U.S. Society

Comment of the Day: “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Oh Yeah, THIS Will Work Out Well: Minnesota Rules That Women Going Bare-Breasted in Public Isn’t Illegal.” There isn’t a thing I could say as an introduction that would improve on it….

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For most of history, the idea of modesty had nothing to do with the idea that the human body or sex was evil.  The idea was that the penis and vagina, as well as the female breasts (the focus of which is the feeding of babies) were indeed focused on reproduction, life giving, holy, and thus reserved from public consumption.  Avoiding public showmanship of the reserved and holy has been a common theme throughout most cultures, religions, and peoples throughout history.  We have a time, place, and occasion for every action in our lives.  Why do we not urinate/defecate in public?  I don’t want to see you do so, and frankly, nor do I want to see your sexual characteristics.

Though this is not a phrase thought well of on this site, we do need to think of children.  There is measurable harm that occurs to children who are exposed to the sexual before puberty.  Modesty, such as not going around bare breasted, is a protection for the children.  We don’t expose sexual characteristics to protect children’s innocence.  Sure, kids know they have these parts, but for the most part, what is not in sight is not emphasized.  We focus on teaching kids about their private parts and how to avoid excess attention focused on them for their safety.  We don’t want more teen pregnancies, child sexual abuse (which includes inappropriate exposure), or normalizing sexual attraction to minors, especially in the form of pederasty, which focuses on the fully developed sexual characteristics, like breasts, that the judges seem to be suggesting we should allow to be in full display. 

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Reviewing a Book You Haven’t Read? Ethics Verdict: Ethics Villain. Response: “Run Away!”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Boy do I hate this. When I was engrossed in local theater, a reviewer for one of the papers her in Northern Virginia gave a negative review to a show I directed when I had seen her leave at intermission…yet she still “critiqued” the second act. I got her fired, and enjoyed every minute of it. I once read a piece by the founding editor of Slate magazine and long-time “Crossfire” star Michael Kinsey in which he admitted that he had approved book-jacket quotes in his name for books he never read. That was the last time I paid any attention to Michael Kinsey.

New York Magazine has a feature called “Favorite Things” where various people of some stature (that I often have never heard of) write about what they like. A current entry is by Jane Pratt, once a frequent news topic for her Magazine ventures like “Jane.” Pratt’s ‘favorite things” include “The Great Pretender” by Susannah Cahalan, a tome that I haven’t read but might, since it’s about a research ethics scandal, the infamous Rosenhan experiments.

These were the studies supposedly run in the 1970s by Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and seven graduate students presented various (fake) symptoms to psychiatrists, supposedly got committed to psychiatric hospitals, and were then stuck in them despite the fact that none of them actually suffered from mental illnesses. The episodes were recounted and published, causing an uproar and sending the reputation of psychiatry even lower than it already deserved to go. Cahalan debunks the episode, for the “experiments” never actually took place; the whole thing was a hoax.

But Jane Pratt wrote in New York Magazine,

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‘Don’t Be Shy, Just Say What You Really Think, Counsel!’

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

New York lawyer Rahul Dev Manchanda was disbarred in 2024 by the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court. The primary charge was that he persisted in using racist and anti-Semitic language in his disciplinary complaints against other lawyers and judges. “Words fail to capture the severity and extent” of the lawyer’s bigotry, the appeals court wrote in its order.

Among other offenses, Manchanda was found to have,

  • Filed documents with “unacceptably bigoted language” in state and federal courts and “a panoply” of agencies.

  • “Used intolerably vile and foul language and divulged privileged information” when responding to clients’ online complaints.

  • “Used racist, antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic statements while holding himself out as a well-trained and extremely experienced lawyer” in New York City.

  • “Repeatedly made meritless, frivolous and vexatious arguments well beyond the point at which he should have known better.” His “targets for such filings have grown to include this very disciplinary proceeding and collateral attacks that he has launched on it in state and federal courts.”

No weenie he, the lawyer is striking back. Manchanda has now sued the Attorney Grievance Committee for New York’s First Judicial Department, seeking $20 million in damages, which he claims he would have made in his practice over the next 20 years.

