U.S. Society

“Forget Jobs, It’s You Passing Out In Public, Stupid!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, maybe there’s something wrong with Wisconsin after all.

Mayor Ryan, behaving irrelevantly

In Sheboygan, Mayor Bob Ryan, is about to face Terry Van Akkeren in the first mayoral recall election in that Wisconsin city’s history. It was prompted after Ryan was caught on tape passed out in a bar after a drinking binge last summer. More than 4,000 Sheboygan voters signed petitions to force the recall.

As one would expect, the mayor who humiliated his community, set a wretched example for his public (and their kids), showed that he has allowed his alcohol problem to render him unfit to serve, and violated a pledge he had made in 2009 (when he was running for office) that he had given up drinking for good, now argues that the incident is irrelevant. He says that what matters is who can bring the most jobs back to Sheboygan. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Pastor Thomas Keinath

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Rev. Keinath on holiday, under the overpass

Thomas Keinath is the pastor at Calvary Temple in Wayne, New Jersey, a so-called mega-church with a 2,000-plus seat sanctuary in an affluent community. It was time for him to take some vacation time, so he did. And what did he do?

Keinath spent his week off living with the homeless in the very un-affluent community of nearby Paterson, New Jersey. During the day, he wandered through the streets along with desperate, sick and destitute. At night, he stayed with them as they built fires to keep warm in freezing cold,  and slept with them, under a bridge, surrounded by discarded hypodermic needles.  He wrote down the life stories of the people he met, so he could learn from their life stories.

“I needed to understand what they were experiencing, and I needed to feel their pain.  How could I bring help or healing to the streets if I did not know what their needs are?” the pastor told reporters. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Recap: A Long Weekend of Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

If the long Presidents Day weekend took you hither and yon and away from ethical dilemmas and controversies, welcome back! Here is what went on here in a lively three days:

The Broadcast Media’s Golden Rule: “Do Unto Others What You Will Use Cronyism To Stop Others From Doing Unto You”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Two Denver TV stations are feuding, and why? Because one of them refused to allow the other to suppress news footage that was embarrassing to a news anchor.

On February 8, KUSA-Channel 9 news anchor Kyle Dyer was interviewing the owner of Max, an 85-pound Argentine Mastiff, and the firefighter who had rescued the dog from an icy pond. I saw the video. Dyer had me wincing throughout the interview, showing herself to be the most dangerous kind of dog lover, someone who is fond of animals but naive and ignorant about their behavior.  She kept rubbing the dog’s ears and face during the interview, and the mastiff was obviously stoic but stressed by the strange environment, the cameras, and this women talking and running her hands all over him.  Mastiffs are gentle dogs, but very shy;  it was clear to me that Dyer was not according sufficient respect and caution to a powerful creature. As the interview ended, she suddenly moved in to kiss the dog on the muzzle, and the dog reacted defensively, biting her on the face and taking off part of her lip. She was seriously injured, and she had to have 75 stitches. Continue reading →

Assignment For The Righteous Persecutors of ESPN’s Max Bretos: Learn “The Niggardly Principles”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I'd advise staying away from "niggardly" too, Max.

Ethics Alarms first promulgated the Niggardly Principles in the midst of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy. The Principles are named after the embarrassing controversy that roiled the Washington D.C. government more than a decade ago, in which a supervisor who used the good, old English word “niggardly” meaning “penurious or cheap” was fired for racial insensitivity after an African-American who hadn’t kept up on her Reader’s Digest “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power” complained that he had made a racist remark. The outcry in D.C. over this capitulation to ignorance was so great that the D.C. government reversed itself, though there remained some, like those supporting ESPN’s decision to fire Bretos for an innocent and appropriate application of the idiom ” a chink in the armor” today, who argued that the supervisor should have chosen his words so as not to offend those too ignorant and hair-trigger grievance-minded to comprehend them.

The First Niggardly Principle, therefore, is this:

“No one should be criticized or penalized because someone takes racial, ethnic, religious or other offense at their conduct or speech due to the ignorance, bias or misunderstanding of the offended party.”

