Today is July 1, which is always treated across the United States as the gateway to a long weekend and the Fourth of July, and little more. This year, it is the run up to the 250th Anniversary of out nation’s founding. July 1 is also, however, the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the most important and most deadly battle of the many important and deadly conflicts in the American Civil War. The two American armies that clashed in the Pennsylvania town sustained more than 50,000 casualties on the Gettysburg battlefield, which may be the saddest and noblest place in America. It is also reputed to be the most haunted, which considering the number of souls lost between July 1 and 3 in 1863, shouldn’t surprise anyone.
[Digression: The Gettysburg Hotel is allegedly haunted, and the proprietors designate specific rooms as haunted. The rent for those rooms is less than the other rooms because, I was told when I called to inquire regarding reservations, “guests tend not to stay the whole night in those rooms.]
Our 250th celebration is an appropriate time to remember Gettysburg, because it is one of those landmark events in American history that could have so easily turned out differently, and if it had, we would never have made to the Centennial, never mind the 250th. The fact that the North prevailed was due to a confluence of random events, the essence of moral luck.
If you have not made at least one pilgrimage to the battlefield, you owe it to yourself, to your family, and to the memory of the combatants, to go. You need not swelter in July. Gettysburg is just as inspiring in the Spring or Fall.
CNN’s summary of yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling that President Trump could fire heads of Executive Branch agencies went like this: “Supreme Court expands Presidential power.” That’s absolutely false. The ruling held that the law blocking Presidents from firing heads of agencies in the Executive Branch was unconstitutional, as many legal scholars have argued for decades, and that the 91-year-old decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had upheld the law at the center of the dispute, was wrongly decided and violated the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government. The Constitution has always held that the President, not Congress and not the Supreme Court, has the power to manage the Executive Branch. Fans of judicial activism and our “shadow government” by unelected agencies liked to call this the “unitary executive” theory, as if the idea that the President should have control over the his own branch of government is just a theory. It’s not a theory. It’s the law. SCOTUS was not “expanding” Presidential power by affirming it.
The Supreme Court expanded its own power when it green-lighted a Constitutional amendment in the form of an unconstitutional New Deal law.
The news media, your friends, and even some Supreme Court Justices seem to misunderstand the essence of the judicial review thingy, as well as the Constitutional role of the Supreme Court itself. It doesn’t help that some of the Justices on the Court have similar misconceptions. The two immigration decisions hostile to the Left’s open borders agenda handed down yesterday are causing SCOTUS to be condemned when all they have done is rule that the current administration of the law is legal. And the news media—fuggetaboudit.
Notable was the caterwauling over the Supreme Court ruling this week that the openly abused and distorted Temporary Protected Status really and truly is supposed to be “temporary.” Here is Jake Tapper of CNN “objectively” grilling DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin over deportations of Haitians with that “temporary protected status”:
Tapper: “Will you be deporting all of them?Will they be all deported back to their home countries, Haiti and Syria? And when will these deportations start? Will it be immediately?”
Mullin: “Well, Jake, first of all, Temporary Protected Status was never intended to be permanent. And there’s a lot of people that came over here 15, 20 years ago underneath TPS that’s already changed their status.The whole time these individuals have been here underneath the Temporary Protected Status, they could have applied for a visa. They could have applied for LPR. They could have applied for different directions. But the status itself can be ended in its name itself by saying temporary.”
Tapper: “The Trump administration’s argument is that this was only supposed to last 18 months. My understanding of how the process works is, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has the discretion to extend it if the U.S. State Department says that the countries that these people are from are still considered unsafe, which is why they were afforded TPS status to begin with. Is it the position of the Trump administration that Haiti is a safe country to send these people to?”
Mullin: “Well, we take a lot of things in consideration. Secretary Rubio, the President and I have had multiple conversations about this, obviously… The qualification isn’t quite just that simple. And keep in mind, a lot of these individuals haven’t been here 18 months. They have been here 18 years. Some of them have been here 20 years, 30 years. They have had plenty of time to reestablish their status inside the United States. They have just chosen not to. Then there’s some that has been here the underneath the Biden administration that took advantage of an open border. And those individuals didn’t really come over here because they needed protective status. They came over here because they were taking advantage of a weak leadership. So what we want, and the President has made this very clear, those that are coming to this country legally, they need to be able to contribute to the United States, not be a burden on the taxpayers. And so we are continuing looking at our Temporary Protected Status. Those individuals that do need assistance because of the country they’re in, we’re always looking at them. There isn’t a more generous country in the world than the United States, but we don’t want people to take advantage of it.”
