Justice Stephen Breyer, at 83 the oldest member of the Supreme Court’s left wing, will retire from the Court at the end of the 2021-22 term.
Observations:
Good. Unlike Justices Scalia and Ginsberg, he is not waiting for the Grim Reaper to remove him from the job. 83 was pushing his luck as it was. This was the ethical and responsible thing to do.
Was Breyer pushed into retirement by Democrats, who want Biden to be able to appoint a 27 year-old socialist ideologue hostile to gun rights, free speech and any restrictions on abortion and affirmative action? It doesn’t matter. At worst, he’s doing the right and responsible thing for some unethical reasons. It’s still right and responsible.
Now we’ll see how ethical and responsible President Biden is. A choice that would make the most people happy would be to re-nominate Merrick Garland. He’s a lousy Attorney General; his record indicates that he’d be a rational progressive on SCOTUS, and it would right an undeniable wrong, though a legal one, in canceling Mitch McConnell’s boycott of his nomination six years ago.
I doubt the President will do that. He’s probably locked into nominating a black woman, whether or not there is one currently on the bench who is qualified or trustworthy, rather than the most qualified candidate. All of the (legitimate) objections to Clarence Thomas’s appointment by President Bush the First will apply, just from a different end of the ideological spectrum.
I hate political memes as a rule, and thus was awash with self-loathing when the one above, which somehow I had never seen before, made me laugh out loud in light of yesterday’s Steve Doocy incident. I hate political memes for the same reason I don’t like political cartoons: they are almost always over-simplified, and aim for bias, stereotyping and emotion rather than making valid points. Trump was memed and made a caricature of himself as unfairly as any President, extending all the way to the “Trump Baby” balloon. It is healthy for a nation to be able to joke about its leaders, but relentlessly diminishing them is self-destructive. I think the public would have united behind Obama in a crisis; we saw the public unite behind Bush, even with the unusually denigrating ridicule he was subjected to. The nation, led by a permanently hostile media, would not have united behind Trump in a crisis, and I doubt that it would unite now behind Biden. Eventually, the mockery affects the office itself.
This week I saw this sticker on a gas pump for the first time (in Northern Virginia).
In addition to its obvious failures on all fronts, this Presidency is dying a death of a thousand cuts.
Therefore I was surprised to see the latest Gallup poll findings that 60% of American surveyed regard Biden as “intelligent,” the same percentage that find him “likable.” I guess relative: do they find him as or more intelligent than they are? I suppose that’s possible, maybe even accurate. Or is it just the old line, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you President?” in action? I’ve seen a lot of Presidents, and I know the other ones pretty well. I’ve never seen a President who seemed as clearly intellectually deficient as Biden is now; he’s obviously been suffering from some kind of age-related cognitive decline for years, and he was never that bright to begin with. It was inexcusably unethical for any family, party or Biden himself to allow someone with his mental issues to be installed in the most difficult job in the country. At this point, is Biden the least intelligent President we have ever had? I’d say it’s a good bet, as frightening as that is to accept. The bottom group in my estimation would include Joe, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford. None were probably below average, although I wonder about Harding and today’s version of Biden.
The only saving grace is that the correlation between great Presidents (or great leaders in general) and superior intelligence is strikingly weak.
1. And speaking of “Old Viginny,” a state tax on plastic bags went into effect this month. It’s 5 cents to get a plastic bag to carry your purchases, easily a 500% mark-up over the retail cost of each bag. This was another legacy of mercifully retired Gov. Northam (D) who turned into a salivating far-Left ideologue to save himself from the woke mob when photos of him surfaced either in blackface or in KKK garb—it was hard to tell which. The tax is more useless climate change virtue-signaling, regressive, and just the perfect thing to inflict on Virginians when food and drug prices are skyrocketing (the bill was passed before “I did that!” stickers were a twinkle in Republican eyes.)
In addition, the arrival of the new tax was badly publicized, and most stores didn’t bother to warn their customers. Nor do most of them have alternatives on hand. CVS, of course, which is run by fools and incompetents, just sprung the charge on people: I watched one elderly woman with about a dozen items look helplessly as the clerk asked, “Do you want a bag for these?”
We have a lot of plastic bags hoarded for Spuds-droppings and other uses: my wife said that we should bring a bunch to the CVS and hand them out. And that’s what we will do!
After the now viral video above made the rounds, James Iannazzo, 48, was arrested and charged with a hate crime following the outburst at Robeks in Fairfield, Conn. over the weekend. The Fairfield Police Department said that Iannazzo returned to the store after a smoothie he purchased caused his son, who is allergic to peanuts, to be rushed to the hospital from his home. Iannazzo apparently ordered the smoothie without peanut butter, but did not explain to employees that his son had an allergy.
