Friday Open Forum on “Un-elected President Day”

Propitiously enough, August 9 is the anniversary of our first un-elected President of the United States taking office at high noon in 1974. Gerald Ford was never on a Presidential ticket, having been appointed as Vice President upon the resignation of Richard Nixon’s vile VP, Spiro T. Agnew. At least Ford’s ascension came courtesy of a Constitutional amendment: it’s not like he bypassed a democratic nominating process or anything, but who would try something like that?

Let’s see what you can come up with to discuss today….

Another Day, Another Fact-Free Anti-Trump Smear From The Axis

One can safely add Yahoo! and the Los Angeles Times to the massive list of media organs that are ethically estopped from calling Donald Trump a habitual liar, since they habitually lie about him.

The most recent example comes from the Times uncritically and deceptively reporting on a series of hyper-partisan, hysterical rants by LGTBQ+ Democrats in San Francisco (well, its San Francisco). Yahoo! then circulated the propaganda under its own banner online. Like the good little Axis of Unethical Conduct members they are, the LA Times and Yahoo! dutifully reported pure Trump Derangement fiction as news, and it was biased, dishonest, unethical journalism from the headline to the finish.

Which, ironically, is not news either. This is how the news media has been operating where Trump is involved for ten years. This is how it plans on winning the Presidency for the Democrats again.

The headline is “‘Our lives are on the line’: Why many LGBTQ+ people hope for a Harris win.” Not one LGBTQ+ American’s “life is on the line” in this election by any stretch of the imagination. Trump does not oppose gay rights or same sex marriage. He has made it clear that he believes in treating such citizens as anyone else should be treated. Believing, as most conservatives, Republicans and people who haven’t been brainwashed or bullied do, that LGBTQ+ lifestyle propaganda does not belong in public school classes does not endanger LGBTQ+ rights or lives.

But the Times (and then Yahoo!) lied, because that’s what progressive journalism does now. It begins,

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Biden Withdrawal Ethics Train Wreck Update: No, Trump’s Condemnation Was Not “Noble”

Conservative pundit Stephen Green wrote today that Donald Trump’s statement saying “….Out Loud What Everybody in Washington Is Afraid To” was a noble act. Green went quite a bit further, too, concluding,

“I don’t care who you are — Republican, Democrat, MAGA, progressive, NeverTrump, traditional conservative, or even a filthy communist — if, at this moment, you can recognize this simple truth about what Trump said today. It was noble.  Biden was more than Trump’s political rival. He’s a man who has spent the last five years smearing Trump (and millions of Trump voters) as a racist, a phobic, a hater, a would-be dictator, an authoritarian, and worse. But now that Biden is as low as any president has been since Richard Nixon was forced out of office 50 years ago this week, Trump spoke the truth about what Biden’s own party did to him. If someone can’t recognize the nobility in that, then I still don’t care what they are because they’re a filthy commie at heart.”

Steve got just a teeny bit carried away. And I guess I’m a filthy commie, because I see nothing noble in Trump’s condemnation of Biden’s being pushed out. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is plenty to condemn in the entire scenario. But Joe’s forced exit, when it finally happened, isn’t one of them. And while I’m ready to accept the possibility that Donald Trump may possess, somewhere, deep down and well hidden, the capacity for nobility, today’s self-serving statement wasn’t evidence of that.

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Good To Know: Major League Baseball Demands More Accountability Than The U.S. Government.

The Chicago White Sox announced this morning that manager Pedro Grifol has been fired. “As we all recognize, our team’s performance this season has been disappointing on many levels,” general manager Chris Getz said in a statement within this morning’s press release. “Despite the on-field struggles and lack of success, we appreciate the effort and professionalism Pedro and the staff brought to the ballpark every day. These two seasons have been very challenging. Unfortunately, the results were not there, and a change is necessary as we look to our future and the development of a new energy around the team.”

Ya think? Under Grifol, the White Sox just finished tying the all-time American League record for consecutive losses at 21. He leaves with the third worst winning percentage of any manager in Major League history who has managed more than a single season. But believe it or not, his two and a two thirds-season tenure at the helm of the ChiSox was even worse than those stats indicate.

Last season, Keynan Middleton publicly criticized the White Sox’ clubhouse culture after he was traded to the Yankees. The pitcher said that there were “no rules” and “no consequences;” he said he knew of instances of “rookies sleeping in the bullpen during games” and players skipping team meetings and fielding drills. Veteran pitcher Lance Lynn was asked if Middleton’s comments were just the complaints of a disgruntled ex-, and he said that Middleton was “not wrong.” This year there were reports that the White Sox had a “fractured” clubhouse that wasn’t helped any when Grifol told his players that they would be remembered as the worst team in MLB history if they didn’t shape up. One player told a local sportswriter, “It’s been really tough in there. Pedro is a really good guy, just not the man for the job.”