Yeeeeah.….

The suit alleges that the lawyer was disbarred because he is “a Republican, conservative, Christian values lawyer” who is Indian-American, and that the discipline he has been subjected to was “a simple, draconian, defamatory, slanderous, libelous death sentence, simply for exercising protected speech” against “activist extreme feminist and lesbian judges, racist law clerks, LGBTQ+ and biased court administrators, who routinely would lose his motions, sabotage his filings” and “arbitrarily and capriciously threaten him with contempt or arrest.” Manchanda has been persecuted, his suit claims, because his actions targeted agencies in which “the vast majority of New York City government employees” are “predominantly leftist, communist, Democrat, … of African American descent, with predominantly Jewish supervisors, as well as LGBTQ+ activists and extremists.”

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Ethical Standards Needed, Precedents Lacking

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the gap between a Presidential election where the office is turned over to a new POTUS, and especially a President from the opposing party, a lot of partisan mischief can be done before the lame duck limps out the door. This is legal, of course: every President has a right to serve four full years. However, when the exiting Chief Executive deliberately acts to throw obstacles in the way of the People’s Choice or lock in policies that the incoming President is certain to oppose, the conduct is unethical in my view. It is giving a metaphorical middle finger to the newly elected President.

Ethics Alarms discussed several instances between the November election and January 20 in which whoever was pulling poor Joe’s marionette strings engaged in particularly egregious examples of this kind of divisive conduct, and more have been uncovered since.

Here’s one that made me do a Danny Thomas spit: In the last days of Biden’s administration, a $89 billion, 25-year grant was awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research. The nonprofit, which “operate[s] exclusively for the benefit of” the University of California system, according to its tax filings has never raised or spent any money since it was formed in 2022. The new regime at NIH is investigating, as well they might, and the massive grant is likely to be cancelled.

Then there’s the board that oversees the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. On January 17, 2025, “Biden” stacked the Holocaust Museum board with Democrats, appointing Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, Susan Rice, Biden’s director of Domestic Policy Council of the United States, Tom Perez, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Anthony Bernal, who was an advisor to former First Lady Jill Biden, and best of all, Doug Emhoff, whose claim to prominence is that he married Kamala Harris. Trump dismissed all of them last week, but he shouldn’t have had to.

The Axis is always blubbering about “democratic norms”: one norm I would like to see solidly entrenched in tradition is for Presidents ending their term to do nothing that will interfere with the agenda of the leader the electorate has made clear that it wants to shepherd the government. That shouldn’t be too hard.

Is There Any Way To Know If The Public Is Turning Against Trump As the Axis Claims?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

So far, I can’t find any. The Axis news media has made it clear that it is still determined to spin everything to undermine this President’s agenda to the point of flat-out deceit and misrepresentation. (I saw several other news platforms this morning claiming that Trump had said that he “didn’t know” if he would uphold the Constitution, a Big Lie, as I explained here.) In addition to polls being both incompetent and dishonest for at least a decade, there is an unforgivable lack of context in interpreting them, as I noted in this post.

Meanwhile, from the Right, I am reading claims that the polls showing Trump voter remorse are simply fake. Charlie Martin, one of the more rational pundits at PJ Media, writes in part,

…recent focus groups clearly demonstrate that Trump voters aren’t experiencing an ounce of buyer’s remorse. The mainstream media can push their fake polls and doomsday economic forecasts all they want—Trump’s base isn’t budging.

During a revealing segment on Fox News, Sean Hannity highlighted what the liberal media doesn’t want you to see: a focus group conducted by CNN’s Van Jones showing unwavering support for President Trump. Pollster Robert Cahaly, the founder of Trafalgar Group, exposed the left’s transparent strategy, explaining how they’re trying to drive a wedge between Trump and congressional Republicans.

“People are not regretting voting for Donald Trump. And then to watch their pollster say, ‘Yeah, if the election were held today, Trump would still wipe the floor with Kamala Harris,’ or probably any other Democrat, for that matter,” Hannity pointed out. “Why are they doing that? Are they trying to divide Trump with congressional Republicans and senators to stymie his agenda?”

