(I know that’s not a very holiday-cheery graphic, but it’s how this Jack feels—like Jack Nicholson playing Frozen Jack Torrance in “The Shining”—after walking Spuds this chilly morning…)

A few notes before we start in earnest…

• Relatively few lawyers in the D.C. area (that I have talked with on the topic)seem to think Rudy Giuliani either should be disbarred or will be for, in the over-heated words of the D.C. Bar’s ethics prosecutor, “weaponizing his bar license.” Those who do see doom for Rudy seem to be in the  group of  hyper-partisan lawyers (bias makes you stupid!) who want to make it impossible for Donald Trump to get effective legal representation, which allies the attack on old Rudy with the recent referral to the Justice Department for prosecution of the former President from a transparently partisan “Get Trump!” investigation in the House.
• Ed Larson, the Pulitzer-winning historian who collaborated with me on “The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow” (a great Christmas gift!) has just written a new book, “American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation.” It promises to be excellent, and a scholarly as well as fascinating tonic for “1619 Project” nonsense.
• An unscientific survey: based on lawn decorations in Alexandria, Virginia, secular Christmas has now completely obliterated the religious holiday, and we have returned to the holiday’s pagan origins. I’ve been counting: inflatables of Will Farrell in “Elf” (8 to 1) and Chevy Chase being electrocuted in “Christmas Vacation” (4-1)  outnumber any references to Jesus’s birth…indeed, a single, lonely creche is the only hint of that event among over a hundred homes in my neighborhood. Snowmen dominate the lawn genre completely here. Back in my Arlington, Massachusetts days, it was common to see multiple manger scenes on every street and road.

1. Diversity follies…The Washington Post completely beclowned itself by allowing academic race-hustler Erika Edwards to author an op-ed titled “Why doesn’t Argentina have more Black players in the World Cup?” Apart from the obvious and correct answer, “Because the players the team has are the best players, and you don’t choose athletic team squads via affirmative action,” there is also the fact that the percentage of African-Argentinians in the country is 0.37%. Never mind: the Post allowed Edwards to imply the country was racially biased against blacks anyway. Said critic Ignacio Manuel García Medina,

Why is Argentina’s national team any more racist for not having any black players than Japan’s national team for having only Asians? Why is not Cameroon’s team racist for not having any whites, Latinos or Asians? The answer seems obvious: because The Washington Post is only interested in bombarding us with the white supremacist narrative that the left loves and exploits so much.The Washington Post‘s ridiculous article would prove that those who boast most about respect and tolerance for other cultures are actually the ones who look down on others. The readers of The Washington Post deserve much more than articles that pretend to be well-documented but think that soccer teams and countries should be like a Netflix movie.

Yup!

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I type this with scratches on my wrists. Let’s see: my Christmas tree lighting saga began yesterday when I discovered that almost half of the thousand plus lights  I tested and put away a year ago went dead for no apparent reason. A wild hunt to five stores revealed a run on multi-colored lights all over Alexandria, and the terrible news that the Old Town Alexandria landmark “The Christmas Attic” had closed its doors, so my hope of purchasing some unique colored lights as I have in the past was foiled, perhaps forever. Today, having eventually found some barely acceptable replacements for the dead strings, I discovered that my lovely 9 ft. Fasier fir was one of those perverse trees with dense branches growing sideways, Then the first string I hung, in the middle of the tree, stopped working after several more had covered it, and the hunt for the loose connection, ultimately successful, scarred my arms for life. I’m writing this post to calm down; I have several hours of pain and frustration ahead of me.

Mel Torme left all of that out of his song….

In the midst of all this, a Trump Deranged commenter whom I had passed through moderation called me a “Maga propaganda” channeling “hack” because I use the term Wuhan virus” to describe the destructive pathogen that originated in the Wuhan province in China. I have explained in detail why Ethics Alarms does this: the short justification is that I am nobody’s political correctness monkey, facts aren’t racist, and the Left’s campaign to eliminate Wuhan virus from the lexicon was in great part a feature of the ongoing effort to cast President Trump as a racist based on nothing at all.

I also, I hope you notice, refuse to capitalize the b in “black” (and the w in “white”) just because a white-guilt-predator activist committee somewhere decided that was a hoop good little antiracists had to jump through. This is exactly the same principle behind my refusal to let anyone dictate that I use their pronouns if I doubt their accuracy and the individual has done nothing to justify my trust and  good will.

1. Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder, and Jim Abbott, the one handed pitcher, applaud (figuratively)…  Hansel Emmanuel,  a 6-foot-6 freshman guard on the  Northwestern State basketball team, dribbled between two defenders to deliver “a thunderous dunk” in a 91-73 win over Louisiana-Monroe. It was his first basket of the season. Emmanuel has only one arm. See?

Emmanuel,  19,  lost his left arm just below his shoulder in a childhood accident. He ended the game scoring five points with two rebounds in eight minutes. After the game, Emmanuel said, “I know my family was proud. I had to keep working. You can’t give up.” Continue reading →

I confess: I find the reports of the recent hearing before the D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility bizarre, the intensity of the prosecutor ,Hamilton “Phil” Fox III of the  Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel surprising, and demand that Giuliani be disbarred surprising. I am limited as to what I can discern from these reports, and to some extent it’s my own fault: until now, I was not aware that such hearings were streamed online, so I could have watched this inquiry live two weeks ago. I can’t now, because one can only watch the broadcasts live; they are erased after they are completed. Good to know, but it’s too late for me to make a first hand analysis.

Among other things that confuse me is why the Washington Post assigned a non-lawyer (and definitely a non legal ethics specialist) to cover the hearing and write the story. That explains the infuriating vagueness of the reporting, as in the repeated explanation that Giuliani is being accused of “misusing his law license.” I know the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct pretty well, as I’ve taught it for over 25 years: “Misusing a law license” doesn’t appear there. Nowhere, including in the Post, can I find the specific rule or rules that the former New York City mayor and prosecutor allegedly violated. There has to be a rule. In New York, Giuliani’s license was suspended on a court’s determination that he  made “demonstrably false and misleading” statements that widespread voter fraud undermined the 2022 election.

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What a failure today has been, and all I was absolutely determined to accomplish was getting the lights on the tree…

1. NOW he’s figured it out..Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, weenie that he may be, has now figured out how Twitter should operate. He has penned an interesting piece full of regrets and second thoughts, containing these proposed core Twitter principles for the future. He begins his reflections,

There’s a lot of conversation around the #TwitterFiles. Here’s my take, and thoughts on how to fix the issues identified. 

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead:

1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control.
2. Only the original author may remove content they produce.
3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.

The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone….

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