This is the life I have chosen: I just was hit with a $400 charge (350 euro) for mistakenly using a licensed image last year that—get this—belongs to Germany. With all my posts, its only the second time this has happened: my practice is to apologize, take the graphic down, and pay the fine. This is what ethicists do. This one hurts a bit more than the last ($750) charge, just because of the time of year (cash flow is rough) and the confluence of projects. Hey! EA is due for another installment of my mass tort/ non-lawyer partner law firms/ litigation financing scandal report! Watch this space….

1. Weird story of the day: A park ranger at Yosemite was fired for mounting a Pride banner (above) on El Capitan. Of course, NBC, in its report, drips with sympathy for the (trans) woman, whom it insists on calling “they” resulting in a completely confusing report:

“‘I’m devastated,’ said Joslin, who is trans and uses they/them pronouns. “We don’t take our positions in the park service to make money or to have any kind of huge career gains. We take it because we love the places that we work. I have a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, and I could be making a lot more money in Silicon Valley, which is only a few hours away, but I made career choices to position myself in Yosemite National Park, because this is the place that I love the most.’”

Then why did you use your position to make an unauthorized political statement while marring the natural beauty that tourists expect to see in National Parks? More from NBC (them)…

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The President hinted yesterday that he’s planning on using an Executive Order to shut down mail-in balloting. Of course the Axis is going bonkers, although they would probably be going bonkers if Trump said that he wanted to make mail-in balloting universal across America—whatever he says, does or wants to do is by definition evil, you see. Also naturally, the President paired his warning with his usual off-the cuff exaggerations, giving foes wonderful targets for tangential attacks. No, the U.S. isn’t the only nation or even one of just a few nations to use mail-in ballots, as CNN and others were quick to note in “Nyah nyah nyah! He lied again!” fashion, to which my response is “So the Hell what?” Both “everybody does it” and “everybody doesn’t do it” are invalid rationalizations.

The Multiple Sclerosis News Network this morning felt that a strong argument against Trump’s war on mail-in balloting is that he urged voters to use the device to vote for him and Republicans in 2024. Stupid pundits appeal to stupid people: of course he did. That was the system in use: Trump foolishly hamstrung his own campaign by telling Republicans not to vote by mail in 2020. The Axis advocates of insecure elections (all the better to cheat you with!) also say that the fact that Trump won the popular vote in 2024 (by a slim 1.5% margin) proves that he is wrong about mail-in ballots and that the system doesn’t favor Democrats.

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“I am totally convinced that if Russia raised their hands and said, ‘We give up, we concede, we surrender… we will GIVE Ukraine and the great United States of America, the most revered, respected, and powerful of all countries, EVER, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and everything surrounding them for a thousand miles, the Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners would say that this was a bad and humiliating day for Donald J. Trump, one of the worst days in the history of our Country.’ But that’s why they are the FAKE NEWS, and the badly failing Radical Left Democrats. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!”

—President Donald Trump, on his own social media platform, Truth Social

I was thrilled to see this (Thank-you, Ann Althouse, for reading Truth Social so I don’t have to) today because I had already resolved to post about the unconscionable and, in my view, expressly unpatriotic and destructive mindset of the Axis media as well as, of course, the Trump Deranged, to actively root against the elected President of the United States, their own nation, no matter what he does and no matter what his objectives are.

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A few EA readers have reported getting subscription payment requests from WordPress. This is some kind of phishing scam. There is no subscription charge for Ethics Alarms,

The subhead of the New York Times piece with that headline appearing yesterday is “Why the left can’t win without a new Constitution.” I read it yesterday and planned to post about the thing, but, as has been happening too often lately, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness intervened. Now I see that other sources are opining on it.

As regular readers here can guess, my initial reaction was “What a waste of time!” Here we are treated to Osita Nwanevu (above), a radical black Leftist (aka. “nascent totalitarian”) pushing his book, “The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.” Such a book can only appeal to other radical (and deluded) leftists, and it is also a waste of time. The author believes that a new Constitution is mandatory to save what he calls “democracy.” Even if he were right, Nwanevu might as well advocate mass surgery to graft wings onto all human beings, or the replacement of English in the U.S. with Esperanto. The chances of his “reforms” coming to pass are exactly zero. Not 5%, not 1%, but zero, unless one believes that a violent civil war is in the cards. The Constitution isn’t a perfect document, but no one can claim it hasn’t served the U.S. (and the world) extraordinarily well. The Founders, wisely or luckily, made the process of changing it difficult and burdensome, making radical alterations unlikely to the vanishing point.

To its credit, and you know how I hate to write that about the New York Times, the paper did put one of its token conservative pundits, Ross Douthat, in charge of interviewing the author. Douthat reveals himself as a weenie, however, and never challenges Nwanevu as forcefully as the extremist’s nonsense deserves. Observe this section, for example:

Douthat: All right, let’s do an excursion back in time to the American founding, because one of your arguments is that America was not actually intended to be a democracy.

 

Nwanevu: Right.

 

Douthat: That in fact, we should understand our founding almost in terms of a kind of oligarchic coup.Talk a little bit about your view of the founding.

 

Nwanevu: So when you raise some of the objections that I’ve raised about the nature of our system, conservatives will often say: well, we’re a republic, not a democracy. I think liberals, by habit, say: No, no, no, that’s not true — the founders actually intended democracy, but they messed up in 50 million different ways.

