The United States Tennis Association asked broadcasters of the U.S. Open to censor any protests or negative reactions to President Donald Trump’s appearance at the men’s singles final today between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. The President, an avowed tennis fan, was loudly booed when he last attended a match at the Open in his first term

Here’s the relevant section from the USTA email to U.S. Open broadcasters :

“With respect to Broadcast Coverage, the President will be shown on the World Feed and the Ashe Court Feed during the opening anthem ceremony. We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity, including ENG [Electronic News Gathering] coverage.”

There is no problem with the USTA making it clear to attendees that such demonstrations will, for example, result in removal from the stadium, but telling broadcasters not to report what, if anything, happens during their broadcasts is censorship, as well as asking the broadcasters to be complicit in a lie. The broadcasters, all of them, should tell the association to bite them.

The USTA will show Trump during the National Anthem, which “Bounce,” the tennis substack that is clearly infected with the Trump Derangement Virus and that first reported the memo, calls the playing of the anthem “one of the noisiest and bombastic portions of Sunday’s events” —nice—and describes the USTA’s request as “further complicity in broadcasting Trump’s desired stagecraft for his first appearance at the U.S. Open in a decade.”

Isn’t everyone sick of this attitude? The President of the United States has always engaged in public appearances that emphasize the importance and significance of the office, as well as embracing POTUS’s traditional role as “a human flag.” This isn’t “Trump’s stagecraft” nor is honoring the U.S. at a sporting event “bombastic” except to anti-American progressives like Ben Rothenberg, the writer of “Bounces.”

Sure, people like Rothenberg are the reason we have so many citizens who so revel in hating the elected President of the United states that they cannot be counted on to be civil when their nation’s leader appears in public. Nevertheless, journalists—and broadcasters of sports events are allegedly reporters—are ethically bound to report what happens no matter who it embarrasses or reveals to be an asshole.

1. To start off, let’s survey today’s headlines and anti-Trump spin at the President Trump Jeering Society, aka. The New York Times:

• Many Cities Say Yes to Federal Police Help, but No to ‘Occupation’

• Grand Juries in D.C. Reject Wave of Charges Under Trump’s Crackdown
• How Trump’s Blunt-Force Diplomacy Is Pushing His Rivals Together
• Three Opinion Writers on Whether Congress Can Rein in Trump [Note: All three are vocal anti-Trump pundits]
• Will Trump’s Caesarism Last? [Quote: “Barack Obama and George W. Bush were far more successful at consolidating presidential power, and Trump 1.0 mostly demonstrated that an inexperienced, incompetent president could still be pinned down like Gulliver….” Response: Well yes, when two partisan impeachments and a lengthy investigation weaponized by his Democratic predecessor effectively made it difficult for him to govern…]
• Will Trump Have to Run From the Economy?

• Second Weak Jobs Report Undercuts Trump’s Claims of a Booming Economy

There are no positive stories about the Administration in the Times at all. A few are arguably straight reporting, like “What Has the Trump Administration Gotten From Law Firms and Universities?”

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I would be having an Open Forum on Ethics Alarms today no matter what day of the week it was, unfortunately. The massive theatrical project I am involved in to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the student musical theater organization I inadvertently founded as a first year law student is just a week away now, and today in a particularly challenging segment of production week for me.

And that isn’t all I have to do. I feel like Dick Van Dyke in “What a Way to Go!” (above).

If you are in the Washington, D.C. area or going to be here next week and would like to come to the show (there is only a “suggested donation”), email me and I’ll give you all the details.

Today there are at least two stories that are exploding Trump-obsessed heads all over, and both of them raise serious ethical, legal and constitutional issues. I’ll try to write about both, but you might want to start here yourself. Issue one is the reported Justice Department discussions on making it more difficult for trans individuals to obtain firearms in the wake of the second transsexual mass-shooter in recent years. I think that’s the right count. In a related issue, the news media, and even the AI bots, are in full defensive mode regarding trans shooters.

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Yikes.

Jeff Guinn’s comment on the previous post included a link to a Reason report on Fed governor Lisa Cook’s record before Biden appointed her and Congress confirmed her. since the law permitting Trump to fire her specifies “for cause,” and it usually isn’t just firing for cause when the cause is something everyone knew about (or should have) when the employee was put in the job, her extreme woke craziness can’t be used by the President to dump her, but it can be used to conclude that the woman is untrustworthy, is likely to be motivated by a political agenda rather than the public interest, is almost certainly firmly in the Destroy Trump By Any Means Necessary” camp, and is not above manipulating the interest rates to foil the Trump Administration.

