust in institutions and professions rolls around this winter, and SCOTUS, once the branch of the government held in the highest regard by the public, again sinks, Thomas will be a major reason. And if I am polled, I will vote with the disillusioned.

Now on to the rationalizations. Not only have I been dismayed at how many pundits, conservative commentators an Ethics Alarms readers have rushed to defend Justice Thomas when there really is no defense for his conduct, but it is also disturbing that none of these have produced an argument that isn’t transparently contrived. The following rationalizations on the Ethics Alarms list seem to encompass the entire thrust of the “Thomas shouldn’t resign” briefs. How depressing. Here they are, with some brief comments:

Continue reading →

Pretending History Didn’t Happen Because You Wish It Had Been Different

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s a photo from the popular Canadian TV series “Slasher: Ripper,” which just began its 5th season. The actor is Gabriel Darku who, as you can see, is a black performer, but for some reason is playing a rising Toronto police detective in an integrated police department in the late 19th Century. There were no rising black police detectives in the late 19th Century, and certainly not with that hair-style. Even more remarkable is another character in the series, a black, female surgeon and medical examiner.

Of course, the race issue never comes up in conversation: race doesn’t exist, apparently. The show, like so many others, is set in a universe where racial bias, caste systems and discrimination doesn’t exist. I’m only picking on “Slasher: Ripper” because I happened upon it last night (the show also has a “non-binary” female in male garb character whom everyone treats as no different from anyone else). There are a lot of period shows that engage in this fantasy. Another is Netflix’s “Enola Holmes.”

Let me say without hesitation: I don’t care. I know this is all part of the effort to make more acting opportunities for minority actors (and fewer for white actors) in pursuit of fairness, diversity, and inclusion, yada yada. OK: as always, my position as a a critic, director and ethicist is that as long as such non-traditional casting works, and doesn’t diminish the entertainment value or become a distraction to most audience members, go crazy, man! I don’t find Darku so extraordinary an actor that his ahistorical casting seems justifiable in artistic terms—I find him rather wooden and boring—but that’s just me. However…

Continue reading →

The Complete List Of Rationalizations To Excuse Justice Thomas’ Gross Betrayal Of Judicial Ethics, And Other Updates (Part I) [Revised and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Just in case you’re wondering, I stand by everything in my previous post about Justice Thomas’s unprecedented breach of judicial ethics and his obligations as a Supreme Court justice, except my belief that Thomas would resign, or be forced to. Not for the first time, I badly over-estimated the integrity of a public servant. Other points…

1. Above is Thomas’s statement this morning regarding the ProPublica report that he has been accepting lavish trips from conservative donor and billionaire Harlan Crow for decades. It is garbage, top to bottom:

  • The fact that the Thomases and the Crows are good friends or old friends is irrelevant, and is no defense.  Of course SCOTUS justices can have friends, and can socialize. However, many of the vacations the Crows took Clarence an Ginni on included other politically interested conservatives, who has access to Justice Thomas and an opportunity to pursue their interests with him as a captive audience. Moreover, one reason such situations suggest impropriety is the Cognitive Dissonance scale: gifts tend to raise the giver and what the giver is linked to on the scale of the receiver. This is why legislators and government employees are limited by laws in what kinds of gifts they receive. The legal ethics rules also caution against accepting expensive gifts from clients, because it might interfere with independent judgment, even though lawyers are supposed to already be on their clients’ sides.
  • “Family trips” is deceit. More than just the Crow family went on these trips. Thomas is obfuscating.
  • What “colleagues”? When was “early in his tenure”? Thomas joined the Court in 1991, well before the vacations with the Crows began. Are we supposed to believe he asked about gifts and junkets like these before they were offered? By colleagues, does he mean other justices? “I once asked somebody and they said it was okay” is a particularly unconvincing justification. 
  • Our first unethical rationalization, and it’s a lulu:#4 Marion Barry’s Misdirection, or “If it isn’t illegal, it’s ethical.” Thomas is saying that because no official standards prohibited what he did until recently, what he did was okay. Wrong! Rules, laws and standards don’t make unethical conduct wrong, ethical principles do. Thomas knew that the vacations violated well-accepted and near-universal principles of judicial ethics. He was and is a judge, and judges must avoid the appearance of impropriety and influence. For a Supreme Court justice to invoke the same corrupt logic as D.C.’s rogue mayor is disgusting and depressing.
  • It is false to say that the trips were not “reportable.” Of course they were reportable: Thomas deliberately chose not to report them.