Tapper: “But do you maintain that it is safe in Haiti to send these people back?…The reason I ask is because I heard Stephen Miller, who is driving a lot of this, say that Haiti is safe for Haitians. And I just looked at the State Department’s website, and they have a level four do not travel advisory for Haiti just from a few months ago, from April, and it says, ‘Violent crime is rampant. The expansion of gang organized crime and terrorist activity has led to widespread violence. Crimes involving firearms are common. Crimes include robbery, carjacking, sexual assault and kidnappings for ransom.’ That doesn’t sound safe to me.”
Mullin: “Well, that “do not travel” is not for Haitians.That’s do not travel for the United States, because they are kidnapping or trying to kidnap individuals from the United States because they feel like their family has the money to pay the ransom.”
Tapper: “I understand that. But based on everything I have read, including the U.N. and Human Rights Watch, it doesn’t sound safe for Haitians. More than 8,100 killings documented last year, those weren’t Americans. Haiti is among the top five countries with the highest rates of rape and sexual abuse, with more than 1,200 cases of sexual violence last year. That’s not Americans; 1.4 million people have been displaced. Those aren’t Americans.”
Fascinating! Because of woke logic like Tapper’s, the Supreme Court decision that it was long past the time when Haitians and Syrians permitted to enter the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status based on conditions of decades ago could be told to go home is being called racist and “cruel” by the Axis of Unethical Conduct. The sad (and apparently permanent) fact that Haiti cannot get itself civilized or secure does not make everyone on that perpetually dysfunctional island nation the responsibility of the United States forever. Nor is the reality that Haiti probably will never be safe for Haitians the concern of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The job of the Court is to determine what laws require and prohibit,, not whether one is a good law or a bad law, or whether it is being administered in the most kind and caring manner possible. What is Tapper advocating? He seems to think that SCOTUS should have ruled that all Haitians have a right to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, as long as the U.S. is safer than Haiti. If that’s true for Haiti, it’s true for Syria. If it’s true for Syria, it’s true for Gaza. Somalia. Ukraine. Heck, it’s true for the U.K. If that is the policy our nation wants to embrace, crazy and irresponsible as it is, fine—one of the Communist wackos who won her primary in New York this month advocates that policy—but it is not the Supreme Court’s role to render such an edict. The Court’s job is to declare whether it is illegal for the U.S. to end Temporary Protected Status decades after the events that caused Haitians and Syrians to be temporarily admitted into the U.S.
The Texas State Board of Education has voted to make Bible passages required reading in public schools. The GOP dominated education board voted to pass a new required reading list on last week. Now required literature includes sections of the Book of Exodus for fifth graders, “The Shepherd’s Psalm” for seventh graders, and more. Naturally, Democrats, progressives and Muslims who want the U.S. to become an Islamic society like England and much of Europe are freaking out. And, also naturally, conservatives can’t keep their mouths sufficiently shut to give the law a chance when it gets to the Supreme Court, which it certainly will.
A Republican member of the Texas education board, Julie Pickren, told The Texas Tribune before the 9-5-1 vote that the readings will give students “important insight into the moral and philosophical traditions that have shaped Western civilization. When students engage directly with original writings, speeches, sermons, and foundational texts, they can evaluate ideas and develop a deeper understanding of the principles that have shaped the USA and Texas.”
Them’s fightin’ words to the Left. Board member Evelyn Brooks objected to the list, saying,
“Teachers need to have their autonomy. They’ve been selecting books for decades, for years. This is nothing new. This is not a new concept to teachers. We are simply giving them a mandated list, which I believe is unconstitutional, but regardless of what I believe, let’s not take their autonomy away.”
That isn’t a very persuasive argument either. Democrats and the teachers unions have turned the public schools into progressive indoctrination centers. Today’s teachers can’t be trusted to have “autonomy.” Mandated reading lists are not unconstitutional (Julie’s an ignoramus); even if the Bible section of the list gets struck down, we should take teacher autonomy away from the mountains to the prairie, to the oceans white with foam.
Ethics Quote of the Month: “If you want to hate America, watch the news. If you want to love America, drive through it.” Unidentified German World Cup fan and first time U.S. visitor.
The conservative news media have been writing a lot about the positive reactions of foreign World Cup fans as they finally get to experience our country first hand. Because of our hopelessly biased and partisan journalism, in which one side holds that the U.S. can do no wrong and the other paints the U.S. as a racist, sexist, land-stealing hellhole ruled over by a mad orange king, I have no idea how accurate this “surprise” is. Bill Maher seems to believe it, but then who can trust Bill Maher?
