The baseball post-season ended for the Boston Red Sox last night, but I won’t miss seeing regular pop-up ads during the games that encourage viewers to bet on whether the batter coming to the plate will hit a homer during the game or the odds on whether the pitcher will have six strikeouts. This doesn’t enhance the game or entertain viewers; it just fulfills MLB’s despicable deal with an online gambling company who wants to make betting on games while they are in progress the national pastime.

1. Alec Baldwin update…Since there seems to be little question that Baldwin pointed the prop gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins before the gun discharged and killed her, it is possible that he could be charged with involuntary manslaughter. I view that as extremely unlikely, given Baldwin’s celebrity status (unfortunately laws are only for the little people when prosecutorial discretion is involved, unless the subject is an associate of Donald Trump), but attorney Andrew Branca provides a useful and thorough examination of the law on the subject of such accidents here.

2. “Fuck Joe Biden” developments. “Fuck Joe Biden” chants have become regular phenomena at weekend sporting events. After Game 4 of the American League Championship Series, Red Sox fans outside Fenway Park disrupted the live post-game show by chanting the mantra so loudly it was hard to hear what the panelists were saying. “Fuck Joe Biden” took the place of the more traditional “Yankees Suck” refrain, which had been employed in the previous game whenever Alex Rodriguez tried to speak. It was not Boston’s finest hour, but then I predicted we would end up where we are, in Boston and everywhere else.

Meanwhile, I obviously wasn’t paying attention to the “Let’s go Brandon!” phenomenon. I kept seeing references to it, and was puzzled, but since it appeared to be spreading via Tik-Tok, which doesn’t interest me at all, I didn’t bother to investigate. I am an idiot. I wrote about the beginning of “Go Brandon” myself, here, on October 4, noting how another knee-jerk network agent for the Democrats lied to her audience after NASCAR driver Brandon Brown won at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast tried to interview Brown while fans were loudly chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden!” in the background, so she told the driver, “As you can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon!’” Just like that, a new coded vulgarism was born. “Let’s go Brandon” now means “Fuck Joe Biden.” Nice.

The Ethics Alarms position, as with similar uses of obvious substitutes like “N-word” and “F-word,” the code is exactly as uncivil as the word being avoided. For now, “Let’s go Brandon” can be fairly called a joke, but not much longer. Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) ended a floor speech this week with “Let’s go Brandon!” He should be disciplined by the House for that.

3. I don’t understand this story at all, so if you can explain it, please do. A woman was raped on a Philadelphia subway train, and the story spread that it was another Kitty Genovese episode of bystander apathy. A local prosecutor disputes those accounts, as related in “Prosecutor Casts Doubt on Account of Train Passengers Not Intervening in Rape.”

There were, by all accounts, about ten passengers on the train when the rape took place. The woman was raped, and nobody on the trains took sufficient action to stop the rapist. It is undisputed that two passenger videotaped the assault. What doubt can there be that the passengers did not intervene in the rape?

4. “Yoo’s Rationalization” Champ of the Month! Paul Begala, the worst of the Clinton henchmen (though the competition is close) channeled the Left’s favorite rationalization, #64 “It isn’t what it is,” with this risible tweet:

This is notable even for Begala, who earlier maintained that President Clinton did nothing wrong beyond a “personal indiscretion” and that President Obama’s administration was 100% scandal-free. Begala issued that tweet after the horrifying CNN Town Hall where Biden showed he was “on top of his game” by lying repeatedly and having to be rescued by CNN’s Anderson Cooper when he couldn’t fetch the word he was looking for. Here was Joe’s wit and command of details explaining why he hadn’t bothered to go to the border:

“But the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world. My wife Jill has been down. She’s been on both sides of the river. She’s seen the circumstances there. She’s looked into those places. You notice you’re not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with what looks like tarps on top of them. We’ve been able to deal with that. We’ve been able to significantly increase funding through the HHS to provide shelter for these kids and people. But, there’s much more to be done. It is a thing that concerns me the most about being able to get control of it.”

We’re supposed to be dazzled by that. Incidentally, the President hasn’t surveyed hurricane damage for a month, but time passes so quickly when one is in one’s Golden Years.

Leslie Bricusse has died, the less famous of the Anthony Newley-Bricusse song-writing team, though he also had hits with other collaborators. Easily the most profitable and annoying of their creations was “The Candy Man,” from the score of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” But it was the opening number from the show that included my favorite among their scores that kept going through my head as I perused today’s ethics developments. There’s a beautiful land out there, I’m sure of it. But it sure is hard to see lately.

1.Yesterday, October 20, had two major ethics milestones attached to it that I should have noted. The first was in 1947, when the Red Scare began its assault on freedom of thought and association as a Congressional committee began investigating the allegedCommunist influence in Hollywood. The unconstitutional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) grilled witnesses by asking “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Those who refused to answer were found in contempt of Congress and jailed. Others, including director Elia Kazan, Gary Cooper and studio heads Walt Disney and Jack Warner, gave the committee names of colleagues they suspected of being communists. It all led to a so-called “blacklist” that kept actors, writers and directors, including some of the most talented in the industry, from working for years.

I thought of those hearings as I watched (as much as I could stand) the disgusting House January 6 riot hearing this morning where Attorney General Garland allowed the prestige of his office to be used for a flagrant abuse of the committee system for pure partisan propaganda of the most bilious sort, executed by the House Judiciary Committee. (More on that later.)

Garland also reminded me of the other ethics event in U.S. history that took place on the 20th: the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre.” Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, an esteemed Harvard law professor so trusted that the Supreme Court once allowed him to argue both sides of a case before it (which was ridiculous), was getting too close to the ugly truth, so Nixon ordered his Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused, and resigned. The mantle of AG then fell on Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also refused to fire Cox, and also resigned. Finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork did the deed, reasoning, as he explained later, that Nixon’s order was legal and not an abuse of power.

