U.S. Society

The New York Times Really and Truly Published This…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…to which the total and irrefutable rebuttal is…

Observations:

  • Incredible.
  • If someone believes this, then they are by definition too inattentive, ill-informed, dishonest of stupid to have what they write published in the New York Times.
  • Not only does bias make you stupid, it makes you willing to display to the whole world how biased and stupid you are.
  • Why would anyone trust the Times after this, or any paper that published such an undeniable attempt to erase not just history, but recent history?
  • The headline is pure gaslighting. A reader who hasn’t had her brain wiped like in “Paycheck” will think, “Wait…did I imagine the entire campaign against Trump for at least two years before the election being based on his being a fascist, Hitler II? I must have…the Times says that Trump vilifying political opponents is unique and unprecedented.
  • How long does the mainstream media think it can keep doing this before virtually no one takes them seriously at all?

Major League Baseball Asks What This “Integrity” Is That We Speak Of…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Even though the stupid All Star Home Run Derby was the night before, last night’s Major League Baseball All Star Game, which was allegedly baseball at its best, was decided by another home run derby, this one called a “swing-off.” The game’s nine innings ended in a tie, see, after an unprecedented comeback by the American League, which had trailing by six runs with just three innings to go against the National League’s best pitchers. This set up the game for a thrilling finish, like, say, Carlton Fisk hitting the ball out in the 12th inning of Game Six of the 1975 World Series, but no.

The 95th All-Star Game in Atlanta was settled by a “home run swing-off” to settle the tie. Worse still, the game’s MVP award was given to Kyle Schwarber of the National League, based on how he performed in the “swing-off” (I can’t believe I’m writing this), not in the part of the night known as “a baseball game.”

By the time Rob Manfred, the Worst Baseball Commissioner Ever Not Named Bud Selig , is through making up rules and gimmicks, baseball fields will have fun obstacles—you, know, gnome heads, water hazards and little twisty chutes?—like in miniature golf. He wants to make the game entertaining for people who are bored by baseball….you know, like him.

All of this is because the mega-millionaire players stopped wanting to actually play hard in the iconic exhibition game—might get injured, lose a big contact—and managers were pressured into not playing to win but rather treating the game like an elementary school Halloween parade, where every kid in costume gets a moment in the metaphorical sun (the games aren’t played in the daytime anymore, like they were when kids could watch their favorite players). So pitchers never pitch more than an inning, maybe two for the starters, and players all get an at-bat, but that means that if the game ends in a tie, one or both teams will have no players left. Behold! The stupid “swing-off,” which is even less baseball than the “zombie runner” gimmick used to break ties in the regular season. It had never been used before.

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Oh So NOW the Axis Cares About Ethics!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

One of the most important and brave missions of the second Trump administration is its determination to root out the “Deep State,” or to be less portentious about it, to eliminate as many entrenched lifetime partisans, almost all progressive, Democrat and left-leaning, as possible.

What we witnessed in Trump’s first term was a literal sabotaging of democracy and the Constitution by furious partisan hacks and activists who were just certain that they knew what was best for the country, and if they had to accomplish it by cheating, manufacturing fake scandals and obstructing the President by any means necessary, so be it. Having succeed, as demonstrated by the dubious election of 2020, these nascent totalitarians were further emboldened. Next we got the passionate, Soviet-style effort to lock Trump up before he could be re-elected, the excessive political prosecutions of the J-6 idiots, the further weaponizing of the Justice Department to intimidate dissenters (as in threatening parents who dared to challenge woke school boards), and the Puppet Presidency. Who knows what would have been in store if the Left’s babbling, DEI, empty pants suit Presidential candidate with her anti-free speech knucklehead running mate had squeaked into the White House? Perish the thought.

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So Was Biden Lying, or What?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

The word “lie,” one of the more basic terms in the ethics field, has been thoroughly blurred by a malign combination of ignorance, poor analytical skills, and partisan rhetorical dishonesty. A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of facts and truth in order to deceive. Genuine mistakes aren’t lies. Deliberate hyperboles made for effect but still obvious exaggerations are not lies. Jokes are not lies. Delusions aren’t lies. Opinions are not lies. Asserting a belief that one cannot reasonably know to be true is not a lie. A broken promise is not a lie if the promise was made sincerely. A prediction that does not prove accurate is not a lie. One contradicting what he or she once asserted as a strongly held belief does not prove hypocrisy—a variety of lie—if the individual has generally changed his or her belief in the interim.