“Freddy” is a young German soccer fan who has become an internet sensation as he joins Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Alexis de Tocqueville as heavily-read foreign commentators who documented their first road trips across the United States. His viral social media posts have attracted tens of millions of readers as Freddy has raved about Americana like Waffle House , Taco Bell, Buc-ee’s, Bass Pro Shops, the size of American homes and more. Freddy the German is not the only one, however. World Cup visitors from Europe, Asia, Africa and South America have hit social media with similar shock and awe, full of wonder at Walmart and Costco, small town diners, Texas barbecue, the extravagant abundance in grocery stores and the stunning options and variety we take for granted in the most prosperous country in world history.
“The average American rarely pauses to consider how extraordinary our country remains today. We gripe about suburban sprawl while living in homes that would be considered luxurious by the standards of much of the world. We roll our eyes at chain restaurants that millions of foreign tourists eagerly seek out. We treat abundance as ordinary because abundance is all most of us have ever known. That familiarity breeds a certain blindness.But the World Cup tourists are not blind. They see an America that remains dynamic, entrepreneurial and welcoming. They encounter strangers eager to offer travel advice. They find communities proud to share local traditions. They discover a country that is far friendlier than the caricatures would suggest.” The America they are experiencing bears little resemblance to the negative stereotypes they had long imbibed back home.”
Yeah, but that Reflecting Pool still isn’t right…
Meanwhile:
1. Somebody sent me the Google AI’s description of this blog. It reads,
“Ethics Alarms is a popular ethics and commentary blog founded by lawyer and ethicist Jack Marshall. It focuses on examining daily news, politics, and pop culture to analyze right from wrong. The site’s name originates from Marshall’s concept of “ethics alarms”—the gut feelings, twinges of conscience, and cautions that trigger when faced with an ethical dilemma. It evaluates current events, politics, pop culture, and sports through a traditional, often conservative-leaning ethical lens.
Criticism: Detractors sometimes find the author’s perspective dogmatic, combative, and inflexible.
The Tone: It is conversational yet highly opinionated, combative, and staunchly “no-nonsense”. The writer is quick to point out “Tales of the Great Stupid” and the perceived decline in cultural reasoning.
The Content: Marshall dissects everything from political bias and sportsmanship to the ethical implications of horror movies like It Follows.
Community & Rules: The site encourages open discussion. The creator has strict Rule Book criteria, often calling out “rationalizations” and logical fallacies used by both public figures and commenters. The sometimes polarizing blog is designed to help readers recognize, debate, and improve their ethical reasoning skills. It breaks down complex moral dilemmas and often features categories like “Ethics Quizzes” and “Ethics Heroes.”
Not bad! I never thought of Ethics Alarms as “popular,” however. And I had forgotten that I had written about “It Follows”!
2. Can “The View” be called a news program when it disseminates false information and rather than informing viewers, makes them less informed? Last week the ladies unanimously claimed that “no one wants voter ID laws.” In fact, a 2025 survey by Pew found that 83% of U.S. adults favor photo ID mandates. Even assuming error because polls are biased, inaccurate and generally suck, I think it’s fair to say that “no one” is untrue. And stupid. The ladies also claimed that “half” of America would be prevented from voting if the SAVE act was signed into law. Whoopi Goldberg led the discussion of the “SAVE America Act,” saying “He [Trump] torpedoed the [housing] bill because he wants another bill signed. And it seems to me no one wants to sign this bill.”
Whoopi never got out of high school, so she can perhaps be forgiven for not understanding how laws get made, but shouldn’t a host on a news show know that? Only the President signs the bills into law. It is unethical to criticize what you don’t understand. Am I being polarizing to say that?
3. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently published a report, “A Broadside for the Nation: Preparing College Students for Informed Citizenship,” calling for mandatory college civics courses. Teaching civics before college would seem to be a better idea, since 18-year-olds can vote and not everyone goes to college. The Council claims the requirement would help the nation’s future “schoolteachers, business leaders, professionals, and government leaders.” Gee, ya think?
[I suspect that you’re going to see a lot more of that crazy lady who freaks out on Tippi Hedren in “The Birds” over the next few months…]
Let’s see: the hysterical, Trump Deranged Axis of Unethical Conduct is rooting for Iran, calls Israel genocidal because it is fighting Gaza, is supporting a woman-abusing former (?) Nazi admirer who makes the President’s truth-telling skills seem like Honest Abe’s by comparison, has extolled a kid who stabbed an unarmed white teen to death because the killer is black, worships illegal immigrants, cheers the assassinations of Charlie Kirk and an insurance executive who was shot in the back, opposes voter ID, believes that trying to unscum the Reflecting Pool, which has been an embarrassment for decades, as D.C. becomes a national destination for our 250th anniversary as a nation is an outrage and just selected an openly anti-American, anti-Semite Congressional candidate in New York who wants to abolish borders, police, prisons and deportation even for violent criminals.