From Reason’s Robby Soave:

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Daniel Currell, a management consultant, has a fascinating and depressing op-ed up at the New York Times site [gift link!] about how Disney’s theme parks have become virtually unaffordable for the average American, indeed even the average middle class American. He writes in part,

…We all judge our well-being against something, typically our past and our peers. Through either of those lenses, the Disney parks — and many similar institutions of American culture — may offer a piece of the puzzle. Compared with the past, a Disney trip is more expensive, to be sure, but perhaps more important, it feels much more expensive, because at every turn one is being invited to level up and spend more. Thanks to social media, we can now see the experiences that divide us. Go to Instagram and search for #Club33, the invitation-only clubs hidden within Disney properties. What you see there will not make you feel a kinship with your fellow man, unless you are one of the very few invited in. America’s 20th century was a fortunate moment when we could rely on companies like Disney to deliver rich and unifying elements of our culture. Walt Disney hoped that his audience would have “no racial, national, political, religious or social differences”; he wanted to appeal to everyone, in no small part because appealing to everyone was profitable. It was a time when big institutions were trusted, and the culture they created was shared by nearly all Americans…The market, and increasingly the culture, is dominated by the affluent. And technology is enabling companies to see these previously invisible class divides and act on them. Based on what we earn, we see different ads, stand in different lines, eat different food, stay in different hotels, watch the parade from different sections and on and on. What’s profitable today is not unification. It’s segmentation.

The article explains that a trip to Disneyland or Walt Disney World is now likely to cost a family of four a base cost of $700 on ride tickets alone, plus admission costs. The families who can afford it pay roughly $90 to get front-of-the-line access to a single premier ride, otherwise a less affluent family wait up to an hour waiting to get on. It follows the travails of one middle class family on the dream trip to Disney World it had saved up for over several years. Seven days in Orlando cost about $8,000 for two adults and three children, not counting travel and lodging at an off-site hotel. That was 15% of what the family earned year after taxes, and it was still an inferior experience to what the “elite” could pay for.

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I have never been a loyal member of any party, as my opinions do not depend on group loyalty or ideology, but upon what I try to keep dispassionate, objective, history- and fact-based analysis of issues. However, the rapid ethical rot and totalitarian bent of the Democratic Party is causing me anguish. I am being pulled toward a conclusion that the only rational and patriotic political position now is to be committed to a Beware the Democrats! position. But that is, superficially at least, indistinguishable from the Trump Deranged “Trump is Satan” position that the Machiavellian Axis of Unethical Conduct has been using for almost a decade now, with no sign of changing course.

What’s the difference? Well, call me reductionist, but it’s this: Trump isn’t Satan, though Trump is an infuriatingly flawed individual and leader, but the Democrats are corrupt and untrustworthy. They have intentionally poisoned a critical mass of Americans—yes, the dumb ones, the gullible ones, the badly educated ones and the weenies, but still—against their own system of government using a level of fear-mongering that evokes the McCarthy era here and Hitler’s Final Solution in Germany.

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[Apparently the previous graphic I sued to represent a nuclear bomb explosion either intentionally or by happenstance resembled Bozo the Clown. Amusing, but in this case, a distraction. That’s Hiroshima above. Not funny…]

I don’t know when the United States began its disastrous slide toward weenie-ism, but it’s just got to stop. Unfortunately there are so many cultural pathogens running amuck that the Trump Presidency has to try to solve—multiculturalism, transmania, gun-phobia, censorship, the death of journalism, the corruption of the professions, “the good illegal immigrant,” DEI, and on, and on—getting around to the weenie epidemic will be a long shot at best. But I can dream…

The latest example of the Weenies making trouble is the Israel-Gaza war. Israel’s situation could not be clearer: it has to eliminate Hamas once and for all, or else resign itself to more attacks on citizens in perpetuity. To eliminate Hamas, Israel will have to kill some citizens, destroy some buildings, harm children. Hamas wants to make them do that. But the responsibility for the war lies with Hamas, as does the responsibility for ending it. Hamas can surrender.

Ah, but the Weenies are out in force, condemning Israel for doing what nations that are attacked have to do: strike back decisively, and make certain that the aggressors are never in a position to attack again. The United States understood this in World War II, but a confluence of factors that I have neither the time nor patience to expound on now—though a major one is the ascendancy of women in politics, punditry and the professions—has blurred the clarity of that principle, resulting in such fiascos as the Vietnam War, the first Iraq war, the second Iraq War, and Biden’s Afghanistan debacle.

Arguably, the situation facing Israel is even clearer than any of those, but even in Israel itself, weenie-ism is rotting the moral and ethical core of society. That is another nation, like the U.S., which one would think would have the guts, determination, and courage to do the right thing even when, as the poet said, all about them are losing their heads and blaming it on Israel, and can trust itself when everyone doubts them.

I hope Israel does, but the Weenies are powerful in their weakness, and people will die if they gain the upper hand.