The New York Post says he called a staff member a “fucking immigrant.” The Times says he called her an “immigrant loser.”
After the Merrill Lynch office where Iannazzo works was swamped in furious emails, he was fired from his job as an analyst. A spokesman for Bank of America, the parent company of Merrill Lynch, told the New York Times in an email,
“Our company does not tolerate behavior of this kind. We immediately investigated and have taken action. This individual is no longer employed at our firm.”
“When faced with a dire situation for his son, Mr. Iannazzo’s parental instinct kicked in and he acted out of anger and fear,” the father’s lawyer said. “He is not a racist individual and deeply regrets his statements and actions during a moment of extreme emotional stress.”
Today’s themes: masks, dumb quotes, incompetent leadership, and The Great Stupid.…
1. Jen Psaki on a roll…In the annals of “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden,” or IIPTDXTTNMIAFB for short, the routinely absurd comments of White House paid liar Jen Psaki should qualify for inclusion. After all, the mainstream news media pounced on all manner of silly, offensive, off-the-cuff statements by the likes of Kellyanne Conway and other Trump surrogates, but leave it to the conservative pundits and wags to criticize equally idiotic or dishonest statements when they come from Psaki. The latest example: on “The View”—to be fair, it is understandable that anything said on “The View” would be ignored—Psaki advised frustrated Democrats,
“This is very frustrating, it is infuriating, that some people in the Senate, including the entire Republican caucus, won’t support peoples’ fundamental rights. It is also frustrating that when we talk about voter protections, just something that everybody should have the right to, some people are putting process ahead of that fundamental protection.So we have got to keep at it, including changing the rules to make sure there is a path forward to move voting rights legislation on a federal level. My advice to everyone out there who’s frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off, feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita, do whatever you need to do this weekend, and then wake up on Monday and keep fighting.”
For a White House that purports to represent a coalition of the poor, downtrodden, and systemically oppressed to advise its core to turn to such privileged upper-middle class delights as mid-day margaritas and kick-boxing classes—paid for with all those pandemic aid checks no doubt—eloquently spoke to just how phony the current regime is. If a Trump spokesperson said something that dumb, Stephen Colbert would live off it for a week. But the first part was really worse. There are no endangered “rights” protected in the Democratic voting bill. There is no right to voting before election day, or not voting in person, or having third parties harvest ballots from people too lazy to deliver ballots themselves, or to vote without photo identification. These aren’t “fundamental rights’ by any definition. This kind of rhetoric had been a lie for years, and the news media allows it to continue unchallenged.
There is an implied, if not fundamental right being threatened by the bill, however. That would be the right to have confidence that there is integrity in voting system, and that there are not gaping holes, deliberately left unplugged, that can and will be exploited to steal elections if possible.
For months, veteran prolific Ethics Alarms commenter Michael Ejercito peppered the blog with various versions of the same question: “When are you going to finish “The Pandemic Creates a Classic and Difficult Ethics Conflict…”? He was referring to this post, which went up way back in May of 2020. The rest of the title was “…But The Resolution Is Clear.” It was designated as Part I, with a Part II supposedly coming soon that would explain what that resolution was and why. It never arrived.
Stalling, I posted a Prelude to Part II. It was so long and covered so much territory that I doubt anyone read it all the way to the end (except Michael). It didn’t inspire a single comment. Here’s a precis...
No, I am not satisfied with the current draft of Part II, but I trust it’s obvious what the resolution referred to is. The lock-down has to end, and before vaccines, cures, or adequate medicine are available….It is quite striking: the arguments for continuing the lockdown indefinitely are almost entirely authored by progressives, and are without exception characterized by bad logic, emotionalism, manipulated facts, biased analysis, fearmongering, and suspect motives. The majority of the arguments for opening up the economy soon are markedly more logical, unemotional, and based on sound statistics and analysis…
It is not “plausible” that the pandemic will continue forever; pandemics don’t. And indeed, if they did, it would be an irrefutable reason to open up now. Freedom has always had a price…
…As I discussed in Part I, health experts focus almost exclusively on health. Health is not the only priority involved in the policy trade-offs involving the lockdown. The health experts don’t care about the other issues—literally, they don’t care—because it isn’t their job to care about the economy, or unemployment, or ruined careers and diminished quality of life. They should care about increased suicides during depressions, and inadequate preventative health care, and the deaths those and other consequences of the lockdown will cause, [or]…the U.S. having a catastrophic expansion of its national debt… !
…Right: nobody knows how it will play out. We do know, however, how it will play out if we lock down the economy much longer, never mind until there’s a vaccine…On this 75th Anniversary of V-E Day, it shouldn’t be hard to understand that lost lives can be acceptable when the most rational, responsible policies involve unavoidable risk.