So he was fired. That’s what’s supposed to happen to the leader of an organization that falls flat on its metaphorical face with terrible consequences. Was the White Sox losing all those games—nobody expected the team, which is a re-building mode, to be good this season, just not so spectacularly bad—as spectacular an organizational failure as, just to pick a random example out of the air, the Secret Service? Nobody has been fired for its astounding incompetence in Butler, Pa., although many culprits have been identified. Nobody has been fired from a leadership position during the entire Biden Administration, although the culture of incompetence is throbbingly obvious. (I guess Joe himself comes the closest to having been fired.)

In an essay on substack, conservative law professor and blogger Glenn Reynold sees the culture rotting from the head down:

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For Ethics Alarms Readers: Announcing “Project Race-Lighting”

Somebody’s got to have the guts to do this, and it might as well be me, well, us. Introducing Project Race-Lighting.

For more than a couple of years now, I have been intending to spend at least 72 hours watching commercial TV and to record the racial and ethnic categories of the actors in the ads. I watch a lot of television and always have, but although I have felt the need for someone to do a study of the phenomenon that I believe is taking place, I have also had substantially less time to do it since Grace died at the end of February. At one point she had agreed to start the project, stuck as my wife was in a chair in front of our TV while she was rehabbing her (mysteriously) painful knee. She also had the same impression I did. Trust me, that was not always the case in other matters.

I think I first became cognizant that something strange was in the air or “going on” (“What’s going on here?”—the starting point for every ethical analysis) when “Jake from State Farm” magically turned black in 2011: it was one of the more ham-handed examples of pandering to the Obama-led movement to make affirmative action, DEI’s predecessor, a cultural norm. A decades later came the Black Lives Matter, reparations, DEI, CRT, “Great Stupid” tsunami in the wake of the George Floyd Freak Out. The trend had been subtly underway before that, as Jake indicated, but Madison Avenue attacked the white actor job market with a vengeance. Now, the way TV commercials represent U.S. society appears (I don’t have the data yet, so it all could be in my imagination) to show a nation where whites are a small minority, somewhere close to the percentage of Asian Americans (about 7.3%), and two out of every three marriages are bi-racial, meaning that most children are mixed-race.

The real percentage of whites in the US population is almost 70%: yes, white people are still a majority in the population. But they are evil, as you know, and at fault for all the ills around us, so the society corporate America pretends we live in is very different. How different? That’s why I am launching “Project Race-Lighting.”

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“THIS Is CNN…”

Here, in part, is how CNN’s objective, “just-the-facts, ma’am” senior White House reporter for CNN Politics described Kamala Harris’s choice of uber-progressive Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her VP in a story headlined, “Happy warriors Harris and Walz propose an antidote to Trump’s American carnage”:

It’s hardly new for a political party to sell hope and aspiration — it’s a staple of presidential election campaigns. But the fresh vibe in Philadelphia was striking because it emerged after one of the darkest chapters of modern US politics.

Americans have experienced a Trump presidency that threatened to tear the country apart, suffered through a pandemic that killed more than a million citizens and endured grinding years of economic insecurity caused by inflation and high grocery prices. For most of this year, the former president has promised a second presidency of retribution. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, had been delivering searing warnings that his rival was tarnishing the very soul of America, even as the haunting signs of the president’s advancing age became increasingly painful to watch.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the last GOP primary challenger standing against Trump, used to predict that the first party to ditch its old, White male presidential candidate in 2024 would get a massive boost. While Harris is yet to prove she can alter the fundamentals of a race against Trump, she’s proving Haley’s point, bringing some unexpected sunshine to an election year.

“We both believe in lifting people up, not knocking them down,” Harris said of her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Walz. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it?” the vice president asked before adding, “We both know the vast majority of people in our country have so much more in common than what separates them.”

This message is a mirror image of Trump’s political method, which relies on tugging at the fault lines of US society for political gain.

Walz rammed home the point, as if anyone in the packed arena filled by roaring cheers had missed it. “Thank you for bringing back the joy,” he told his new boss.

