Lawrence Reynolds, an Ohio Death Row inmate, was supposed to to be executed by lethal injection this week. Instead, he is in a Youngstown hospital after an apparent suicide attempt late Sunday night. Having rescued him from death by his own hand, Ohio will now pay for Reynolds’ medical treatment until he is healthy enough to be sent to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville, where executions take place.
Then they’ll kill him. Continue reading
The Eric Massa affair quickly revealed itself as the spectacle of a foolish, narcissistic, dishonest man trying to milk every drop of attention out of the well-deserved implosion of a political career that never should have begun in the first place. Fortunately, there was a side benefit: its reporting by the media exposed the dishonesty of the practice of fake civility. Genuine civility is one of the foundations of ethical conduct, though admittedly a shaky one right now. Fake civility, however, is cynical, dishonest, disrespectful and, on top of all that, silly and ineffective.
One of the inappropriate supervisory moments that punched Massa’s ticket out of Congress was that he told a male staffer, in the presence of others, that “I should be fucking you.” Someone at the Mainstream Media High command issued a memo that the gentile and classy way of reporting this statement was “I should be fracking you.” Not that there was any pretense about what the word signified. On the Headline News morning show with giggly news-bimbo Robin Meade (an in-your-face insult to every serious female broadcast journalist in America), Meade listened to the “fracking” account and said—every one of the times the story was repeated during the program— some version of “Gee, I never heard that word before (giggle)!” Whereupon the newsreader replied with some form of “I know (snicker) neither have I!” They were far from the only ones. Dana Milbank used the same code in his account of Massa’s messes in the Washington Post. “Fracking” is the euphemism of the week. Continue reading
Everybody has a camera…well, almost everybody. Thanks to cell phones, we can be recorded in still or video formats almost every second of the day. We are our own Big Brother. So much so, in fact, that it is hard to muster too much fright and indignation over increasing use of public cameras by the government. Boston police, for example, now have immediate access to street video of shootings, robberies, and homicides on many city streets, and use real time images to send information about the suspects and crimes to responding officers. Continue reading
Social commentators, business analysts and ethicists are tying themselves into logical and philosophical knots trying to explain exactly what is so wrong in 2010 with Walmart cutting the price of its black Barbie doll, which has not been selling well at its current price, while leaving the price of its white Barbie, which has been selling, almost twice as high. Continue reading
The film montage of significant Hollywood figures who have died since the last Oscars broadcast is always an emotional and evocative feature of the Academy Awards, as well as a time to bid a final farewell to various faces that became affectionately remembered parts of our past. Except for fanatic film buffs, there is always the occasional “who the heck is that?” moment, as a the image of a”famous” make-up artist or key grip passes by. But they were all important, in their own ways, and deserve their final salute.
Farrah Fawcett, who died of cancer last year, deserved her final salute too. Yet she was missing. Continue reading
I missed this story last week. I am almost sorry it came to my attention.
February 20 witnessed the national finals of the Sprite Step Off competition in Atlanta, billed as “the largest Greek stepping competition ever.” I never heard of “step-dancing,” but that is apparently because I’m not black. It is a lively type of dancing favored by black fraternities and sororities. Although the performance by the all-white Zeta Tau Alpha team from the University of Arkansas—the only white team in the competition—received uproarious applause, mixed with amazement on the part of the almost all-black crowd that a white team could master the art, the cheers turned to jeers when they were announced as the winners. Although few disputed that the Zeta team had been one of the very best, angry e-mails and on-line protests from African Americans began building into a tidal wave. There were accusations of “cultural theft,” and the general message was that a white team should not have been declared the winner in a step-dancing competition. That was a black tradition, and only bias could explain the white team’s success. Most of the protests came from people who had not seen the performances. Continue reading
It’s time to play “Who’s the Worse Neighbor?”!
It’s clear that the media take on the New Jersey story about the risqué snow sculpture will favor the snow-artist neighbor and ridicule the Puritanical neighbors, but the ethics fouls may be on the other side.
A brief summary: a woman and her son used the ample snow on their lawn and the their substantial sculpting talents to make a life-size, headless, armless, torso and trunk of a rather well endowed naked woman instead of the more traditional Frosty the Snowman. If this “came to life one day,” that traffic cop would arrest it for indecent exposure. Continue reading
“Some, including the archbishop, have argued that by providing health care to a gay or lesbian spouse we are somehow legitimizing gay marriage. Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner — a basic human right, according to Church teaching — is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism.”
—–Tim Sawina, former chief operating officer of Catholic Charities, in a letter protesting the Washington D.C.-based organization’s recent decision, dictated by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, to eliminate health benefits for all new employees’ spouses in response to the legalization of same-sex marriage in D.C.
Even if one is inclined to be sympathetic to the Catholic Church’s plight in the gay marriage issue, as it finds itself locked into a centuries-old moral code that declares homosexuality a sin while the world steadily rejects the premise as ignorant, cruel, and wrong, the Catholic Charities decision is indefensible. It is especially brain-melting to try to justify such a decision by a charitable social service organization. Continue reading
The idiotic story you are about to read is true.
Rachael Greer, a seventh grade student in Jeffersonville, Indiana, explains that a girl walked into the school locker room with a bag of pills during Rachel’s gym class.
“She was talking to another girl and me about them and she put one in my hand and I was like, ‘I don’t want this,’ so I put it back in the bag and I went to gym class,” said Rachael. The pills were the prescription ADHD drug, Adderall. During the next period, an assistant principal took Rachael out of class. The girl who offered her the pills and a few other students had been apprehended, and to her surprise, Rachel was to join them in their punishment. Continue reading
Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading
