1. How desperate are Trump Deranged? This bad: a veteran lawyer, scholar and all-around good guy whom I admire and will continue to despite his extreme Trump Derangement symptoms, just wrote on Facebook: “Today’s column by Heather Delaney Reese hits the mark perfectly. The rats are increasingly deserting the Trump moral sinkhole. Not because they’re not rats, but because rats are survivors and they know a sinking ship when they see one.”
Can you guess whom he (and the columnist) is referring to? Yes, it’s Tucker Carlson. He has not been a supporter of Trump for quite a while, and has always been a dishonest, revolting hypocrite and self-serving weasel. It would be hard for me to imagine anyone who would be a worse example to cite in claiming that President Trump’s “moral sinkhole” has cost him or the Republican Party valuable support. Carlson leaving the Republican Party is approximately as much of a blow to the GOP as George Wallace leaving the Democratic Party was in 1968.
Meanwhile, this qualifies as breaking news over at the New York Times: “Images circulated by an activist group reveal bare marble where President Trump’s name once resided. The Kennedy Center previously told a federal judge it had been removed.”
2. Can someone tell me how fake caller IDs being used by robocalls and other pests are legal? I know they are unethical. The same “senior benefit” peddler has called me under false names including “Verizon,” “USMC,” “Department of Agriculture,” and “CVS,” just to name a few.
Being surrounded by raging, reflecting pool-obsessed people seems to be driving everyone around them nuts as well.
A 47-year-old woman was playing pickleball with a man on May 31 at 10 a.m. when they had an argument over who was supposed to get the ball. Subsequent to the game and the dispute, the woman, a registered nurse, jumped between her adversary and her son, who were arguing over the game and the man’s behavior. She then began throttling the man on the head and face with her racket, ostensibly to “protect her son.” She was charged with using “a weapon that can cause serious bodily injury or death,” which is a felony.
It’s crazy out there and getting crazier. Be careful. If pickleball isn’t safe, what is?
Meanwhile:
1. The rest of the story: As I expected but was hoping to be wrong, the 90% woke members of the legal ethics listserv responded to the same hypothesis I posted here with insults, ridicule, denial and ignorance. I particularly upset the mob when I told an angry California lawyer that he comments on alcoholism indicated that she didn’t know what she was talking about, because she didn’t. (She kept referring to “recovered alcoholics” as if the illness can be cured. It can’t, and everyone educated about the disease, including sufferers, know it.) Another wrote that I was “insulting” and “discriminatory” for even raising the topic, and that she wanted me banned from the listserv. (As we know, censorship is the last refuge of those who are out of facts.) I wasn’t banned, but the group’s president contacted me last night and warned me that I had been “disrespectful” because, for example, I pronounced a group of ethicists metaphorically sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “Nananana I can’t hear you!” damning. So now the list can insult me and denigrate my position while I am effectively silenced…and that’s what they are doing. The freak-out is because alcoholic lawyers are victims, see, and need to be protected like all other “differently-abled” people. The fact, and it is a fact, that an alcoholic lawyer who does not duly inform clients of their enhanced risks when they retain him is setting those clients up for a potential disaster doesn’t trouble these hypocrites one bit. The myth is that the ethics rules exists to protect the public. They really protect lawyers by creating the illusion that the legal establishment polices its members.
I’ll keep monitoring the listserv to track emerging legal ethics issues, but I’m through trying to stimulate discussion or commenting there.The Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers is overwhelmingly partisan, biased, dominated by California lawyers, and hostile to non-conforming positions.
2. Oh…if you are wondering, alcoholic surgeons are similarly handled in kid-glove ways that reflect denial by the medical profession and that put patients at an unnecessary risk. As with alcoholic lawyers, it is considered cruel and unfeeling to hold that an alcoholic surgeon should not be permitted to practice without being tested for alcohol before every procedure if not being removed from that role completely. If you read carefully, this page makes it clear why alcoholics pose an inherent risk in sensitive jobs: “most addicted physicians have high levels of denial and are usually not receptive to interventions from colleagues.” In other words, they try to cover-up their disability and will often lie. As with all enabling groups like my legal ethics colleagues, the medical professionals deliberately blur the issue by lumping alcoholism in with other addictions. This is in the same class as confounding illegal immigration with immigration, has similar motivations.