A corollary of the FNP is that violating it unconscionably empowers the kind of people who should not be empowered in a free, fair and intelligent society: bullies, race-baiters, grievance police, censors of free expression, and the shamelessly ignorant. That was the theme of a disgraceful incident in which Hallmark pulled an “offensive”card because some African-Americans complained that the term “black hole”—as in Stephen Hawking and “Star Trek”—sounded too much like “black ho”—I’m not making this up— and was thus a racial slur. Hallmark’s craven capitulation was off the charts as First Niggardly Principle breaches go, but in some ways ESPN’s breach was worse; at least Hallmark didn’t pick an employee’s pockets and finger him as a closet racist. Continue reading →

Punishment for Color Blindness: ESPN’s Unfair and Cowardly Suspension of Max Bretos

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

What Max Bretos means by "chink in the armor." Not that ESPN cares.

The headline “Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin’s 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets” appeared on ESPN’s mobile web site last week, and it was quickly removed. ESPN apologized, then fired the over-night headline writer who thought it would be cute to make a racially-offensive play on words between the derogatory slur for a person of Chinese descent, and the old, respectable, and the completely non-racial phrase meaning “a flaw or weak point.”

ESPN’s response to the tasteless headline was appropriate.

But it wasn’t enough for ESPN, which was under a full barrage from the  political correctness police and race bullies as well as Jeremy Lin fanatics. So the station also decided to make a victim of  innocent anchor Max Bretos, suspending him for 30 days because he used the expression Wednesday when he asked New York Knicks legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier on air about Lin.

“If there is a chink in the armor, where can he improve his game?” Bretos asked. Continue reading →

The Flag and Whitney Houston

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

If Ol' Blue Eyes was worthy, why not Whitney?

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie  ordered New Jersey’s flags flown at half-staff in official mourning for Whitney Houston, and a lot of people are outraged. The critics of the honor fall into two categories: those who believe that the honor should be reserved for military heroes and high government officials, and those who believe that Houston is especially unworthy because of her well-documented substance abuse problems.

For his part, Governor Christie defiantly declares that Houston, as a daughter of New Jersey, deserves the state honor because of her contributions to the culture.

Technically and officially, Christie is out of line. Federal law is very specific about the proper treatment of the flag, including when it can be flown at half-staff. Simply put, celebrities don’t qualify, no matter who they are. A state governor can proclaim that the flag be flown at half-staff in his or her state for fallen soldiers, but not for non-military individuals. But governors ignore the law routinely, and have for decades. Tennessee’s governor lowered the flag when Elvis died. Massachusetts did the same for Red Sox great Ted Williams, though he was also a war hero, so no one was going to object. The law, in terms of custom and enforcement, is a dead letter, and probably should be.

True, some governors have abused the spirit of the law, including Christie, when he lowered the flag for Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band—a great musician, but hardly a figure of transcendent national significance. If 4 USC Section 7 isn’t going to be followed or enforced, then we need some new standards, or before we know it they’ll be lowering the flag for Joan Rivers. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Chris Matthews

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Loyalty is the heart of Pat’s being. He is loyal to country, to church, to neighborhood to heritage. To Pat, the world can never be better than the one he grew up in as a young boy. Blessed Sacrament Church and Grade School, Gonzaga High School, Georgetown University. No country will ever be better than the United States of America of the early 1950s. It’s his deep loyalty to preserving that reality and all its cultural and ethnic aspects that has been his primal purpose and is what has gotten him into trouble. Not just now but over the years.”

—MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews, in his wistful on-air tribute to Pat Buchanan, who was fired from his long-time role as the left-wing network’s token hard-right conservative.

"Pat, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...on some other network."

Matthews’ quote helps explain why loyalty is the most corrupting of the ethical virtues. Loyalty is important and admirable, but when it is divorced from the other values, it can lead to rigidity, stubbornness, and corruption. When a person, organization or cause no longer embodies the qualities that justified the loyalty in the first place, loyalty can undermine ethical conduct as strongly as any vice.