Did anyone expect the Axis to be anything but critical of Trump’s Great American State Fair, or to even try to exhibit Fair Fairness in a spirit of union, comity and national pride?
The event opened in D.C. three days ago. The weather in the area has been sweltering or rainy. Never mind: the Axis media has already pronounced it a failure. The Daily Beast—ah, how I remember the days when, as with the Huffington Post, that site was a semi-reliable source of useful news and commentary from left-of-center!—pronounced Trump’s fair as “tacky.” All state fairs and carnivals are tacky: that’s why they are fun. The Atlantic grumps, “The Great American State Fair Isn’t Very Great.” Lots of headlines about “sparse crowds”: Gee, I wonder if the rain (the planned Vanilla Ice concert was rained out yesterday), the heat, and the news media telling people to stay away might have some effect on that. This morning, a Sunday when crowds would be large under decent conditions, it’s raining. When the rain stops this afternoon, the Mall will be soggy and hot.
One of the most relentless of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends reposted this whine from a Smithsonian employee:
I’m adding that memorable line from “Death Becomes Her” to the Ethics Alarms Hollywood Clip Archive. I don’t think I’ll have much use for it—at least I hope I won’t—but it sure fits here.
In that scene, the awful aging star played by Meryl Streep has just paid a fortune to get dosed with a magic formula that restores youth and guarantees immortality. After she downs the glowing blue elixer, the mysterious woman who provided it adds, “And now a warning…”
American Airlines, Delta, and Southwest have issued a warning to flyers to avoid short skirts and shorts when flying. If a flight emergency forces a plane to land and passengers have to use a slide to “deboard,” the friction from the device can rip a passenger’s skin off.
Oh. Funny, I don’t remember people screaming in all of those airplane movies.
The slides have substances in their composition to maximize sliding speed, as the objective is to save lives, not ensure comfort. I am assuming we never heard of this peril before because those slides aren’t used very often. However, airlines have been in many controversies over dress code enforcement: why wouldn’t they use the “if you want to have your skin ripped off, go ahead, fly like that!” response?
Remember this post, about the fitness model who presented herself at the gate dressed thusly….
…?
Heck, if that stuff about the slides is true, after an emergency landing she would have ended up looking like one of the victims in “The Towering Inferno”!
“Better late than never” is often a rationalization (#35. The Tortoise’s Pass), but in this case, it’s nice to finally know the risk of short shorts and short skirts. I’m still wondering what took so long, however.
This is the EU Commission in Brussels. “It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont told POLITICO, making a justifiable analogy since the upper floors, where housing commissioners worked, kept their air conditioning running while the proles in the lower floors sweltered
Americans wouldn’t stand for this.
Not yet, anyway.
1. Could there be a more throbbing example of the unethical “Let them eat cake!” attitude, though it is more like “Let them jump into rivers and drown!”?
2. Why would anyone trust the EU if its leadership could even consider something like this? Yet this is the same orientation that Communism inflicted on its populations. I saw the end results as well as the brainwashing of the public it required when I had (and I do mean had) to be in Moscow in the Nineties for two weeks.
3. Bernie Sanders honeymooned in Moscow. What does this tell you? And he’s being credited with remaking the Democratic Party, along with fellow useful idiot AOC.
4. Yet young voters in droves rushed to the polls in New York to elect exactly the kinds of candidates who hold the “government knows best” and “Know your place, serfs!” world view that is antithetical to American traditions, values and thought.
5. The Democratic Party, now being increasingly dominated by socialists and Communists, is counting on Trump Derangement to let it triumph in November, while its policies, and the even worse policies supported by the Democratic Socialists, are ostentatiously irresponsible and anti-American. Good plan!
Have I mentioned that here? I think I have; I think about 500 times since October, 2026. For example, there is this recent scandal out of Denver, where the Rocky Mountain High makes people woke and unethical, apparently.
The Denver City Council voted overwhelmingly against a lease for Key Lime Air last December after learning the charter airline had contracted with federal immigration authorities to transport illegal immigrant detainees. Of course Key Lime had to be punished for working with ICE to, you know, enforce that law thingy. How dare they?