But “Part II,” when it arrived six months later, still didn’t deliver the promised resolution. Except for the (again, long) introduction, in fact, it was a dud, but a dud that illustrated the problem with the topic. I wrote about the non-media coverage of a Johns Hopkins study that seemed to indicate that the despite the daily lists of pandemic deaths, the total deaths had not varied significantly from the previous year. As it turned out, the study was flawed, and its conclusions were not supported, though the Ethics Alarms indictment of the bias and partisan agenda indicated by the news media’s lack of coverage still applies.
So what was going to be Part II was then going to be Part III, and again stalling, I wrote a prelude to that as well. This one was mercifully short, and endorsed a statement by then President Trump as the Ethics Quote of the Century. He had said via Twitter in October, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” The post concluded,
“President Trump is among the Americans I would view most unlikely to utter an ethical statement, much less a great one, but this was a great statement, essential, inspirational, and right. I assume this is sufficient notice of what the conclusion of Part III will be.”
But there was no Part III, much to Michael’s disappointment and annoyance.
I think it is fair to conclude at this point (if it was not already obvious) that the American Civil Liberties Union has abandoned its original mission of being a neutral and non-partisan guardian of individual rights to being one more activist political tool of the Left. Its hostility toward transparency for school curricula marks a 180 decree turnaround for the ACLU, which has traditionally argued for government transparency in all its activities, including public school education.
One more time, the corrupting influence here is race and “social justice,” which increasingly are regarded as taking priority over all else. Enacting the racial agenda of Black Lives Matters and its allies (like the Democratic Party) now justifies tactics and activities that the ACLU once opposed consistently. Government indoctrination is no longer an offense to freedom of speech and thought, apparently. The ends justify the means.
Once upon a time, Nevada’s ACLU fought fought for transparency when The Silver State’s schools were establishing their sex education lesson plans. Staci Pratt, Legal Director of the ACLU of Nevada, said at the time, “The days of back door decision making are over. Compliance with the open meetings law is meant to secure the opportunity of parents, students, and community members to have a meaningful impact on the development of policy. We are all well served when decisions on the appointment of sex education advisory committee members is subject to public scrutiny, rather than the result of the presentation of a narrow range of interests.” The ACLU of Kentucky used records requests to uncover curriculum plans in all of Kentucky’s 173 school districts, seeking to find evidence of religious instruction:
The ACLU-KY sent requests to all of Kentucky’s 173 school districts seeking policies and curriculum for “Bible Literacy” courses. While most districts are not offering these courses, the ACLU-KY found many of the courses that are being offered do not fall within constitutional strictures, which require any use of religious text in the classroom to be secular, objective, nondevotional, and must not promote any specific religious view.
The investigation uncovered public school teachers using the Bible to impart religious life lessons (Barren, McCracken, and Letcher Counties), use of online Sunday School lessons and worksheets for course source material and assignments (Letcher and Wayne Counties), and rote memorization of Biblical text (McCracken County) — practices which fall far short of academic and objective study of the Bible and its historical context or literary value.
But that was baaad indoctrination, you see. Teaching Critical Race Theory-ish interpretations of American history that tar whites as intrinsically racist, blacks as handicapped by intransigent systemic racism, and, as a special bonus, that a person is whatever gender they decide to be are all good indoctrination, and if overly conservative, contrarian or controlling parents are inclined to interfere, well, the ACLU holds that schools are justified in making sure the Neanderthals don’t find out what’s being taught. Continue reading →
It’s too early, of course; many a Presidential candidate has emerged out of the primordial ooze to evolve from a near unknown to the nominee in three years. In the case of the Republicans (and the Democrats too) such an emergence is greatly to be wished. However, two objectives will remain constant: it is imperative that the lying, Machiavellian, totalitarianism-embracing Democrats be ejected from both branches of the government with sufficient force that they ponder their sins and reform, and that Donald Trump does not return to the Presidency.
Trump himself isn’t dangerous. If fact, in many ways he was an effective President, and his policies were more often reasonable than not; my objections to him as President involve character and style (and they are major objections that his accomplishments cannot counter-balance). However, the Left’s reaction to him is an existential threat. They have convinced themselves that eliminating him is a mission that must be accomplished by any means necessary, and they will continue to work to terrify the weak-minded, inattentive and gullible from now until the 2024 election…and, if necessary, after, no matter what the consequences may be.
They succeeded in convincing millions of Americans that he would destroy the country when he was elected the first time; he didn’t, but their tactics against him nearly did, and might yet. The nation cannot withstand another polarizing election with both sides claiming the other is trying to wreck all that is good about America, and with Trump as the Republican nominee.