In his brief interview with The New York Times last week former President Biden said that he orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term. Those who have suggested that the Presidential autopen was used without his knowledge by aides for such edicts are “liars,” Biden said.

“I made every decision,” Biden insisted.

What value is that interview? First, we know that Biden lies to enhance his own reputation: surely he wouldn’t admit that he was a cardboard cut-out POTUS if that is indeed what he became. Given what we know about Biden’s mental state, he may believe he made every decision, even if he didn’t. If fact, how would he know one way or the other?

“Trump Is Having an Unethical Week” Sunday Continues With This Foolishness…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Wait, what? If this is accurate, and I hope it’s not, someone has gone loco at the State Department. Reports say that the State Department, presumably with the assent or at the behest of President Trump, has sanctioned Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestine.  This freezes any assets Albanese has in the US and restricts her travel to the U.S.

As justification for the sanctions, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

Albanese is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University and teaches a course on “humanitarian, legal and political responses to the Palestinian forced displacement” as a non-resident professor at a number of foreign universities. Albanese worked for  two years at the UN Development Programme in Morocco as well as four years in Geneva as a human rights officer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Outside of the UN, she provides research and legal assistance on migration and asylum seekers for the think tank called “Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development,” and co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine, a group of experts and scholars engaged in the issue of Israel and Palestine.

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Ugh. Is This The Most Unpresidential, Unethical and Stupid Trump Outburst Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is it the most unpresidential and stupid outburst by any President ever?

There is no excuse for this. I guarantee the Trump Deranged on my Facebook feed will be wetting themselves over this. It’s proof that Trump is senile! It shows that he’s insane! It proves he’s Hitler! No, it only proves once again that Trump has a flat learning curve and no self-restraint, that he’s his own worst enemy, that he’s petty and foolish and can’t resist demonstrating just how petty and foolish when it suits his mood.

The nation doesn’t have time for his silly feuds. He doesn’t have political capital to throw away like this, either. That post isn’t just punching down, it’s punching WAY down: Rosie O’Donnell is nobody, a has-been, washed up, irrelevant. And she’s in Ireland! Trump gives her the publicity she craves by pretending that she’s significant: surely he understands the Streisand Effect by now.

Trump can’t take away anyone’s citizenship on a whim; he sounds like an idiot when he announces fantasies like this. Ann Althouse writes, “If it’s a joke, he shouldn’t be making that joke. He has too much power. If it’s not a joke, it’s terrible. I know he’s much more confident — to the point of overreaching as political theater — the second time around and after his 4 years in the wilderness, but he needs to channel himself toward true greatness, not get entangled in this kind of smallness.”

Yeah, that too.

On the Supreme Court, Conflicts, and Cashing In

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Embarrassing and hyper-partisan as it was, Senator Whitehouse’s rant on the Senate floor last week was not entirely without its valid points. He is right that the U.S. Supreme Court has been having too many ethics breakdowns (the leaking of Justice Alito’s draft of the Dobbs opinion was one of them) and as I noted in the EA piece, (AGAIN) there is no defending Clarence Thomas. He is not, however, the only Justice with some ‘splainin’ to do, as Ricky so often said to Lucy.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson published a memoir shortly after being placed on the Supreme Court as a DEI coup, though she hadn’t really done anything to justify such an ego trip. “Lovely One” is now going for half-price on Amazon, but Jackson received a $893,750 advance for the book reported $2 million in profits last year. Since there is no indication that the memoir is flying off the shelves, the numbers are puzzling. Penguin Random House will soon be publishing Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book and it paid her a $2 million advance. Why? The majority of the country can’t name a single Supreme Court justice, but the ones who are willing to cash in are receiving celebrity level book advances. [Full disclosure: the book I co-authored with Ed Larson was also published by Random House, in 2007. We received approximately $6.78 each as our advance…okay, a bit more than that.]