That vote created a problem, however: it violated the law. Federal Aviation Administration rules bar cities from treating airlines unequally based on political grounds or any other reason. The council’s pro-illegal immigration action put $90 million in federal grant funding for the airport in jeopardy. According to multiple sources, City Attorney Miko Brown attended a meeting last January 6 with airport and Mayor’s Office officials including airport Chief Executive Phil Washington, airport attorney Everett Martinez, the mayor’s interim chief of staff Emily Garnett, and other senior airport and mayoral staff. They agreed on a cover-up plan that involved concocting an investigation into the airline’s safety record, so that could be cited as the reason for denying the lease, thus preserving the $90 million grant.
Imagine: not a single official in the room had the integrity to say, “Hey, we can’t do this. It’s wrong!” Huh. I wonder why…
It is a rhetorical question.
Ah, but when Martinez was later placed on administrative leave, he filed a federal lawsuit against the city and spilled the metaphorical beans. The suit alleges that Brown suggested at the January meeting that Denver International Airport investigate Key Lime Air’s safety record. (Martinez could justify revealing in his suit what would otherwise be a breach of lawyer-client confidentiality by citing the crime-fraud exception, although in my view it doesn’t excuse his participation in the meeting.)
The Supreme Court made three unremarkable, straight-forward rulings yesterday, and the Axis predictably acted as if the Court has banned kissing and ice cream:
A. Hawaii passed a law that a lawful gun owner would have to ask permission to carry a gun on privately owned property that is open to the public. The ruling was condemned by the Brady anti-gun groups, whose president wrote, “I will not mince words: This deeply dangerous majority opinion privileges guns over everything and all people in society.” That’s an interesting way to describe a civil right. The majority simply confirmed that the presumption on private property is that citizens have all their rights until the owner declares otherwise. An owner who doesn’t want guns on his property can prohibit them. Gavin Newsom’s tweet demonstrates his dishonesty: “Gun laws keep people safe. This ruling by Trump’s Supreme Court will only endanger people. If Justice Alito really thinks people need guns to go to the grocery store “for self-defense,” this country is truly broken.” All gun laws are good, so there! And once again, the government doesn’t get to decide when a citizen “needs” a gun.
B. The Court ruled that Temporary Protection Status is temporary. Seems reasonable to me! 350,000 Haitians have come here and stayed based on an earthquake that took place in 2010. The idea of TPR is to allow endangered foreign nationals to come here until a particular peril has passed, and then return home. If Congress wants a different system, it can change it. The Left’s whole case against Trump deciding not to permit TRP squatters to stay forever is to claim that the policy is based on racism. No, it’s based on the principle that a nation should control who it allows to come here, and letting the gate swing open for large numbers of people from cultures antithetical to ours is suicidal.
C. The third case held that non-US. citizens coming in from Mexico need to apply for asylum or start the legal immigration process before showing up at the border or crossing into the U.S. The way the system was administered by the Biden Administration let everyone in who claimed to be a refugee, whereupon they were able to scatter before any determination had been made. “Today Trump’s loyalists in the Supreme Court have joined forces with him to deny immigrants internationally recognized human rights and advance an authoritarian white supremacist agenda,” Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said. The United States of America is not bound by the “internationally recognized” right to ignore borders.
As always, those condemning the SCOTUS rulings won’t read the opinions, and the Axis media won’t explain them without spinning for the Left. Gee: the right to bear arms is a right, temporary doesn’t mean forever, and you have to get permission to get into the country before you get into the country. Stunning. Tyrannical.
But here you do have a recognized right to write about whatever you want…as long as it involves ethics.
Above is the résumé of the woman discussed in today’s earlier post. With this, I have no sympathy for JP Morgan at all. Or Angie, though it can’t be pleasant having your worst moments (or at least one of them) splashed all over the web.
I have done a lot of hiring in my time, and I have vetted a lot of résumés. That one would have set off all my “B.S.” alarms like the Chicago fire, and adding to the things I don’t understand about this mess is that Angie was hired in the first place. Her education credentials are beyond weak, and the stated markers of skill and accomplishment are pure puffery. In cases like this, not only should the employee be fired but whoever hired her should be dumped too. All right, I’ve sometimes taken a flier on applicants who seem to have a certain spark, “un je ne sais quoi” as the French say when they aren’t too hot, and I’ve suffered for it on occasion. However, when someone gets a job and the hiring supervisor says, “OK, I’m going to take a leap of faith with you, but you better not let me down,” that employee has to be on notice that, for example, engaging in public theft during basketball fan riot is not consistent with the admonition. If ever a hire pulsed with a DEI-hire-to-fill-a-DEI-job vibe, this is it.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan seems to have a bit of a culture problem with its personnel decisions, no? Have you been following this story, the viral lawsuit by a JP Morgan employee who alleges that his JP Morgan manager, 37-year-old Lorna Hajdini, drugged him and turned him into a sex slave?
Ethics Alarms 