The right is attempting to frame Buchanan’s dismissal as part of a conspiracy to silence conservative voices. I never understood why Pat was on MSNBC anyway, unless it was to have a particularly Jurassic conservative around to make MSNBC’s extreme liberal bias look reasonable by comparison. It was Buchanan’s latest book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive 2025?,” that finally triggered his ouster. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard Buchanan on this topic sufficiently already. He may not be a racist, xenophobe, homophobe and anti-Semite, but his confusion of the need to hold on to American cultural values, with which I agree, with the need to keep America as white, Christian, heterosexual and Anglo-Saxon as possible is hard to distinguish from racism, homophobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. If I were running a news network, I wouldn’t employ him. Continue reading →

Reflections On President’s Day, 2012: A United States Diminished in Power, Influence and Ideals

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Rep. Ron Paul is fond of saying that the United States shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, and thanks to irresponsible stewardship of America’s resources and horrific maintenance of its ideals, his wish has already come true. One result is a world that has no functioning opposition to evil, a world at the mercy of chaos with no champion or guiding inspiration in sight. The other result is a United States that no longer stands for its own founding principles.

For proof, we have only to look as far as Syria, where a brutal dictator is killing his own people at an accelerating rate. Although his people have tired of his tyranny, Hafez al-Assad, like Gaddafi before him, seems determined to kill as many of his own countrymen as he has to in order to stay in power. Our President, Barack Obama, has delivered stern admonitions and disapprovals, which is this President’s style and approximately as effective as tossing water balloons. The Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton, expresses frustration, for all the good that does. The killing, of course, goes on.

If you think I’m going to advocate U.S. action in Syria, you are wrong. Quite simply, we can’t afford it—not with a Congress and an Administration that appear unwilling and unable to confront rising budget deficits and crushing debt with sensible tax reform and unavoidable entitlement reductions. Yesterday Congress and the President passed yet another government hand-out of money it doesn’t have and refuses to raise elsewhere, among other things continuing to turn unemployment insurance, once a short-term cushion for job-seekers, into long-term government compensation for the unemployed. Part of the reckless debt escalation was caused by the last President unconscionably engaging in overseas combat in multiple theaters without having the courage or sense  to insist that the public pay for it, and the current administration is incapable of grasping that real money, not just borrowed funds, needs to pay for anything. The needle is well into the red zone on debt; we don’t have the resources for any discretionary military action.

Ron Paul thinks that’s a good thing, as do his libertarian supporters. President Obama, it seems, thinks similarly. They are tragically wrong. Though it is a popular position likely to be supported by the fantasists who think war can just be wished away, the narrowly selfish who think the U.S. should be an island fortress, and those to whom any expenditure that isn’t used to expand  cradle-to-grave government care is a betrayal of human rights, the abandonment of America’s long-standing world leadership in fighting totalitarianism, oppression, murder and genocide is a catastrophe for both the world and us. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz (Gotcha Edition): Mistake, OK, or Nothing At All?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Braden's mom, Braden's stein, and Braden

Not an hour had passed since I posted my lament about small incidents being blown up into national controversies, and suddenly a perfect Ethics Quiz presented itself on the same trend, from a pre-school yet, just as in the lunch police flap. This one is a tempest in a tea cup, except instead of a tea cup the tempest is in a teeny, tiny beer stein, made out of plastic, that was given to 4-year-old Braden Bulla to represent Germany. His class was studying various countries and their culture, and the teach gave out little plastic artifacts as part of the lesson.

I’m not even sure it qualifies as a stein; it looks exactly like a creamer I’ve had forever. But it was clearly supposed to represent a stein. The children drank apple juice out of these as they learned about Bavaria.  When Braden brought the 2-3 inch plastic thing home, his mother was furious. She told the school and reporters that it is irresponsible to have students  pretend to drink alcohol, even if it is apple juice. “It is entirely inappropriate,” Bulla said. She argued with the teacher and principal, and then pulled her child out of the pre-school. Naturally, someone asked Mothers Against Drunk Driving to get into the act, and they complied, while noting that they couldn’t be authoritative without having been in the classroom. “We would say this: MADD is concerned anytime that a minor is involved in any activity that centers around alcohol consumption,” a spokesperson said. “Even in a case like this one, when there is no actual alcohol.”

So your Ethics Quiz for the day is a multiple choice question:

What best describes the Case of the 4-Year-Old’s Beer Stein? Continue reading →