As I listened to Garland huminahumina this morning when asked by GOP committee members about this memorandum, which was designed to chill the speech of parents raising their legitimate objections to attempted political indoctrination in the public schools, I found myself wondering if he would have had the integrity and guts to refuse a lawful order by Nixon that nonetheless undermined the Constitution both the Attorney General and the President are sworn to defend. I doubt it. That memo was probably not Garland’s idea, and its goal was to stifle political dissent by using vague words like “harassment” and darkly suggesting that law enforcement would be watching.

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Jen Psaki may not be the worst liar among the many Presidential spokespersons I have seen come and go, but she may be the biggest asshole since Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s infamous paid deceiver. Yesterday, asked about the administration’s failure to anticipate and act on the supply chain disruptions despite early warnings, Psaki snarked about “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.” Friend of Ethics Alarms Joe Concha responded, “This kind of pious posturing by Psaki — who is increasingly acting this way as Biden’s numbers fall — is not helping matters. The supply chain crisis is very real [and] will impact the low/middle class the most. But…Psaki makes it about an issue for the rich.” Indeed, my son, who is an auto mechanic, says that inability to get needed auto parts is killing his business, with direct impact on his income. It is clear now that as with inflation, the border crisis and the missing Americans left behind in Afghanistan, the Democratic strategy is to pretend there is no problem, confident the the news media will do a good job hiding the facts.

1. Speaking of gaslighting…Terry McAuliffe’s new strategy as his poll numbers sink in what was supposed to be a cake-walk to a second term as Virginia Governor is to claim that he was quoted “out of context” when he said “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” In what possible context would that statement, which he made on TV during a September 28 debate with Glenn Younkin, the Republican, mean anything other than that he doesn’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach? McAuliffe’s new ad making the claim that his statement isn’t what it is (Rationalization #64) is like a holding a sign saying “I am a liar.” Yes, we know you are, Terry: that you got elected the first time disgraced the voters of Virginia.

The ex-Clinton henchman is desperate, but obvious obfuscation won’t help except with the admittedly substantial idiot vote. “As parents, Dorothy and I have always been involved in our kids’ education. We know good schools depend on involved parents. That’s why I want you to hear this from me. Glenn Youngkin is taking my words out of context. I’ve always valued the concerns of parents,” McAuliffe says in the new ad. “It’s why as governor we scaled back standardized testing, expanded pre-K, and invested a billion dollars in public schools.” But none of that addresses the issue of parent input into what is taught. So a billion dollars is being invested in having schools teach that whites are oppressing minorities and the United States of America is evil: how does that encourage parent input into the curriculum? As governor, McAuliffe vetoed legislation in 2016 and 2017 which would have notified parents of sexually explicit content in school materials and mandated that teachers offer alternative educational resources to students whose parents objected to such content. That’s the “context” of his infamous statement.

2. Huh. If you pay people not to work, they won’t see any need to work. Who would have thought? The news is full of reports that the economy is threatened by a labor shortage, and economists are not quite sure why. “COnservatives,” sniffs the Times, are sure this is because of over-generous unemployment benefits. What do they know? Nah, that’s not it…then teh same story goes on to note that Americans saved trillions during the pandemic, with lower income Americans being able to stash away enough to forgo work with the help of “the government’s trillion dollar response to the pandemic” including food aid, forbearance on mortgages and student loans, and eviction moratoriums. But not those “unemployment benefits”!

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One of the ways you can tell that the creeping totalitarianism of progressives seeking to enforce thought and speech conformity on us all “for the greater good” is getting closer is that advocacy for punishing thought has become mainstream. Indeed, it’s respectable. The supporters of punishing Americans not only for conduct but for “wrongthink” (“1984” lexicon might as well be considered common tongue today) are now not even slightly hesitant to reveal their goal: Agree with them, or lose jobs, friends, associations—rights.

A smoking gun in this regard is an op-ed page (the Times doesn’t call them op-eds any more for some reason: I don’t care) dominating essay by regular Lindsay Crouse—not to be confused with the now-retired actress of the same name—titled “‘Cancel Culture’ Isn’t the Problem. ‘OK Culture’ Is.” Using the firing of NFL coach Jon Gruden as her launching pad, Crouse argues that America is too tolerant of jerks and others who say or think things people like her—you know, good people—-object to, disagree with or find offensive.

“Here’s how it works,” the aspiring censor writes. “Do you have a sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic or fat-shaming thought? Are you smart enough to know you shouldn’t say it in public but want to say it anyway? Are you a powerful and successful person? If so, just make your mean remark or crass joke to a select group who hold similar views or at least wouldn’t dare challenge yours. Don’t worry. It’s OK!”

The writer apparently thinks this statement is so self-evidently ridiculous that she doesn’t feel it necessary to explain why expressing ideas, thoughts and beliefs that she regards as per se unacceptable to those who don’t feel as she does must be prevented and punished. “A common aspect of OK Culture is the tendency to look the other way when someone is professionally excellent but personally awful,” she adds later. Wait a minute: if the individual is really professionally excellent, then he or she isn’t “awful” in the workplace. Not being able to interact professionally with colleagues and subordinates is not professional excellence. So Crouse is referring to personal, private opinions, beliefs, tastes and speech habits that have no relationship to the workplace at all—in short, opinions, beliefs and speech habits that are none of the employing organization’s damn business, none of the government’s damn business, none of public accommodations’ damn business, and especially none of Lindsay Crouse’s damn business.

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