Hardly anyone is reading or commenting today, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to clear the inventory…

1. Today’s incompetent elected official: Pennsylvania State Rep. Kevin Boyle (D-Philadelphia) is shown in a video that turned up on social media ranting and threatening people at a bar. It is unknown right now when the video was taken; from an ethical point of view, it doesn’t matter. Elected officials who disgrace themselves and their constituents like this…indeed, even less than this, should resign immediately. One time is too many. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania House Democrats blathered, “We are aware of a video circulating on social media. It is very troubling.” “Rep. Boyle has been open about his personal challenges,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are encouraged that our colleague and dear friend is seeking help. Our commitment to delivering mental health services does not stop at the Capitol Steps. One of the main reasons we advocate so strongly for mental health access is the reality that challenges can and do happen to anyone, and seeking treatment should be encouraged, not stigmatized.”

No. When an elected official behaves like that in public, his conduct should be stigmatized. He can seek treatment as a private citizen. He has no right to serve in a public position of trust when he has behaved that way.

The same, incidentally, applies to President Biden.

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Last night the New York Times reported that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel will resign after the South Carolina primary. Anyone paying attention knows that in a competent party, McDaniel would have resigned in 2022 after her party failed miserably in the mid-terms despite the ongoing train wreck of the Biden administration. If McDaniel herself had any integrity, pride, sense of accountability and decency, she would have resigned after that debacle on her own initiative, if not committed ritual seppuku and eviscerated herself on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

For some reason, electing incompetent heads of the Republican National Committee is a tradition in this perpetually addled party. Remember Michael Steele? The guy who said his favorite book was “War and Peace” and then purported to quote Tolstoy by reciting reverently, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”? 

What finally did Ronna in was Red State’s Jennifer Van Laar’s investigative reporting on McDaniel’s ineptitude and warped priorities based on the evidence of official Federal Election Commission figures. (Ah, if only we had some mainstream, trustworthy, independent, professional institution that did things like that!) Here’s a sample, but the first part alone would warrant firing the individual responsible in a serious and competent organization. The period covered is October 20, 2022 through November 30, 2023:

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Quick version: It’s getting worse.

You knew that, I assume. Just to pick one example, we heard a Presidential candidate in a debate call an opponent “scum”—and it was a female candidate. Remember when one of the arguments for putting women in office just because they were women was that they would civilize politics. Ah, those halcyon days of innocence!

The new year began with another one of those TV commercials that defines cleverness as “using language that is code for a vulgar phase or word.” Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about one of those, a tax refund service ad that used “What the buck?” and “Buck yeah!” This was even less clever than the still rampant “Let’s go Brandon!” coded insult to the President. (The coded use of “fuck” in that case is stillmore clever and slightly more civil than how Rep. Tlaib, one of the supposedly civilized female Congresswomen, referred to the previous President when she said for public consumption, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!”)

In the past, Ethics Alarms has noted low-life advertisers using code words for “ass” (Verizon), alluding to sexual intercourse (Reese’s), evoking the word “shit” (K-Mart and DraftKings), as well as Jackson Hewitt’s inspiration for “buck,” Booking.com. For some reason, the un-named pizza company (I don’t want to give them any publicity for being, in Nikki’s terms, “scum”) commercial, promoting a really good pizza- and-other-stuff deal, showing a young woman exclaiming, “Shut the back door!” upon learning the shockingly low price bothered me even more than the past examples. “Shut the back door'” and also “Shut the front door” are street-talk euphemisms for “Shut the fuck up!” This is pandering to Generation Z, of course, but it’s also obscenely gratuitous.

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Once again, Ethics Alarms visits the thorny issue of what kind of conduct permanently disqualifies someone from being a trusted lawyer—and in the law, if you can’t be trusted, you can’t be a lawyer. Last October, I wrote about “the rest of the story” concerning Shon Hopwood, who served more than a decade in federal prison for bank robbery, became a “jailhouse lawyer,” went to law school after his release, passed the D.C. bar exam, was admitted to practice, and became a professor at my old alma mater, Georgetown Law Center. In 2017, I had written that he should not have been trusted sufficiently to receive a law license, as such a serious felony committed as an adult is ominous signature significance for someone whom society may choose to trust as a citizen after serving his prison sentence, but not for one trusted to administer and advise regarding the law. The second post was prompted after Hopwood was arrested for multiple counts of domestic battery, and relieved of his teaching duties.

True, Hopwood didn’t steal a client’s money or commit a breach of the legal ethics rules (other than breaking the law, which is a breach of the ethics rules that doesn’t involve the unethical practice of law). I was sorely tempted to say “I told you so!” to the vast majority of my colleagues who disagree with my bias against bank-robbing lawyers, but I resisted the temptation.

As far as I can determine, Hopwood has not been tried or convicted, and maybe that explains why he is still listed among GULC’s faculty. His Wikipedia entry does not mention his latest arrest, but it does mention that he hired Tiffany Trump as a research assistant.

I’m sure this is all her father’s fault, somehow.

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Giving a Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama for doing nothing but existing looks increasingly reasonable. A member of the Norwegian Parliament just made a sufficiently outrageous nomination for the honor to topple the previous champion while making Obama look like the Dalai Lama.

The previous prize for a ridiculous nomination came in 2021, when a different member of the Norwegian Parliament, Petter Eide, formally nominated Black Lives Matter for the honor. “I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality,” Eide said. “Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice. They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness about racial injustice.” Riiight.

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