I’m trying to think back on whether any President was so hectored, attacked and criticized over matters as tangential to Presidential performance in office as Donald Trump regarding these two “scandals.” I rank both of these on the level of Harry Truman criticizing the Washington Post music critic who criticized his daughter Margaret’s singing: fodder for future Presidential trivia and oddities, but ultimately non-substantive.
So why did former CNN full-time partisan anti-Trump agent Jim Acostago into raptures over the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center’s front, “This is very much like watching the Berlin Wall coming down. It is a sign that mankind, humankind can stand up against tyranny“? Because, dear friends, these sad, confused, hysterical people have lost all sense of proportion and reason. As I have had to point out on EA too many times already for such a silly episode, the President’s take-over of the Kennedy Center was petty, vindictive, intentionally obnoxious (aka “trolling”) and gave his worst enemies a metaphorical stick to beat him with. But it was also an act that literally had no impact on matters concerning the American public, since it involved an elitist art venue unaffordable or inaccessible to all but about .0001% of Americans, and is an aging, excessive monument to the second most over-rated U.S. President in U.S. history (the first being Barack Obama).
One wag on X responded, “I missed the time when people were SHOT DEAD trying to get into the Kennedy Center for 40 years. What a clown.” That clown was permitted to be CNN’s official representative at White House press briefings for Trump’s entire first term! If that isn’t a smoking gun regarding the state of our mainstream media’s objectivity, I don’t know what is. The Trump Deranged are so crazed that they get ecstatic over the slightest foiling of any Trump project, policy or initiative, big or small, wise or foolish, right or wrong. These are lives whose values are governed by the cognitive dissonance scale, which is emotional, not rational. It has been suggested in jest that Trump louse up Democratic primaries by endorsing the Democrats he wants to see lose. It’s a great idea. Democrats and progressives are so batty that it would work.
More than 10 years ago I wrote about Kristina Rei, 22, of St. Petersburg, Russia. She wanted to look like Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon character, so she got herself a pair of huge—lips.She has undergone over 100 silicon-injection procedures, and considers it just the initial step in her quest to look like Roger Rabbit’s Toon wife from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. ” At the time, I asked whetherit ethical for a plastic surgeon to give her the ridiculous lips she coveted, since plastic surgeons are subject to the Hippocratic Oath like other doctors. My own position then and now, was that it is unethical, though I tried to give both sides of the issue.
“If Kristin can eat, drink and breathe with her mega-lips,” I wrote, “and there is no risk that they might explode, killing everyone near her, the decision to do what she wants is probably ethical, at least by medical ethics standards. The fact that her Chap-Stick costs will be astronomical is not the doctor’s concern, however.” Nevertheless, I concluded that “a plastic surgeon who assists a patient, especially one so young, in disfiguring herself to this extent is unethical. Autonomy is to be respected always, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Kristin’s lips are so far beyond reason that a plastic surgeon debases his profession by assisting in what can fairly be called self-mutilation.”
My bias regarding fake puffy lips does not involve such extreme disfigurement; indeed most would agree that young women getting their lips puffed up isn’t disfiguring at all. However, it is increasingly becoming apparent to me that this particular form of supposedly aesthetic enhancement is becoming a norm, and a harmful one.
The Ethics Alarms “Worst Excuse Ever” list of champions gained a new member this week.
Meet Merlin Lu.
Merlin Lu, a 21-year-old moron, has been charged with a hate crime, arson and other offenses after he set a cross on fire on June 9 in a Chicago park, police said. Lu admitted to a TV station this week that he was responsible for the the cross burning in Grant Park, but insisted that it was not a hate crime or intended to emulate the cross burnings the Ku Klux Klan infamously used during the Jim Crow era to terrorize blacks in the South.
Lu appeared in court Thursday on four felonies and four misdemeanors, including a hate crime, property damage and burning a cross to intimidate. He insists that he was protesting President Donald Trump and Christian nationalists, and had no intention of expressing racist hate for blacks, Catholics, and any of the symbol’s original targets. “I did know about this historical relevance beforehand. But I didn’t know the severity, how racially motivated it may seem from what I did,” Lu said of a burning cross. “Cause my protest has nothing to do with race.”
Lu’s defense attorney, Alexander Michael, told the judge that Lu was exercising free speech in a “foolish manner.” You mean like expressing himself in a manner that didn’t come within a mile of expressing what you meant? This reminds me of a bit in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the Sondheim musical comedy, where the Roman slave Pseudolus is asked a question by an intimidating general. He answers “No!” and the general reacts by bellowing menacingly, “NO???!!!” to which Pseudolus quickly replies, “I mean yes! I said “no,” but I meant yes!”
