A nice but naive (and Democrat) Facebook Friend posted the cover above, which Time says is slated for November, writing, “This is how you get to be an “enemy of the people” and musing that the motive behind Time publishing such an unflattering image was “puzzling.” Bless his heart! The motive isn’t puzzling at all, and it is why Time and the rest of the Axis propagandists are “enemies of the people.” Even after this President’s unequivocal triumph in getting Israel and Gaza to agree on something at least resembling a peace treaty, TIME had to find a way to slap at Trump in the process of reporting it.

The photo is ugly and makes Trump look ugly. It emphasizes age, and doesn’t even look like him. An equivalent photograph of Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, capturing every sag, wattle and wrinkle, would be condemned as sexist. Deliberately using unflattering photos is one of the oldest and most juvenile of media bias techniques. Regular readers here may recall the Ethics Alarms mea culpa for using so many terrible photos of Hillary Clinton, who had a lot of them…

and my pledge to stop doing it, which I did (until just now). The only President who approached Trump in having his worst looks gleefully circulated by the press was Richard Nixon, and even he never was subjected to a cover shot like that.

Naturally, the President, who cannot control himself—not a good quality in a President—and apparently has never heard of the Streisand Effect had to complain about the cover on Truth Social, guaranteeing that the headlines will be about Trump’s vanity, making certain that 10 times more people see the thing, and letting the despicable TIME editors pat themselves on their backs for a cover that will, at least briefly, make the dying magazine relevant again.

The cover is mean-spirited, unfair, disrespectful, and indefensible, except to Trump-Haters who will react by saying that he deserves it.

Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Pete Davidson, Whitney Cummings, Bill Burr and other popular U.S. stand-up stars accepted large fees to fly to Saudi Arabia and make people laugh at the first Riyadh Comedy Festival. The organizers claimed it was the largest comedy festival in the world, which it may well have been with over 50 international comedians performing stand-up, sketch, and improv.

The Saudi government paid for the event as a part of an effort to increase investment in the local economy and to improve their global image, which is, as you probably know, less than sterling. Other performers such as Marc Maron (funny) and David Cross (bitter asshole) attacked their colleagues for accepting “dirty money,” performing for ‘bad people”—you know, like anyone who performed at President Trump’s inaugural balls—and putting “a fun face on their [Saudi Arabia’s] crimes against humanity.”

Then there is the perceived hypocrisy, since many of the comedians who attended the festival have complained in the past about risking being “cancelled” for touching on unpopular topics in their routines. A Saudi is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for tweeting jokes about the Saudi government. The comics participating in the festival had to agree to certain restrictions on their content as part of their 7 figure contracts.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Did the comedians do anything unethical by appearing at the festival?

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You can find the poll, released last week, here. The charts are easier to read there.

I know: polls. This one, however, has special significance since it comes through Harvard, currently fighting Trump’s efforts to hold it accountable for its toxic influence on education, politics, its students, the culture, and more.

Is the poll tainted with bias? Of course it is. For example, I found it fascinating that in the chart above revealing how popular various Trump policies are with the general public, the pollsters neglected to ask whether the public approved of elite institutions like Harvard being pressured to stop discriminating against conservatives, whites, and men. A related omission: eliminating DEI. How could they ignore that one?

Nonetheless, the chart above, relatively buried at page 23 so it could be preceded by data showing how unpopular Trump is and how the majority of the public thinks the U.S. is off course, is the most important revelation in the poll. It shows that almost all of the Trump Administration’s policies are favored by the public, in most cases by a large majority. Only so-called Medicaid “cuts” are substantially disfavored, one of many areas where the biased news media has (and continues to) mislead the public.

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Actor-comic Patton Osawalt is multi-talented, intelligent, and gives hope to all the homunculi in the world by being happily married to former teen heart-throb Meredith Salenger (above). But he is a smart-ass and an arrogant progressive. In his stand-up comedy Oswalt is like Janine Garafalo, David Cross or Bill Maher, half-clown and half political and social propagandist, relying on the demographics and biases of his audiences to get away with all sorts of dubious assertions.

In a a riff I just heard on one of Sirius-XM’s comedy channels. Oswalt argued that being “woke” is a short-lived virtue. Inevitably, he said, you are not sufficiently woke because “progress” always makes what was once virtuous and ideal no longer good enough. In other words, today’s progressives are doomed to become tomorrow’s stick-in-the-mud conservatives, because “progress” always pulls to the Left.

What Oswalt was saying is what today’s militant, doctrinaire, Orwellian progressives believe: all of their radical left agenda is “progress,” as in a boon to society and the human race. It is the duty of today’s woke to get with the program and support the next “advance,” whatever it is, because if the Left advocates it, it must be right. Critical thought is not required.

What arrogance! hose of us who are not brain-washed, knee-jerk followers or ideologues know better. Often what the Left sees as “progress” (“We’re on the right side of history!”) is really a terrible idea that their mob has been steam-rolled into supporting on faith. Coming up with a list, an incomplete one, is pretty easy:

• De-incarceration
• Open borders
• Banning firearms
• “Good” discrimination (DEI)
• Critical race theory
• Encouraging gender “transitioning” before puberty
• Procreation without marriage
• De-emphasizing discipline and attendance in the schools
• Recreational drug legalization
• Advocacy journalism
• Unregulated abortion.

That took me 38 seconds, and would have taken less if I could type.

There are many more proven bad ideas belonging on the list, including the failures of such “progress” as Communism, once flirted with (or more) by American intellectuals (Jack London, Dalton Trumbo, Roscoe Pound) and artists, and today by an increasing number of “Democratic-Socialists.” A group that is incapable of honest self-evaluation and unable to recognize its own mistakes and flaws is untrustworthy. In Patton Oswalt’s arrogant version of “woke,” the Left’s agenda is always right, always progress, by definition.

How can a democracy function with so many people who think that way?

Isn’t it nice to hear The Cowsills again? I know, I don’t think so either. Other than that sappy song and being the inspiration for “The Partridge Family” (which gave us Danny Bonaduce as well as the late, lamented David Cassidy), the group’s major contribution to culture was probably their rendition of the “Love American Style” theme song.

Let me begin with the parks: on the various news channels I kept hearing how the government shut-down was really beginning to hurt the general public because National Parks are closing and tourist attractions in D.C. have reduced hours. Talk about wealthy, privileged nation problems! Wow.

Meanwhile…

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