but Claude Rains is always welcome here because he makes me laugh, and boy do I need one today.
Over the weekend the Axis needed one, because its members were freaking out over polls by organizations that in the past (like 2020), reliably employed their unethical bias to inflate pro-Democrat Presidential race poll numbers, now showing Joe Biden substantially trailing Donald Trump. Here’s another one:
James Carville is a good stand-in for the whole amusing spectacle…
James Carville is having a meltdown after the CNN poll.
The Biden Administration’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is distributing disaster and pandemic relief funds to farmers based on their race and gender, in direct defiance of the equal protection provisions in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The USDA openly prioritizes relief money to “socially disadvantaged” farmers: women, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian-Americans, blacks or African-Americans, Hispanics or Hispanic-Americans, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. White men, not so much. Farmers who fail to meet the “socially disadvantaged” criteria have received far less assistance for their losses than if they were of a different race or sex. Can’t do that—but the racists, bigots and woke in Joe’s USDA do it anyway. USDA has a smoking gun form, CCC-860, Socially Disadvantaged, Limited Resource, Beginning and Veteran Farmer or Rancher Certification, hopeful recipients of government aid must file to swear that they are not evil, undeserving, patriarchal and racist white males:
“I certify that I am a member of a group listed below, whose members have been subject to racial, ethnic, or gender prejudice because of their identity as members of a group without regard to their individual qualities. (Check all that apply but note that if only “women” is checked without selecting the other category, the selection does not make the applicant socially disadvantaged for conservation programs).”
Women.
American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian Americans, Black or African Americans, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders, Hispanics.
That’s pretty clear, no? And yet, in a masterpiece of “It isn’t what it is” rhetorical dishonesty, the form then says,
“In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating in or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity (including gender expression), sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, family/parental status, income derived from a public assistance program, political beliefs, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity, in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA.”
Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.
This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.
I confess, I didn’t expect the U.S. Supreme Court to give Donald Trump’s Presidential immunity claim as serious a hearing as it did in last week’s oral arguments. Now that I read the transcript, however, I understand “what’s going on here,” to quote my own starting point for ethics analysis. Its focus, or at least the focus of the conservative members of the Court, is appropriate considering the current assault on our system of government by the totalitarian Left as it tries to use the criminal laws, the courts, and partisan prosecutors to prevent the public from throwing them out of office.
Naturally the Left is furious, and is attacking the justices. The attack isn’t based on legal reasoning, but the same tactic progressives and Democrats used to claim that SCOTUS had “stolen” the 2000 election by finally ruling that enough was enough, and that it was time to settle the identity of the leader of the nation and not paralyze the government fighting over an election with a filament thin edge within the margin of statistical error. The Bush v. Gore ruling was an example of one of the core functions of the Supreme Court as it has evolved: stepping in to guide the Constitution and the nation through unanticipated situations the Founders never considered or prepared for. But Democrats attacked Justice Scalia and the other conservative justices for defying their own guiding principles—“textualism” and “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should not be extrapolated into new areas never anticipated or discussed in the original document. That judicial philosophy is a conservative bulwark against the arrogant and excessive “legislation from the bench” that marked the Warren Court in the Sixties, and to a lesser extent its predecessor in the Seventies, the Burger Court, the latter most infamously in the purely political Roe decision, finding a right to abortion in a document that didn’t hint of such a thing.
After hearing the oral argument in Trump v. U.S. and detecting signs that some of the Justices on the rightish side of the ideological spectrum agreed that some kind of Presidential immunity might be prudent and even essential, the Axis howled. “Two years ago, conservatives relied on a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s text and original meaning to overturn the federal right to abortion. But on Thursday, as they debated whether Trump can be prosecuted for his bid to subvert the 2020 election, they seemed content to engage in a free-form balancing exercise where they weighed competing interests and practical consequences,” whined Politico. “Some critics said the conservative justices — all of whom purport to adhere to an original understanding of the Constitution — appeared to be on the verge of fashioning a legal protection for former presidents based on the justices’ subjective assessment of what’s best for the country and not derived from the nation’s founding document.”
Translation:“The judges we support do this all the time and we think it’s wonderful, but these bad judges can’t do it no matter how much sense it makes because they have made it clear that they generally disapprove of the practice.”
The New York Post has released a scoop: White House insiders attempted to persuade President Biden’s incompetent paid liar, Karine Jean-Pierre, to leave her post, thus sparing the administration, Democrats and any American who thinks his or her government should be run by people at least minimally qualified for their jobs of ongoing embarrassment.
