I write this in a state of advanced disgust over the predictable but still nauseating reaction by the legal ethics community (as represented on the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, of which I am a member) to the still roiling Fani Willis scandal. This is a, I estimate, a 80%-20% woke profession, and I may be being generous. Not only did group’s hyperactive listserv conspicuously ignore the story despite it being by far the most high-profile legal ethics controversy in many months, but when the topic was finally broached yesterday, it was to brush aside the obvious conflict of interest as irrelevant to the case’s defendants, including Donald Trump. (This is a passionately Trump-Deranged group to the point that vocal dissenters are risk professional blackballing.) This CNN opinion piece by a member has been virtually unanimously praised, despite employing blatant “whataboutism”: “Willis may have engaged in nepotism (as when President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert Kennedy to be US attorney general or when Trump appointed his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner to positions in his presidential administration).” For some strange reason, the legal ethicist association seems to be willing to accept the dubious proposition that even though Willis’s alleged legal lover is profiting greatly from his involvement in the case (and that she may be receiving benefits from that profit in the form of travel and other baubles of affection), this could not reasonably be seen as a factor undermining her required independent judgment in managing the case as his supervisor.

Well, the group is still a valuable resource the 95% of the time that progressive politics aren’t involved…

1. Oh…about that headline! It’s my “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” note of the day. It’s a real headline from a real story, but dates from March 2023. Legal Insurrection wrote about its author here. But I missed it, and as the saying goes, if it’s new to you, it’s still news….

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New York City proudly proclaimed this week that it is the first city in the U.S. to issue an advisory officially designating social media as a health hazard, and illustrated its achievement with head-exploding nanny state (nanny city?) overreach in a “health advisory.”

What the document mostly demonstrates is the culture’s flat learning curve regarding unstoppable cultural developments. In earlier generations, it was dime novels, dancing, jazz, rock-n-roll, TV and rap lyrics that communities sought to ban to protect the young. Now it’s social media. These are desperation screams in the dark. It is amusing, I must say, to see a far-left East Coast city government like New York’s take this course: traditionally it has been conservatives and their church-going contingent in Middle America who have advocated radical steps to”save the children.” “A pool table, don’t you understand?”

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At least I hope so.

What’s going on here?From my perch, I see two Arizona politicians I wouldn’t trust to take out the trash setting each other’s career on fire. And, with any luck, both will burn to the ground.

The chairman of Arizona’s Republican Party, Jeff DeWit, resigned this week a day after The Daily Mail released a 10-minute recording of his conversation with Kari Lake, the recent losing GOP candidate for Arizona governor, seemingly offering her a bribe to drop her plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024.

The recording reveals Jeff DeWit, the state party chair, telling Lake that there are “very powerful people that want to keep you out” of the race. He says they told him to ask her if “there any companies out there or something that could just put her on the payroll and give her — to keep her out?” DeWit repeatedly urges Lake not to repeat what he is saying to anyone, and asks, “Is there a number at which — ” before Ms. Lake interrupts, saying “I can be bought?” “Not be bought,” he answers, just, you know, wait a few years before running. She sounds offended by the offer. “That’s immoral — I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” she says on the recording. DeWit persists: “I actually just wish you’d give me a counteroffer that’s big. Lake answers: “I can’t be bought.”

Holy cow, as Phil Rizzuto used to say.

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Here is news you have all been waiting for, I’m sure. Kenya Barris, the black film and television writer, producer and director, is best known as the creator of the ABC sitcom black-ish as well as for writing or directing a number of mediocre-to-terrible movies like “You People,” “Coming 2 America,” and the “updated” versions of “Shaft,” “White Men Can’t Jump,” “The Witches,” and “Cheaper by the Dozen.” Now he has announced that he will be writing and directing new versions of “The Wizard of Oz” and “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

In a recent interview Barris revealed that his screenplay for “The Wizard of Oz” is completed, with the new Dorothy being black and not in Kansas any more, but rather a girl who lives in the Bottoms, a huge apartment complex located in Inglewood, California. “The original ‘Wizard of Oz’ took place during the Great Depression and it was about self-reliance and what people were going through,” Barris said. “I think this is the perfect time to switch the characters and talk about what someone imagines their life could be. It’s ultimately a hero’s journey, someone thinks something’s better than where they’re at, and they go and realize that where they’re at is where they should be. I want people to be proud and happy about where they’re from. But I want the world to take a look at it and I hope that will come through.” 