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In Case You Were Wondering…

Has Ethics Alarms ever commented about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now the designated running mate of Democratic Presidential Candidate by Default Kamala Harris? As it happens, yes, Walz was featured here back when his state was inflicting the George Floyd Freakout on the nation. I posted this as part of the ethics warm-up on May 30, 2020:

Bulletin for Gov. Walz: Derek Chauvin has civil rights too, you irresponsible fool. I have just watched Minnesota’s Governor repeatedly refer to George Floyd’s “murder.” An elected public official cannot and must not do that. If he wants to guarantee that a fair trial in the case becomes impossible, this is the way to do it. There has been no trial, and however horrible the video of Floyd’s death may be, Chauvin and the other officers have the right to the presumption of innocence. Now a St. Paul’s mayor is at the podium calling for Chauvin to be held “accountable.” Well, he’s under arrest and will face trial, and for now, that’s about it.  All of this outrage porn and virtue-signaling enables the rioters by pretending that there is anything productive to be done but to wait for the justice system to play out.”

As is often the case, I was right. Gov. Walz was wrong.

So now you know….

Unethical Quote of the Month: Rep.Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)

Here’s Rep. Raskin during a panel discussion in February talking about how Democrats can “protect democracy” by refusing to acknowledge Donald Trump’s victory should he win in November:

“What I would say is, you know, we’ve got to play defense and offense in 2024. The right to vote is under attack in very specific ways in lots of states, especially in some of the Deep South states, especially in Florida, which I just returned from. There’s just unbelievable stuff going on there — like, if you have to send a mail-in ballot or absentee ballot, you have to have a — you can only have it taken to the mailbox or the polls by a member of your nuclear family who lives with you. OK? So there’s just a million traps for the unwary that are being set across the country. But at the same time, we do have to get on offense for the articulation of a constitutional right to vote that’s meaningful for everybody in the country. The million of people who are left out, and disenfranchised, and for everybody whose right to vote is rendered vulnerable by this Supreme Court. And you know, I like very much the point that both Sherlyn [Ifill] and Rick have been making about the Supreme Court. I mean, we’ve got to remember that for the vast majority of American history, the Supreme Court has not been a friend to the people. It has been overwhelmingly in a reactionary or conservative mode, I mean, all the way up until the Civil War. What did the Supreme Court ever do for enslaved people in our country? Absolutely nothing, other than cement their status in the Dred Scott decision, saying that African-Americans had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. And then even after the Civil War, even after the Reconstruction amendments, in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, constitutionalizing Jim Crow. And then it’s not until the Warren Court for a couple of decades, with the white primary cases, and Brown v. Board, where you get a different kind of Supreme Court on the side of the freedoms and equality of the American people. But the court is not going to save us. And so that means the only thing that really works is people in motion amending the Constitution — but again, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because what can be put in the Constitution can slip away from you very quickly. And the greatest example going on right now before our very eyes is Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which they’re just disappearing with a magic wand, as if it doesn’t exist, even though it could not be clearer what it’s stating. And so they want to kick it to Congress, so it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified. And then we need bodyguards for everybody, and civil war conditions, all because the nine justices — not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not that much work to do, a huge staff, great protection — simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great Fourteenth Amendment means.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 13: Old Guys With Long Scraggly Beards

I saw two men today with this fashion statement, the Rutherford B. Hayes look. Actually, that photo above is the one where his beard looks relatively kempt. On the other hand, Rutherford gets something of a pass because he grew to adulthood in the era where long beards were inexplicably in, especially among Civil War officers, and he was one. Today, however, long scraggly gray or white beards send out multiple messages to me, none of them good. Like:

  • “I’ve given up. I’m old, and I don’t care how I look. I’m not even trying any more. Tomorrow, I may not wear pants.”
  • “Hey, I’ve never done anything that earned anyone’s deference or respect, but maybe if I look like Heidi’s grandfather, someone will treat me better.”
  • “I’m Santa Claus on the skids!”
  • ‘I’m retired and you’re not! Ha Ha!”

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Ethics Observations on the Doug Emhoff Scandal

The story was first broken by the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid:

Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.

The woman, Najen Naylor, 47, did not deny the story when approached by DailyMail.com at her home in the New York millionaires’ playground, The Hamptons.

She would not comment, except to say, ‘I’m kind of freaked out right now.’

A close friend with direct knowledge of the affair and pregnancy told DailyMail.com that Naylor did not keep the child – though her social media shows a video of a mysterious baby girl named Brook in 2009, the year the baby would have been born.

Another  friend, Stacey Brooks, who mothered twin boys around the same time as Naylor was expecting, also did not deny any of the claims – but said she would not divulge further information without Naylor’s permission.

What’s going on here? Observations:

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