Whew! That’s a relief. At least a few in the executive branch recognize an unqualified, inept high-profile job occupant when they see one and have the integrity and sense of responsibility to try to rectify the problem. The reason this secret effort to dump Karine was apparently attempted is what anyone watching her painful press briefings already knows: She terrible at her job. She doesn’t understand the issues and isn’t quick enough or smart enough to parry reporters’ questions effectively. Unfortunately, Karine is also a Dunning-Kruger sufferer. “She thinks she’s doing an amazing job,” one of the Post’s sources says.
Oh goody, EA hasn’t had a face-tattoo post for a while. I think we can make short work of this one.
That’s Ash Putnam above, a Tik Toker who’s “annoyed” because she applied for a job with the discount retailer and was told via email saying had been rejected. She strongly suspects it might have been her tattoos and body piercings that ruled her out.
Gah! I have a Zoom legal ethics program om professionalism to teach in about 30 minutes and overslept, so you’ll have to hold down Fort Ethics until I can get a post up around noon. Sorry!
1. The Washington Post is hiring a new primary theater reviewer, and several friends and associates from the theater community urged me to apply for the job on the grounds that I am very qualified for it (true) and that I would be good at it (also true). I was dubious about whether I would be considered, especially because a) I fought with the Post critics over their biased and incompetent reviews of my company’s productions and b) a simple search of EA would reveal about a hundred posts critical of the Post, its editors, its pundits and its reporting. But I could use the gig, and I was transparent about my criticism, while making a case why it shouldn’t disqualify me.
Two days later, this story surfaced. It was the Post at its worst, indeed, biased, irresponsible journalism at its worst. I realized that posting this right after my application virtually guaranteed a ding, and I had spent a couple hours on the paper’s absurdly complicated online submission process. I also realized that I had no choice. Several friends told me I was nuts not to just skip one story; it’s not like I cover everything here. But that was a truly awful example of unethical journalism by a major news source, and attention should be paid.
(This may end up as more of a rueful observation than a post.)
Last night I watched PBS’s “American Experience’ because it was late, my satellite package has amazingly few channels that aren’t commercial junk (No TCM for example, and I miss it) and no baseball games were on. It was a new episode about the Love Canal protests during the Carter Administration, something I hadn’t thought about for a long time.
It was the first toxic waste dump scandal—PBS was celebrating “Earth Day”—- and a landmark in the environmental movement: one can get some sense of the kind of things going on from “Ellen Brockovich,” about a another community poisoned by chemical manufacturers. That account focuses on the legal battles, but Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal centers on the local activists, mostly housewives and mothers, who organized, protested and kept the pressure on local, New York State and national government officials to fix the deadly problem, something the bureaucrats seemed either unwilling or unable to do.
One feature of the tale I had forgotten: the furious women briefly held two EPA officials hostage, and released them promising a response that would make that crime “look like Sesame Street” if President Carter didn’t meet their demands for action in 24 hours. And Carter capitulated to the threat! It doesn’t matter that the women were right about the various governments’ foot-dragging and irresponsible handling of the crisis: a competent President should never reward threats from people breaking the law. Jimmy just didn’t understand the Presidency at all, the first of four such Presidents to wound the U.S. from 1976 to 2024.
That wasn’t my main epiphany, however. It was this: In the late 1970’s, before the feminist movement took hold, so-called ordinary women, mostly mothers, became intense and dedicated activists fighting for the lives, health and futures, of their babies and children, as well as their unborn children because the Love Canal pollution was causing miscarriages and spontaneous abortions. The women were heroic, and the public and news media were drawn to them because they projected moral and ethical standing by fighting to save lives.
Letitia James really is an idiot, isn’t she? How could the New York Attorney General be so reckless as to go on camera and deny what is a matter of record? I guess one answer would be “She’s a dead-eyed, arrogant and Machiavellian political operative who lacks the necessary integrity to be a prosecutor…and she’s an idiot.”
This video should be used extensively by Trump, the Republican Party, and to whatever extent possible where the other Trump cases are proceeding. It vividly and revoltingly demonstrates the partisan nature of the Democrats’ lawfare against the former President. Nah, it’s not selective prosecution!How could anyone think that? Criminalizing politics? What are those conspiracy-spouting conservatives talking about?
James isn’t is uniquely repellent—Fani Willis, the equally dishonest Fulton County DA, is arguably worse— but still is an appropriate face to put on all of the Democratic Party’s efforts to win the 2024 election not on merit but by the time-tested totalitarian device of charging political opponents with crimes. (Trump is a fan of Putin?) You never know: there may even be some progressives with integrity who will decide they don’t want to be associated with such anti-democratic tactics…and that is exactly what they are.
Ethics Alarms 