Did you know that President Trump was an authoritarian, abused his power and violated the Constitution?

Nothing Trump did in office was as clearly, obviously and intentionally a direct violation of the Constitution’s limits on Presidential power as what President Barack Obama did in 2012 when he could not get Congress to pass a law allowing so-called “Dreamers” to stay in the United States. He used an Executive Order to establish the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program despite saying himself (remember, Obama is supposedly a Constitutional Law scholar) that he didn’t have power to do it.

That was the exact moment when I concluded that Obama was not only a weak and feckless President, but an arrogant and dangerous one.

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It has been raining for five days straight here.

But never mind: what matters is that October 5th marks the date in 2017 when the New York Times blew the whistle on Hollywood mega-producer and major Clinton money source Harvey Weinstein, setting in motion all sorts of cultural. legal, political and societal forces no one could have predicted, as well as providing many depressing ethics lessons. For example, virtually everyone who pretended horror at Weinstein’s predations knew about what he was doing long before, but said and did nothing, and yes, this almost certainly included powerful Democrats as well as alleged Hollywood feminists. Yecchh. The sudden awareness of sexual harassment in high places—as if Bill Clinton hadn’t been enough to make it obvious—was quickly weaponized to take down powerful men in business, the arts, news media, politics and more, some deservedly (Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer…) some not so much (Al Franken). The Weinstein movements #MeToo and Time’s Up also catalyzed the effort to smear Brett Kavanaugh out of his Supreme Court nomination, though they went oddly mute when Joe Biden was accused of doing privately the kind of thing he had been photographed doing to hapless girls and women for years. How and why this happened was neatly illustrated when the co-founder and COB of “Time’s Up” was revealed to have helped Andrew Cuomo discredit his multiple sexual harassment accusers.

Despite its ugly partisanship, hypocrisy and cynicism, the Harvey Weinstein Ethics Train Wreck, documented here, has still had its salutary effects. Bill Clinton’s reign as a Democratic rock star finally ended. Woody Allen was at last shunned in Hollywood. 

Best of all, the double standards and empty virtue-signaling of feminists and progressives were impossible to miss. Good.

1. Remember, Karine Jean-Pierre, the President’s paid liar, says that “If you are not with where the majority of Americans are, that is extreme.” A new poll by the Trafalgar Group, taken September 17-20 and including more than 1,000 likely 2022 election voters, showed that 1.4% of voters “believe eliminating gas-powered cars and moving to electric vehicles is the best solution.” Just thought it was worth mentioning…Speaking of Karine, it has been fascinating watching her claim that when the still-high gasoline prices edge down, it is President Biden’s brilliant work paying off, but when it goes up, it’s everybody else’s fault. Now gas is going up again, and OPEC has voted to cut production, probably meaning that it will start rising sharply. Ultimately, her re-flip-flop will pose another “Just how gullible is the American public?” test. The results of the earlier ones have not been encouraging. Continue reading →

Icky, unethical, or just remarkable devotion to an agenda? Whatever it is, I’m sort of impressed. When most people say, “I’ll piss on your grave!” they are just indulging in wishful thinking.

Dean Eichler, 68, of Bergenfield, N.J. was finally secretly recorded on video pulling into the Tappan Reformed Church Cemetery in his SUV for his daily ritual. As he leaves the motor running, Eichner slowly walks towards Linda Torello’s grave while unzipping his fly. Eichner urinates vigorously on her final resting place, then returns to his SUV and drives away.

43-year-old Michael Murphy used hidden cameras to catch the performance after finding traces of urine along with plastic bags with feces whenever he visited his mother’s grave in Orangetown, New York. The elderly man visits almost every day at around 6:00 am. He is, as you might guess, Linda’s ex-husband whom she divorced 48 years ago. Michael got permission to set up the cameras; apparently this ritual has been going on for a long, long time. Interestingly a woman, assumed to be Eichner’s spouse, accompanies him on his morning visits.

Murphy says that his mother’s brief marriage to the guy ended when she became pregnant and he didn’t want to be a father. (There’s got to be more to the story than that!) “How he found my mother’s grave site we are not sure. But this stems back to a problem almost 50 years ago,” Michael wrote on Facebook. He says the family has had no contact with him since 1976.

Police say there is nothing they can (or will) do about routine grave-pissing, but Linda Torello’s son is trying to determine if a complaint for grave desecration will prompt some action.

You know, the late Stephen Sondheim could have written a musical about this.

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Pointer: Oddity Central

Which of the ethics developments below will explode into genuinely significant historical and cultural developments? You never know. On this date in 1910, A violent explosion destroyed the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 and injuring many more. The paper’s publisher Harrison Otis was a fanatic opponent of organized labor, then just beginning to get really organized, and when two union leaders, the McNamara bothers, were arrested as the likely bombers, the paper went into a major push to convince the public that they, and all unions, were evil. Organized labor responded by hiring the nation’s most famous defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, to defend the two, certain that they had been framed and that a conviction for murder would destroy the labor movement. Darrow, as he described in his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” quickly discovered that a) the brothers were guilty (though they were not trying to kill anyone) and b) that there was no way they could plead not guilty—what the two union organizations that hired him assumed he would have them do—that wouldn’t result in their executions.

Darrow decided that the only way to handle his conflicting duties to both sets of clients, the unions that were paying his record-setting fee because they were certain that an innocent verdict in the trial was essential to the survival of the labor movement, and the brothers whose lives were on the line, was to get a hung jury….and the only way he could get that was by bribing a couple of jurors.