“That’s exactly why they’re doing it,” Cahaly revealed. “They realize that Washington is full of political animals. And if they can convince the people in Congress that Trump is somehow becoming more toxic, then they can damage his agenda.”

The playbook is painfully obvious. The same pollsters who spectacularly failed to predict Trump’s electoral success are now doubling down on their flawed methodology. 

Well, is that fair? If polling can be distorted by rigged group selection, focus groups and “man-in-the-street” interviews are even more unreliable. I’m sorry to have to say it (all right, no I’m not), but Sean Hannity is not exactly a paradigm of objectivity. The theory that the Axis would use rigged polls as a “by any mean possible” weapon to stop Orange Hitler makes sense based on past experience, but that isn’t the same as evidence.

In a democracy, having a sense of what the public is thinking is important. It doesn’t mean that elected officials should rush to follow public opinion whatever it may be, since a) the public is substantially emotional, ignorant, selfish and/or stupid, which is why we have a republic rather than a pure democracy, b) they are elected officials theoretically because they are more reliable and trustworthy than the hoi pollois, and c) public opinion is constantly being warped by bad actors, also known as “journalists.”

But is it too much to ask that some trustworthy, unbiased, competent organization can provide a reliable snapshot of what the public’s view of this administration’s epic first three months is? Apparently, yes, it is too much to ask. All we are left with is confirmation bias.

I resent it.

No, President Trump Did NOT Say That He “Didn’t Know” If He Had To Uphold the Constitution…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I’m sorry that I used the “However Much Contempt You Have For [Fill in the blank], It’s Not Enough…. already today, because the unethical Axis news media earned the introduction today repeatedly. The prize goes to Mediaite (and others) who pulled a Trump answer out of context to claim that “Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’” The exchange was clarified in the body of the article, but, as Mediaite knows well, the anti-Trump crazies largely wouldn’t bother to read the whole story (it’s hard to read with all that mouth-foam on the computer screen) and just cited the headline as more evidence that Trump is Hitler.

Reading the exchange, it is clear as crystal that Trump was expressing uncertainty about the degree to which various sections of the Bill of Rights applies to illegal immigrants and other non-citizens, and, therefore, what upholding the Constitution means in that specific context only. Ethics Alarms expressed uncertainty in the same matter yesterday, but I am not at all in doubt as to whether a President must uphold the Constitution.

The news media is despicable, untrustworthy, unethical and destructive. Enemies of democracy, the public, the people, and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I have no idea what can be done about it. Partisan, corrupt unethical law firms can be targeted and punished, indoctrination factories pretending to be independent institutions of higher education can be hobbled and discredited, but they don’t have specific Bill of Right’s provisions singling them out for immunity from government action.

The New York Times Editorial Board today issued a dishonest, hysterical editorial employing hyperbole, massaged facts and biased analysis to accuse the President of having “wounded this country, and there is no guarantee that we will fully recover” while comparing the first 100 days of his term to” the post-Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Watergate and other times.” This, from a newspaper that saw nothing untoward about unelected ideologues using a demented President, whom the Times helped elect, as its beard, and its favorite party employing politicized prosecutions of its primary opposition to hold power through undemocratic means. You can read it: [Gift link!]I don’t deem it worthy of fisking, frankly. The Times editors are part of the same dangerous corruption that Mediaite’s hacks engage in, just from a loftier perch.

May Ethics Blooms, 5/3/25

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I really don’t know what I’m going to do with my Trump Deranged friends. They literally are acting nuts; they don’t make any sense. The Axis allies—journalists, scholars, Democratic politicians, lawyers, ethicists <sigh!> and pundits are making even less sense, so there’s no one to pull the unhinged back onto their door-frames. In the Open Forum there was some discussion of Rep. Omar (D-Somalia) repeatedly telling a reporter to “fuck off.” This is not a sign of good mental health. Oh, heck, let me scroll though my Facebook feed and see what madness is afoot…Ah! Here’s a meme lacking juuuust a bit of context:

Like so much else I see from this clown corner, it’s too dumb to respond to. Then there are these certifiably idiotic political cartoons, which Steve Witherspoon linked to in the Open Forum. They reinforce my conviction, often stated here, that the entire genre of political cartooning is an anachronism and a vehicle for shallow thinkers to have their infantile analysis given undue gravitas by readers as dim as they are.