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The ABA Doubles Down On An Unethical SCOTUS Ruling

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Begining with Batson v. Kentucky, 476 US. 79 (1986), trial lawyers in both criminal and civil cases have been officially forbidden from exercising peremptory challenges to potential jurors based on the prospective juror’s race or gender on the theory that this violates prospective jurors’ equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a utopian ruling and grandstanding by the Supreme Court in deliberate defiance of the Sixth Amendment right of citizens to a fair trial as well as contradictory to the legal profession’s duty of zealous representation.

The majority in Batson fantasized that in many cases racial or gender bias, positive or negative, is will be likely based on the jurors’ characteristics alone. There is a scene in “Airplane! II” where a man on trial for abusing his ex-wive, and all of the jurors are women nursing babies. The film came out a few years before Batson. Courts have permitted lawyers to strike jurors based on a prospective juror’s age, marital status, disability, or socioeconomic status, but especially since the infection of critical race theory and the destruction of race relations initiated by Barack Obama, the fact that an attorney can’t decide in a particular case that he wants as few blacks/whites/ women men as possible without risking a verdict being overturned or being subjected to a disciplinary complaint is one more way progressives have managed to distort the rule of law.

So, naturally, the American Bar Association, having now become a full member of the Axis of Unethical Conduct, has decided to bolster the Batson decision, which really needs to be ove-turned, For this it relies on its controversial and arguably unconstitutional Model Rule 8.4 (g) (which Ethics Alarms has been discussing for years), which reads,

“It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law. This paragraph does not limit the ability of a lawyer to accept decline or withdraw from a representation in accordance with Rule 1.16. This paragraph does not preclude legitimate advice or advocacy consistent with these Rules.”

It’s a really bad rule, vague and insidious, which is why only a minority of states have adopted it and why some courts struck it down when their state bars tried. How can any lawyer, or anybody at all, “know” what kind of conduct is going to be found discriminatory today, when, for example, criticizing an incompetent Presidential candidate for sounding like a vaudevillian’s doubletalk routine is likely to be called “racist”? (I’m sorry to keep picking on poor Kamala, but I didn’t nominate her…). But the ABA is now more devoted to the woke overhaul of society than it is law or ethics—see this recent post–so ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 517 was inevitable. The only mystery is what took the ABA so long.

Here’s the gist of it:

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Addendum to “The Supreme Court Rules That The President Is In Charge of the Executive Branch, Just Like the Constitution Always Said.”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

When I wrote the last post, I could not find a link to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sole written dissent in the 8-1 SCOTUS decision today to, you know, let the President of the United States run the Executive Branch, which the Constitution says he controls. Well, I finally did find one here, and the dissent is exactly what you would expect if you’ve read her recent hysterical, legally incompetent rants because her party isn’t getting away with its various efforts to cripple the Trump Administration. She is distinctly echoing the primal scream of frustration that the Axis is emitting because its dreams of a Woke paradise are evaporating by the hour.

She wrote in part, “In my view, this was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground. This case is about whether that action amounts to a structural overhaul that usurps Congress’s policymaking prerogatives — and it is hard to imagine deciding that question in any meaningful way after those changes have happened. Yet, for some reason, this Court sees fit to step in now and release the President’s wrecking ball at the outset of this litigation.”

This is a policy complaint, not a legal one. Remarkably, even the pathetic Justice Sotomayor went along with the majority. The fact that Presidents have sought authority to do what the Constitution makes clear that they already have the power to do does not amend the Constitution. The Court lifted the say because it believed it likely that the President’s reorganization of his own Branch would be found lawful. It’s a good bet, given that the Constitution backs him up and there is no progressive majority on the Court more concerned with blocking Republican policies than following the law.

The coalition of unions and activists that sued to block the cuts said in a statement, “Today’s decision has dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.”

Are you sick of this narrative yet? It’s a grave thret to democracy to allow the elected President of the United Sates do what he said he would do if elected. More…

“This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”

But it is. Nothing in the document requires Congressional approval for Presidential control of his own Branch. The Founders do not mention “federal workers” at all, and envisioned a government that would not have departments and agencies multiplying like rabbits. Jackson’s tell is the use of her term “wrecking ball.” That’s a political bias without relevance to the law or the Constitution. She is the one advocating an abuse of power, not the majority.