Lu’s LinkedIn page says he has attended college in Indiana and Chicago, but he apparently never studied American history. Or law. Or logic.
Lu’s “My burning cross didn’t mean what burning crosses always mean and I didn’t think it would seem racially motivated” now joins the three previous worst excuses in Ethics Alarms annals, making the total four. In chronological order, the three earlier winners are…
I was once accused of engaging in deliberate candidate confusion. Arlington, Massachusetts is the largest municipality in the U.S. that still employs the ancient town meeting government structure. When I graduated from law school, I registered to run for the town Board of Selectmen, which sort of serves as the town equivalent to the U.S. Senate with the town meeting members playing the House of Representatives. People freaked out. My father was well-known and respected in Arlington, and since our names were the same, both of us were accused of deliberately trying to mislead voters.
But Democrats really did try to cheat this way in Alaska. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) is trying to hold off a challenge by former Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democrat trying to flip a critical GOP seat as her party is determined to take over the U.S. Senate in November despite being repeatedly revealed as the most cynical, ruthless and untrustworthy major U.S. party in history. To aid the cause, Democratic Party operatives recruited a retired teacher also named Dan Sullivan and got him on the ballot to split the Republican vote so Pelyola could prevail.
Piper Rockelle is human civilization rot. The child star turned slut-for-bucks epitomizes how the social media age has curdled childhood, taste and ethics. It’s an ugly story, and one that I was blissfully unaware of until recently.
Piper, 18, has been performing for money since she started winning kiddie beauty pageants—a dubious “ick or ethics” activity itself—from about the age of three. Her mother began uploading clips of her prancing around to YouTube when Piper was 8. The mother, a stage mother from Hell (and hopefully destined to end up there) moved her budding meal-ticket to LA when the girl was 10, “homeschooling” her (it is anyone’s guess how much of the schooling involved actual education) while selling her daughter’s images online. Next, Mom began recruiting “the Squad”, a group of other preteen children to exploit with Piper as the leader. First they were filmed doing darling little girl things until they were transitioned to tween “crush content”: scripted reality show-style drama with episodes about infatuation, coming of age, teenage angst, first kisses and dating.
Piper Rockelle became the most famous online “kidfluencer.” Her tween and teen content was popular and lucrative on YouTube, and Piper built a fan base of millions of bored low-lifes and budding pedophiles on TikTok and Instagram. Then, in 2022, eleven members of the Squad sued Rockelle’s mother Tiffany Smith, and her boyfriend and business partner, Hunter Hill, alleging abuse and exploitation. TheirYouTube channel was demonetised, costing Piper and her mom hundreds of thousands in lost dollars every month.
I’m sorry, Kim, to have to call you out as the unethical hack you are—I’m an ethics expert, you know— but then I didn’t ask you to invade my email inbox with your incompetent and deceptive substack essay, “Stop Talking About Biden. Start Talking About Trump. And no, I’m not linking to that dumb screed, because I’m not going to help you promote alleged expert commentary that in fact makes the public more ignorant than they already are.
Wehle is a member of the law professor Trump Deranged ward, which is quite extensive, as my recent unpleasant experiences with my own ilk, legal ethics professors, has amply demonstrated. Her background doesn’t suggest that that she is a progressive, but who knows. It is hard to believe that any lawyer who cites as authority the likes of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), both with extensive Ethics Alarms dossier s(because they are both spectacularly dishonest, biased and unethical) has any other excuse for doing so.