I’m so excited.

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The majority of the conservative pundits writing at conservative opinion juggernaut PJ Media are not Trump fans, though they of course will support him over Joe and his aspiring totalitarian party. One would think that the cheap tactics and strategies of misleading the public with assorted Big Lies used by the Left against Trump from at least 2015 on would be anathema to this group, and one would be tragically wrong.

For example, here is often amusing and occasionally trenchant columnist Stephen Kruiser bemoaning the failure of Ron DeSantis to gather any momentum in the primaries, and second guessing his approach:

Ron DeSantis became Public Enemy Number One-and-a-Half (after Trump, of course) largely because of the brilliant way he handled Florida’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He essentially gave the finger to Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, and every other egomaniacal bureaucratic tyrant.

DeSantis’s handling of COVID was his — I have to say it — trump card in his effort to catch Trump. It was Trump who weaponized Fauci, no matter how much he and the MAGA faithful deny it. That alone should have been mentioned by the DeSantis campaign as often as possible.

What DeSantis needed to do was ignore Haley, Vivek, and the rest of the Island of Misfit Republicans and hammer Trump on COVID. I’m pretty sure that’s what Trump and his people thought DeSantis would do because Trump and his online army were rewriting the history of his and DeSantis’s COVID responses from the moment the governor got into the race…

I am not at all positing that DeSantis would have fared better had he gone with a COVID-centric strategy; I’m saying that it was his only real shot.

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It’s all over but the shouting in the GOP race for the 2024 Presidential nomination. Ron DeSantis, dropped out yesterday, endorsing Trump, and Nikki Haley will get her metaphorical clock cleaned in the New Hampshire primary: there will be no Gene McCarthy-style upset. Now all the speculation is settling in on the question of who Trump would choose to be his running mate. He claims he’s already decided, but who knows what goes on in that dark wilderness he calls a mind? He could be trolling, he could decide on someone else. My interest lies in whether he is capable of making an ethical choice.

Keep in mind that almost all Presidential running-mates have been chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they have the qualifications, leadership ability or character to be an effective President. If they do, its a lucky accident. Even Abe Lincoln ran for his second term with a wildly unqualified VP, Andrew Johnson, as the latter quickly proved upon being elected. The objective served by the VP choice is winning the Presidency for the #1 man on the ballot. Lyndon Johnson was one of the rare VP choices who had the chops to be President, but all the Democrats and Kennedy cared about was that he was popular in Texas: nobody dreamed that he would end up in the White House thanks to Oswald’s marksmanship. More recently, all three of the women placed on the national ticket—Ferraro, Palin, and (ugh) Harris, had no business being there and wouldn’t have been, had they not had two X chromosomes. If the main qualification for Vice-President were, as it should be, the proven capability to be President of the United States, every VP nomination should be an experienced and effective executive in a challenging government job: state governor, mayor of a big city, or head of a major federal department like State, Homeland Security or Defense.

That criteria becomes especially important when, as it will be in 2024, the Presidential candidate (make that “candidates“) is too old and inherently betting against the mortality tables. Lousy President though he turned out to be when elected to the job, George H.W. Bush still was easily qualified for the VP job based on his experience. Reagan, an elderly candidate, made an ethical choice for a running mate. One of the worst and most unethical choices was FDR’s pick for second-in-command in 1944, when he knew he was probably dying. Harry Truman was an irresponsible, unethical choice (FDR had only met him once, and briefly at that, before handing him the slot); the U.S., as it so often has been, was lucky. Harry was up to the job.

I’m interested in surveying the various names being mentioned in various articles and pundit pieces a possible Trump VPs,to determine if any stand out as particularly ethical or unethical choices.

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