1. Nice. Earlier this week, as noted on Ethics Alarms, the New York Attorney General released a report suggesting that the number Wuhan virus nursing home deaths could be more than 50 percent higher than originally claimed by Governor Cuomo’s administration.

In response to the report, Cuomo said, in part, “”Who cares? They died!”

Meanwhile, the mainstream media seems intent on minimizing the whole scandal. Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean accused NBC anchor Lester Holt of censoring her friend to shield Cuomo. Dean’s friend, appearing on Holt’s show, claimed that she was directed by him not to say “Governor Cuomo failed us” regarding the death of her own family member in a nursing home, but rather “New York failed us.”

“The mainstream is STILL protecting this guy. Disgusting,” she tweeted. “New York State did not fail us. The governor, his administration and his health department FAILED US. You are a disgrace to all families.”

2. From the Ethics Alarms “I don’t understand this at ALL” files: There have been many stories in the media about a persistent problem involving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the federal program that covers gig workers, part-time hires, seasonal workers and others who do not qualify for traditional unemployment benefits. The program, established by Congress in March as part of the CARES Act, has provided over $70 billion in relief. It also has erroneously send some citizen too much money, since, you know, mass government programs are inherently wasteful, inept, and inefficient.

To be accurate, “some” is an understatement. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were overpaid, and now states are asking for the money to be returned. The amounts can be thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. The recipients of these “Oops! Our bad! Now pay up or else!” letters are told that their benefits will be reduced to compensate for the government’s error, and that the state may put a lien on their home or attache future wages.after future wages or withhold tax refunds. In most cases the money has been spent, and in many cases, the recipients are still in fiscal distress.

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But enough of that.

Let us never speak of it again.

1. A day that will live in ethics infamy...on 11:38 a.m. EST, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up shortly after launch, signalling the beginning of the end of the NASA manned space program. Ethics Alarms has published a lot about the ethics space wreck that led to the disaster and continued in its wake. The Challenger Disaster tag has a most of the relevant posts, of which this one, this (which I built a legal ethics seminar—and a song!—around) and this are the most extensive.

2. Another historical ethics note: Walter Bernstein died last weekend. He was one of the screenwriters blacklisted during the Red Scare. Blacklisting seems especially relevant right now. Most of his films were political; the best known is probably “Fail-Safe,” a movie I deeply dislike that was and is over-shadowed by the superior “Dr. Strangelove…” which hit theaters around the same time. His best screenplay was probably “The Magnificent Seven,” an ethics Western, which he contributed to surreptitiously while he was still blacklisted. After he could write under his own name again, Bernstein wrote “The Front,” a mordant comedy about based on his experiences being “cancelled” in Tinseltown.

Bernstein, unlike many others who were blacklisted (like my friend Bob McElwaine), really had joined the Communist Party. The Communist cause was attractive to him after the war, he said in an interview, because the “Communists seemed like they were doing something.” Such was the intellectual focus of Hollywood Communists, but having lazy and naive political opinions isn’t supposed to cost you your profession and livelihood in the United States of America.

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The Supreme Court today threw out lawsuits claiming that Donald Trump violated the obscure Emoluments Clause, and thus profited from his Presidency. The issue, it concluded, was moot because Trump is no longer in office.

The specious accusation President Trump is violating the Constitution by owning businesses while he is President (Plan C on the list) claimed an ethical breach never anticipated by the Founders and an issue that was barely discussed by the news media during the campaign. Once the President was elected, his haters and saboteurs demanded that he surrender his interests in a vast business empire, something that was both logically and practically impossible. The Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 9, Paragraph 8), a true Constitutional dead letter, stipulates that no federal officeholders “shall receive gifts or payments from foreign state or rulers without the consent of Congress.” But payments obviously means pay-offs, and payment for services isn’t a gift. Nor are Trump hotel and other organization receipts payments to the President.

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1. Naturally, this was never going to come out before the election, and if it did, it wouldn’t have been reported. Or is that too cynical? Yesterday, The United Nations released its Emissions Gap Report 2020, an annual assessment of contributions to greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Here is what it said about the U.S.:

“The United States of America emits 13 per cent of global GHG emissions…China emits more than one-quarter of global GHG emissions….Greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the U.S. are dropping precipitously while those of China, India and Russia continue to rise. With the world’s most successful economy (over $21 trillion in 2019), it is not a surprise that the U.S. pollutes more per person, but the U.S. is making great strides in changing this. “

Forbes notes that the U.S.has been decreasing its greenhouse gas emissions faster than any other major polluter, and it did so without the Paris agreement.

2. Well, duh. Via  NewsBusters: MSNBC Live host Stephanie Ruhle said of Biden’s inauguration, “Let’s be honest, you know if President Trump did this, he would be getting crushed for holding a super-spreader event. We’d all be saying it.”Gee, Stephanie, why be honest now? Oh…right.

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The New York Times dumped editor Lauren Wolfe yesterday. I had written about Wolfe a few days ago:

“Biden landing at Joint Base Andrews now. I have chills,” New York Times editor Lauren Wolfe said in a tweet yesterday with a screenshot of a report from CNN showing Biden’s plane landing….Wolfe was immediately mocked and excoriated on social media, so she returned with several tweets denying any bias and claiming that she was just naturally exited about a historic moment. Riiiiight. Among her tweets,

• “I’m shocked that you all don’t feel the importance. Such historical events are deeply moving and thrilling. This attempt to shit on me is nothing more than shortsighted presumption”
• “So a bunch of people think me being excited for the transfer of power tomorrow is somehow disgusting/idiotic/against journalism. It’s a shame. We should all be interested on historical moments”
• (to Brit Hume) “Really, Brit? You’ve never felt excited at historical moments? Stop inciting your fans who are coming after me with threats. This was an innocuous tweet and you know it.”

Of course, it was a biased tweet that exposed her and the Times’ unethical bias that screams out from the paper every single day, and she knows it. Wolfe eventually deleted the tweets, which are similarly self-indicting.

On what basis was Wolfe fired? Surely not for being biased in favor of the Democratic President! The entire paper is biased that way and flagrantly so. The Times offices has to be teeming with staffers and editors openly basking in Donald Trump’s defeat. Wolfe must have been surrounded by people talking about their “chills.” The Times can’t possibly care about political bias; if it did, it would hide its own better. It wouldn’t keep putting progressive hacks and Democratic Party operatives with press credentials on its op-ed pages.

It certainly isn’t fair to fire Wolfe for stating on social media a bias that the Times tolerates and approves.

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Ultimately, it will all come down to…

• ..how many Americans are paying attention.
• …how many Americans are smart enough to connect the dots
• …how many still want the United States to be the bastion of individual liberty it was designed to be, and
• …how many American care.

1. I know, I know…polls. Still, the polls we have seem to indicate that outgoing, supposedly maligned and detested Donald Trump has a higher approval rating than incoming President Joe Biden…this, despite the news media drooling all over the latter and a pending second impeachment trial against the former, near constant hyper-insulting anti-Trump verbiage from all sides, and his own infantile, irresponsible and unpresidential behavior since the election. This itself is circumstantial evidence that the election was squirrelly.

Of course, one explanation is that Democrats and progressives hated Trump more vociferously than the President’s supporters cared about keeping him in office. In that case, Republicans and conservatives and whatever Trump’s non-Republican, non-conservative fans are have only themselves to blame, regardless of the shenanigans around the vote-counting.

I stated here many times that I did not believe a President could be elected based on hate. I guess I was wrong.

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