The argument that President Trump should be removed because he is mentally ill or demented has been a go-to “let’s get rid of Trump without having to beat him in an election” almost from the moment he was elected in 2016. It was high on the list—Plan E-— of my “Presidential Impeachment/Removal Plans, 2016 to 2020,” which you can easily review at the link above. As I wrote then, here Democrats and their allies expose their totalitarian drift: declaring anyone who opposed Soviet Communism had to be mentally deficient was a staple of the USSR. At this point, I consider anyone making that argument today proof of one or more conditions: crippling Trump hate, total lack of integrity, or wilful blindness. Since I don’t like writing the same post twice, I adequately explained what was so blatantly biased about the Second Term’s 25th Amendment bleating when I wrote in disgust in “Presidential Removal Plan E” In the Dumbest Way Possible, Raising the Need For a Similar “Incompetent Journalist Removal Plan”,
Maggie Haberman, the unethical and biased Times reporter who, often with her colleague Jonathan Swan, diligently devises news angles that will cause gullible Americans to fear and hate their President, has a new “scoop.” “Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right”the story is headlined. Let’s begin with the fact that as is so often the case with the Times, the headline is misleading and deceitful. When I read it, I assumed that the President had considered suspending a Constitutional right guaranteed to all Americans. Wouldn’t that be how you would read it? But the subhead makes it clear that the headline is scare-mongering: “Secret memos show that the White House debated last year, to a greater degree than previously known, whether to limit habeas corpus rights for undocumented immigrants.” Wait, the Times is playing language games again—undocumented immigrants? What the Times means is illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants are people who have no right to be in the country at all. The U.S. generously (and unwisely, in my opinion) extends the constitutional rights all citizens possess to non-citizens, but that doesn’t mean that a strong argument can’t be mounted (as it has been and should be) that under certain conditions, people who are here illegally can have those rights suspended.
Maggie’s hit job story goes on to describe how a White House lawyer circulated a“confidential” memo explaining why this would be a bad idea, and as a result, the option of attempting to lock up illegal immigrants without due process of law was abandoned. In other words, nothing happened. The “news” is that the President and his advisors and lawyers discussed a possible solution to the deep and dangerous problems caused when the previous administration did not enforce U.S. laws, and decided against it. Oh, but see, it was “debated” to a “greater degree” than “previously known.” Hmmmm. At what point is debating an out-of-the-box policy too much debate when the end result is…nothing? Is a policy consideration not news when someone says, “We could do this!” and everyone says, “Nah. Are you nuts?” but suddenly is news when they say, “OK, let’s think about that” but soon someone delivers a memo that says “The idea is nuts” and then the idea is abandoned?
Taking their cue from Democrats, who seem hell-bent on proving that American voters are too stupid, inattentive and trivial to be entrusted with a Republic, here is an AI TV campaign attack video in the Alabama Lt. Governor race. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen approved the head-exploding ad against John Wahl, the former Chair of the Alabama Republican Party to gain an advantage in the party’s runoff for the position. Trump endorsed Wahl, who finished in first place in the primary earlier this month but short of the 50% of votes necessary to win outright. Apparently he has a pet raccoon that sleeps on or in his bed with him. Now me, I would automatically vote against any candidate who would insult my intelligence with such an ad.
Meanwhile…
1. And now, the rest of the story.…Last August, EA told the story of Shannon Joslin, a Yosemite park ranger fired for mounting a Pride banner on El Capitan. Poor Shannon! “I’m devastated, said Joslin, “We don’t take our positions in the park service to make money or to have any kind of huge career gains. We take it because we love the places that we work. I have a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, and I could be making a lot more money in Silicon Valley, which is only a few hours away, but I made career choices to position myself in Yosemite National Park, because this is the place that I love the most.’” I asked, “Then why did you use your position to make an unauthorized political statement while marring the natural beauty that tourists expect to see in National Parks?”
Well, Shannon sued the Park Service (the lawyer who came up with the theory should be sanctioned), claiming that his/her First Amendment rights were breached—you know, because any other employee gets to put up political signs in the middle of their workplace without approval or permission, right? No? The dismissal was “vindictive” and “retaliatory” and meant to “communicate disapproval of a particular point of view”? Really? Uh, no. The stupid suit was dismissed last week.
In a side Great Stupid issue of continuing annoyance, the New York Times begins its report announcing that Shannon is non-binery and uses “they and them” pronouns, so it feels required to confuse readers by using plural pronouns to describe a single idiot throughout the story. Typical section: “To me this ruling isn’t a ‘win’ for the federal government,” they added in a text message. “This just slows down the process of allowing justice to be served for the American people and slows down allowing National Park Service employees to be effective stewards of public lands.” And the way to be stewards of public lands is to allow rangers to mar them with Pride flags. Brilliant! “Right now, it is unclear whether Dr. Joslin will ever have their day in court,” “their” lawyer said. Awww. What a shame that would be!
Sorry, back to the pronouns; the sheer stupidity of this whole episode got me off track. The duty of a news source is to make the facts clear to readers, not to accommodate all the political correctness hoops the subject of the story insists everyone jump through. Don’t know whether you’re male or female? Too bad. Pick one. Or be prepared for the singular pronoun “it.”
Ethics Alarms 