Continue reading →

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” ABC Blotting Out Trump’s Text Number Sign Was Just A “Misunderstanding”….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Sure.

The broadcast of ABC’s “Good Morning America” chose to blur out the portion of Donald Trump’s podium that showed a number for supporters to contact and donate to the former president’s 2024 campaign as he was condemning his indictment by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.

The number on the podium was also blurred out in a video of the segment on the show’s Twitter account and in a video on the network’s YouTube account.

Nice. But it’s all right, because ABC sources explained to the partisan “Daily Beast” that the blurred podium was attributable to a “misunderstanding.” As in “our Democrat and Trump-Deranged employees didn’t understand that they aren’t supposed to openly sabotage politicians they don’t support so obviously”? That must be it.

Then the Beast—boy, it has descended into complete leftist propaganda now—quickly pivoted to “Republicans pounce!” mode:

Continue reading →

Ethics Verdict: Justice Clarence Thomas Must Resign. Immediately. [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 85 Comments

There is no way to get around this, to rationalize it or to look the other way. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice on the court and the cornerstone of the current 6-3 conservative majority, must resign from the Court now. Today. There may be a route to impeaching him, but it is dubious and unlikely to succeed in removal.

I had just returned yesterday from giving a presentation to non-profit lawyers on professionalism, lawyers’ duty to do more than just avoid violating the ethics rules, but to comport themselves in a manner that bolsters the public’s trust in the profession. Judges at all levels have the same obligation. When I finally returned to my office and had the time and inclination to catch up on ethics developments, I encountered the news that Justice Thomas not only had breached that obligation in a stunning and unforgivable manner, but has been doings so for more than 20 years.

ProPublica, whose mission is “To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing,” revealed that its investigation into Thomas’s longtime friendship with billionaire conservative donor Harlan Crow had revealed that he and his wife Ginni (a conservative activist) have taken yearly luxury vacations paid for by Crowe as the mogul’s guests. Thomas has also failed to report them.

Continue reading →

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”: Ethics Reflections On Chicago’s Mayoral Election

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Having just rejected a hard-left Democratic mayor whose leadership and policies left the city of Chicago in the midst of crises in its schools and on the streets, the besieged city’s voters took stock, thought hard, and elected a new mayor who promises more of the same. Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, squeaked out a victory over Paul Vallas, a former Chicago Public Schools CEO. This indicates mass incompetence and ignorance by the city’s electorate, as well as apathy and a flat learning curve.

Let’s begin with the fact that Johnson, who advocates raising taxes (on “the rich,” of course) didn’t deliver on many of his own financial obligations. He finally had to pay up once he was elected, because Chicago has a law blocking deadbeats from taking office. Before that, however, he owed $3,357 in water and sewer bills as well as$1,044 in unpaid traffic tickets dating back to 2014 and 2015. Johnson’s campaign’s official rationalization for this was essentially the ever-popular “Everybody does it”:

“Like many working and middle class Chicagoans, the Johnson household has received various fines and fees from the City of Chicago over the years. These fines and fees are on a previously established payment plan and are on schedule to be fully resolved before Brandon Johnson takes office as our next mayor.”

But the mayor of the city is not like other citizens. He (or she) is supposed to be an exemplary citizen, and one who can lead by example. Johnson, obviously, can’t. The new Mayor-Elect also defaulted on a Capital One credit card debt of more than $3,600 in 2016. Chicago, meanwhile, is in the midst of its own fiscal problems. Choosing a guy with Johnson’s cavalier attitude toward financial obligations is pure incompetence.