 

I think the conservatives have the better side of the argument when you actually look at the historical record. People should understand that the Constitution is forged in a particular political and economic context.

To all of which the required response is “Ya think?” Everyone literate knows that while the Founders were committed to democratic principles (as articulated by the nation’s mission statement, the Declaration of Independence), they were sufficiently educated, wise and practical to know that pure democracies don’t work, and come to disastrous ends. Nwanevu “thinks” the argument that the nation was founded as a republic is the better one? It was founded as a republic. The Constitution was “forged in a particular political and economic context”? What historical document in world history wasn’t forged in a particular political and economic context?

The real value of the Times feature is this: Nwanevu shows vividly how hostile the current American Left is not only to the Constitution but to the democratic processes created by it, as well as pluralism. His attitudes explain why Democrats think it is acceptable to cheat in order to hold power; his theories reek with the “it isn’t what it is” deception that has become the operating system of the Axis of Unethical Conduct.

He wants to abolish the Senate so the the large, knee-jerk Democratic states can dominate national policy forever. Tough: the Founders respected and protected the pluralistic ideal of individual states with their own unique cultures having the power to avoid tyranny of the majority, and as Baretta would say, “That’s the name of that tune, baby.” He wants the Electoral College to be abolished for the same reason (and because it was why the Obama un-making of America was stopped in its tracks despite the Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2016 election). Packing the Supreme Court would eliminate the Founders’ prescient plan to ensure that the Constitution isn’t shredded every time the same party rules Congress and the White House.

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Here’s how the increasingly despicable Daily Beast introduced the story about Trump’s “summit” with Vladamir Putin:

President Donald Trump has given Russian President Vladimir Putin the red carpet treatment as they arrived for their historic summit, applauding the Russian autocrat before offering him a ride in the presidential limousine known as The Beast.

As the pair landed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson Friday—three years after Russia invaded Ukraine—Trump greeted Putin with a military flyover and a handshake before the pair smiled for the cameras on a makeshift podium.

The extraordinary scene was the first time Putin, who has been largely frozen out by the West, has been on U.S. soil in 10 years.

It was also the first time an American president has given the VIP treatment to a Russian leader who faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court as well as being sanctioned by the U.S. government.

Is it possible to be more contemptible? This hack news aggregator is using a diplomatic effort in pursuit of a laudable goal—the end of hostilities that have claimed over a million casualties and devastated a region to continue the discredited and debunked Democrat narrative that Trump is somehow in league with Russia against U.S. interests. Would it be possible to write that section in snottier, more biased, less ethical fashion?

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Here’s a smoking gun: Records uncovered in the recently settled lawsuit by police sergeant Charlotte Djossou showed that D.C. police department leadership ordered the staff to file theft and violent crimes as lower-level offenses.

The sergeant accused Metropolitan Police Department leaders of misclassifying offenses to deflate the district’s crime statistics. Police superiors told officers to downgrade theft cases, knife attacks, and violent assaults to lesser offenses, as shown by internal MPD emails, depositions, and phone call transcripts.

Djossou’s suit was filed in 2020, alleging that police leadership punished her for speaking out against the scheme. She accused MPD brass of deliberately to “distort[ing] crime statistics” by “downgrading a number of felonies to misdemeanors, so that there will be ‘fewer’ felonies in the statistics.” She also provided records proving that police leaders instructed their subordinates to under-classify varieties of theft to keep the crime statistics artificially low.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico all used data from the Metropolitan Police Department to argue that the District is as crime-free as Oz and that Trump’s takeover is really just an early stage of his dictator aspirations. Did their coverage mention Djossou’ s suit? Naw. Did they disclose that a D.C. police commander is currently on leave after the city’s police union accused him of manipulating crime stats? Of course not. Can the public trust the mainstream media to fairly report on any initiative by the Trump Administration? Can the public trust any politicized institution to tell the truth about their effectiveness?

There are more details here.

If we can’t trust the statistics to be honest and true, then all the indignant claims about crime rates dropping are unreliable. That alone is justification for a federal takeover of the D.C. law enforcement operation.

Typical of the “If Trump does it, it’s bad” mania has been the attacks on his choices for the Kennedy Center Honors program this year. The list includes the band Kiss, “Phantom of the Opera” star Michael Crawford, country music legend George Strait, actor Sylvester Stallone and disco legend Gloria Gaynor. I have had insider intelligence regarding these choices in the past (it’s sausage-making), and I’ve also reviewed the history of the honors. The only major departure from tradition this time is that there are no “high culture” awardees on the list, no classical composers, opera singers, ballet dancers or serious novelists. But past honorees have included such legends as “The Flying Nun” star Sally Field, Neil Diamond and Big Bird: if the list had come from the typical progressive cabal that has run the Kennedy Center since its inception, nobody would have blinked. It’s a little like baseball Hall of Fame choices: it is easy to find past honorees who were equally or less deserving.

Is Trump deliberately poking progressive culture in the eye with his takeover of Kennedy Honors? Sure he is, and I’m glad. The honorees and the previous regime insulted him and his office by cutting Trump and Melania out of the gala in his very first year of his Presidency. I condemned this at the time, writing that the threatened boycott of the ceremony by some of the awardees in 2017 should have been responded to by a curt “Fine, we’ll give the honor to someone else, then. Good luck in your future endeavors.”

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