Darrow ended up being caught red-handed and tried for jury tampering, only escaping prison by being presented by a great defense lawyer—himself. In order to make everyone forget his disgrace, Darrow set out to henceforth only take on high-profile cases that would have him fighting for human rights: every case we associate with Darrow today came after the LA Times bombing trial, which he had intended to be his last before retirement. Amazingly, he did make everyone forget that fiasco, an ethics lesson in which he made fateful call that the ends justify the means. Today, so no lawyer is ever placed in Darrow’s position again, the ethics rules in all jurisdictions hold that a third party paying a lawyer to defend another is not a client no matter how important the result of the trial may be.

1. Nancy Pelosi, ethics villain. More irony: it is astounding that the Democratic Party can get away, even a little bit, with screaming to the heavens that Republicans are a “threat to democracy” when they have allowed an openly unethical,villainous woman like Pelosi to lead their national legislators for so long. Even when her failing mental acuity leads her to reveal her vile character, as it did yesterday, there seem to be no consequences. “We have a shortage of workers in our country and you see even in Florida, some of the farmers and the growers saying why are you shipping these immigrants up north, we need them to pick the crops down here,” Pelosi said, discussing the need for “comprehensive immigration reform” without saying what that would be. She also stuttered a while before deciding wich misleading word to use for “illegal immigrants,” because her party and its allies have so many deceitful ones: “Migrants”? “Undocumented workers?” “Tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? She settled on “immigrants.” Her message–it would be nice if the news media explained it to our lazy, have awake public—was that farmers should be encouraged to pay illegal immigrants paltry wages to avoid paying enough to attract American workers. What an awful, awful human being—and she’s a revered leader of the Democratic Party.

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The post about Aaron Judge’s quest to be the American League’s record-holder for home runs in a season sparked some interesting baseball reflections in the comments, but I fell down on the job: yesterday marked the date in 1941 that Ted Williams became the last of the .400 hitters (whoever wins the AL batting championship this season will probably be under .320). And it’s a real ethics story! Told that his average, just under .400 but with enough past the decimal to be rounded up to the magic number in the record book, Ted was advised by his manager, Joe Cronin, to sit out the doubleheader that would close the season. Williams, in a famous demonstration of integrity (Ted was always an integrity stickler) insisted that he wouldn’t “back in” to a .400 average, and risked a place in history by playing in both games, though they were meaningless in the standings. With the same determination that allowed him to homer, as he had promised, in his final at bat in 1960, Ted got six hits in eight at-bats during the two games in Philadelphia, boosting his average to .406.

1. This is hard to digest: YouTube has demonetized a supercut video of Democrats claiming that Donald Trump’s 2016 victory was “stolen” or not “legitimate,” claiming that it “isn’t suitable for all advertisers” and “as a result, it will continue to run limited or no ads.” In fact, the video is not misleading in any way; it just shows the utter hypocrisy of the current Democratic Party’s condemnation of “election denial.” Here’s the video:

I remember all of this; its real significance is the degree to which Big Tech is determined to cover for the Left’s hypocrisy. Donald Trump’s entire four years in office were crippled by the effort by the “Axis of Unethical Conduct” to paint him as being elected by a diabolical alliance with Russia; it harmed the nation, our democracy, divided the country and directly seeded the current political chaos. These people should be ethically estopped from attacking Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “rigged;” I can, but they can’t. Literally, they started it (and Trump has a better case than the Democrats ever did.)

YouTube election misinformation policies prohibit users from posting “misleading or deceptive content with serious risk of egregious harm” and “content interfering with democratic processes.” Videos that advance “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in certain past certified national elections” as well as “content that claims that the certified results of those elections were false.” That video doesn’t do any of these things. It just properly exposes Google/YouTube’s political allies, who deserve to be exposed.

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Among the other horrible unintended consequences of the destructive response to the Wuhan virus pandemic is that it has made professionals lazy. I just completed my first legal ethics seminar in front of a live out-of-town audience in more than two years, and only my fourth with participants I could look at and talk to in that time. I am told that lawyers like the convenience of getting their Continuing Legal Education credits using Zoom, from the comfort of their homes or offices.

In the program two days ago, for example, ten lawyers attended by coming to the classroom, but over 190 watched remotely.

Well, as our children found out over the past two years of panic and fearmongering, remote learning doesn’t work. I know that many of those seminar attendees out in Zoomland are doing billable work, or playing with their dogs, or otherwise not giving the topic their full attention. Legal ethics is essential for a self-policing profession like the law, and ethics is hard; being an ethical lawyer takes practice. In trainings, that means being tested with tough questioning by the instructor ( that is, me). Now, however, most lawyers want to exert the least effort possible while getting their mandatory credits, meaning that they are not taking their responsibilities seriously. Many will suffer for this. More importantly, clients will suffer.

In this vein, I praised the attorneys who eschewed Zoom the past two days, and told them that I would reward each them of the with a gratis hour’s worth of ethics consultation over the next twelve months. I charge $390 an hour, so if the time is used, it will more than cover their fee for the seminar.

I then learned that two of the Zoom attendees complained bitterly to the state sponsors. They hadn’t known that I would be handing out that bonus, they said; if they had, they said they would have come in person too. There’s a flaw in this reasoning: I don’t receive the fees for the session, and the sponsoring group wasn’t giving out the free hours. It was a spontaneous gesture on my part.

Nonetheless, I agreed to let the sponsor tell the angry Zoomers that they could have a free hour too, even though they hadn’t earned it.