Continue reading →

“Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich,” Continued: Prof. Turley Weighs In, Among Others

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

I’ve been looking for commentary by legal and ethics experts I trust that defend Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump, now that the thing is in black and white. (Speaking of White: old Popehat blogger Ken White was one of the first I checked. The former Ethics Alarms Award-winner as best ethics blogger has so far avoided the topic, I suspect because he regards explaining why an indictment of someone he obviously detests is a lot of hooey with the same eagerness he applies to having sex with a horseshoe crab.) In the earlier post today, Ethics Alarms looked at Andrew McCarthy’s analysis, which was searing in its contempt for Bragg’s efforts. Later, I discovered that one of the Washington Post’s worst knee-jerk progressive members of its editorial board, Ruth Marcus, wrote,

…the indictment unsealed on Tuesday is disturbingly unilluminating, and the theory on which it rests is debatable at best, unnervingly flimsy at worst.That is a scary situation when it comes to the first criminal charges ever lodged against a former president.

Then she almost immediately demonstrated why I hold her in such contempt by adding,

I’m not saying prosecutors will lose this case. They could well win, and I hope they do, because a failure to secure a conviction will only inflame Trump and his supporters in their claims that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them.

Got that? She hopes Bragg wins a bad case and Trump is convicted because Trump and his supporters will have evidence to support the “claim” that the criminal justice system is being weaponized against them. Somebody explain to Marcus, a lawyer, though it always astonished me that she is, that ethical lawyers don’t want defendants to be convicted on bogus charges no matter who they are.

Continue reading →

New Rule! Only White, Straight Men Need To Be Civil

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Last week, a looming $30 million budget shortfall prompted NPR to eliminate 10% of its staff across all its departments.  It killed several podcasts and so far, 84 employees are gone; more will follow.

One of the podcasts sent into the archives was “Louder Than A Riot,” which explored how hip-hop’s “Black women and queer folk have dealt with the same oppression [hip-hop] was built to escape.” So after getting the bad news, “Louder Than A Riot’s” staff took to Twitter and accused NPR of bias in its layoff decisions:

What support for that did the angry staff have? Oh, none. But NPR is a nest of progressives who don’t believe in ethics, so playing the discrimination card was a reflex, and Facts Don’t Matter. As it turned out, NPR did engage in discrimination, but the “good’ kind:  the layoffs had been  “structured in a way” so they would not disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. In other words, skin color and sexual proclivities were used to decide who to fire, and being white and non-LGTBQ was held against employees.

That’s unethical.

Also illegal.

Also “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” exemplified. Continue reading →

Apparently Donald Trump Is A Ham Sandwich [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

Of course, we’ve known for decades that the man was a ham. Yesterday, however, unethical prosecutor Alvin Bragg provided decisive evidence that the former POTUS is also a ham sandwich, with an abusive grand jury indictment that perfectly embodied the old saw (first coined by former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Sol Wachtler) that district attorneys could get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.”

When the breathlessly anticipated indictment finally came down from the grand jury (here is the indictment), it fulfilled the worst predictions of critics.

“Oh, we have to wait to see the indictment” was the mantra from Bragg’s defenders, and that was sort-of true. However, we already knew that this was a bad case: the statute of limitations has lapsed, Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce federal law, the act of paying for a non-disclosure is not a crime, the claim that the pay-off was really a campaign contribution is based on circumstantial evidence at best, the key witness is Michael Cohen, one of the sleaziest lawyers in the professions long line of sleazy lawyers and convicted perjeror, and both the Justice Department and Bragg himself had already decided it was too weak to prosecute, at least to prosecute ethically. Moreover, Bragg’s “statement of facts” before the indictment (which you can read here), made the case sound just as weak as many suspected it was.

When we learned that there were 34 counts, we thought, or at least I did, “Wow! Bragg must have a lot more to pin on Trump than Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen!”

Uh, no.

Continue reading →