Meat Loaf has died. The hilariously theatrical pop singer with the big voice was responsible for one of the great ethics songs: “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.” It packed almost everything into one epic musical journey: temptation, non-ethical considerations vs. ethics, betrayal, consequences and cosmic retribution.
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Absent a last-minute reprieve or a relapse of whatever it is that I’ve been battling, this looks like the final day for our especially lovely, inspiring Christmas tree. I always feel like I’m making the world a little meaner and less hopeful when I take it down. This post, from three years ago, still stands.
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In U.S. ethics history, January 21 stands for one of the more significant pardons in American Presidential annals, because in 1977 Jimmy Carter pardoned all those young men, hundreds of thousands of them, who had fled to Canada rather than risk being drafted to fight in Vietnam. (Only half came back. I am tempted to say, “Good!,” but I won’t…) Those who left as a matter of principle and those who ran off because they wouldn’t have fought for their country under any circumstances (this was the era of “Better Red than Dead,” after all) were treated the same. It was a utilitarian trade-off, and whether the President’s decision was unethical (my Vietnam vet friends said it made them feel like suckers) or ethical (it definitely helped heal the national divisions over that misguided conflict), it was certainly brave and consequential. For example, that single act probably killed the draft as much as anything else.
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Feel free to debate that issue here; I’m not up to it today myself. There won’t be the usual Friday Open Forum because there was one just two days ago (and it’s still open!). Full disclosure: in my fevered state, I really thought it was Fridaywhen it was Wednesday.
1. This video is worrisome if it’s genuine, and it may not be. A young woman freaks out after getting a positive Wuhan variant test result, and acts as if she’s been sentenced to die on the rack and wheel. I fear this is what two years of politically-driven pandemic hysteria is turning our rising generations into: cowards, whiners, phobics and weenies. Her tearful lament ““The coolest characteristic about myself is that I haven’t gotten it!” is particularly nauseating.Continue reading →
On Hugh Hewitt’s show, Senator Rand Paul opined that President Biden shouldn’t be permitted to speak in public because it was dangerous. One might think that was an over-the-top statement (though censoring the last President was an ongoing project of Democrats, eventually executed by the party’s social media tools), but in the press conference yesterday, Biden appeared to give Russia a green light to invade the Ukraine. That’s pretty dangerous, I’d say.
The situation is clear: Putin is sabre-rattling about taking over the Ukraine in hopes of getting valuable concessions from the West to stay on his side of the border. Biden is supposed to be making it clear that to do so would have unacceptable consequences, not by drawing an imaginary “red line” that he wouldn’t have the guts to enforce ( Robert Ludlum would have called this “The Obama Obfuscation”), but by being a convincing and formidable champion of international law whom Putin would have reason to fear. Instead, yesterday Biden offered a bribe to Putin by volunteering that NATO won’t make Ukraine a member. That’s bone-headed negotiation practice: giving away a bargaining chip without being assured of anything in return. (Joe has clearly not studied the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Then Biden suggested Putin “has no choice” but to invade now, and that his “guess” was that Putin “probably would go in.” Oh! Then it’s all right I guess! Biden also said that the invasion would be successful: “The cost of going into Ukraine in terms of physical loss of life for the Russians — they’ll be able to prevail over time, but it’s going to be heavy.” In the alternative, Biden implied Russia might well get away with “a minor incursion.” Translation: “My advice, Vlad is take over one piece of the Ukraine at a time.”
Has any President uttered such dangerous statements affecting another nation’s sovereignty during a press conference? Paul has a case. Continue reading →
This is an encouraging development. Maybe, just maybe, cumulative arguments like those that appear at Ethics Alarms eventually create positive change by shining light on unethical situations capable of remedy, and forcing lazy, cowardly or inattentive authorities to change course.
It’s nice to think so, anyway.
Spurred by the escalating controversy over the unfair triumphs of transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas in NCAA women’s meets, the NCAA announced a crucial change in its policy regarding transgender athletes. The eligibility of transgender athletes to compete with women will now follow the sport-by-sport model adopted by the U.S. and international Olympic committees. The new policy goes into effect immediately.
It would seem to mean that Lia, formerly James, will be out of the pool. USA Swimming policies follow the International Olympic Committee, and IOC’s rules state:
“Trans female athletes must demonstrate a total testosterone level in serum below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 consecutive months prior to competition and must remain below this threshold throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category in any event.”
What will happen to all those records Thomas set while hovering somewhere between male and female has not been determined.
I’m sure the NCAA would have been happy to remain blindly woke if it could have gotten away with it. If Ethics Alarms contributed in some tiny way to making sure they didn’t, that’s encouraging.
What would be even more encouraging is if feminists would stand up for the female athletes they fought so hard for, rather than meekly parroting LGTBQ propaganda.
Ethics Alarms 