Meanwhile…

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Unethical Quote of the Day: The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“These rallies will focus on the importance of the rule of law, judicial independence and the need for lawyers to be free from the fear of retribution as a result of who they represent. The rallies will also involve the reaffirmation of our professional oaths.”

—One of the many alleged “ethics lawyers” promoting lawyer rallies in over 50 cities in today’s “Law Day of Action” protesting the Trump Presidency.

Too bad my sock drawer is in such bad shape…this group has mostly cheered on the Biden Administrations’ lawfare against Trump and the J-6 rioters as well as the politicized bar discipline inflicted on Trump’s lawyers. It has shrugged off large law firms capitulating to pressure from the Left and corporate clients not to represent conservative causes and public figures (so much for lawyers sincerely opposing “fear of retribution as a result of who they represent”), and members have remained silent while partisan judges have overstepped their authority to interfere with the lawful exercise of Presidential power.

There is no more hypocritical profession in American today than lawyers.

Important Note on the Newsmedia’s War on President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday several sources, citing polls, felt that it was significant that “President Trump’s approval rating after 100 days is the lowest of any President after that period since the beginning of the polling era.”

This is deceit. The distinction is significant indeed, but not for the reasons the news media wants the public to believe.

Every elected President except for Donald Trump in his first term begins with a substantial so-called “halo effect” where a strong majority of the public approves of him because they approve of the institution of the Presidency, its earlier, greatest occupants, and the system of government that put him, and them, in the White House. In his first term, Trump was unethically robbed of this “norm” (Hey, I thought it was Trump who shattered democratic norms?!) by the coordinated attack on his legitimacy and the Electoral College along with the false “Russian collusion” narrative promoted by the Axis of Unethical Conduct.

The President after the 2024 election had something approaching the halo—call it a half-halo—because the public was so disgusted with Joe Biden and because Trump won the popular vote. Nevertheless, his favorability was greatly diminished compared to past POTUSes because the despicable Democratic Party smear that he was a new Hitler-on-the-hoof had a large proportion of the public tainted with hate and fear.

Trump is almost alone among Presidents in that his first hundred days were occupied with substantive action, much of it bold and transformative. As soon as a new President does something, anything, he will likely lose support. Trump has done more in his first hundred days, by far, than any previous Chief Executive with the arguable exception of Franklin Roosevelt, who had the benefit of taking over a catastrophic situation in which doing anything was deemed an improvement over the Depression policies of Herbert Hoover, which could be fairly described as “Be patient, it will all get better soon.”

FDR, therefore, is a distinguishable exception. Other than him, Trump is unique. His Hundred Days have been unusually bold and productive. Of course that loses him polling points.

One of those partisan-biased Presidential historians like Douglass Brinkley could explain this, and if they had any integrity, they would. But they don’t.

David Hogg is the Ethics Dunce Democrats Deserve

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Anti-Gun Twerp David Hogg is catalyzing a split in the Democratic Party because he is ethically inert. Well, good. The Party asked for it, and deserves to get it.

The current ugly rift has occurred because Hogg, who was elected a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in an absurd party meeting in which everyone present agreed that the main reason Kamala Harris isn’t President today is because too many American are sexist and racist, has made it clear that he will use his leadership position in the party help defeat Democratic Party candidates and current elected officials who do not meet his standards of “by any means possible” progressive activism.

DNC Chair Ken Martin protests, saying, “Let me be unequivocal: No DNC officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary election, whether on behalf of an incumbent or a challenger.Voters should decide who our primary nominees are, not DNC leadership. Our role is to serve as stewards of a fair, open and trusted process, not to tilt the scales.”

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