Above is what Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who presumes to tell us that she is qualified to be President of the United States, tweeted to her followers last week. This deliberate and disgraceful lie could be presented on Ethics Alarms as evidence that Warren is an Ethics Dunce. It would easily qualify as an Unethical Quote of the Week (Month…Year…). It is fully qualified as an Unethical Tweet of the Week, in a category that is becoming increasingly contested. None of these, however, quite capture the miserable, cynical, disgusting nature of Warren’s statement. Continue reading →
Well, unless he repudiates his brother, Julian Castro just earned himself a place on the next Ethics Alarms “Who’s most unethical Democratic candidate?” poll. An update on that: Warren well ahead, Harris is second, but with just half Warren’s “support,” and the rest far behind….
This is really slimy: Presidential candidate Castro’s Congressman brother, who also heads his campaign, tweeted a list of San Antonio donors to the Trump campaign, along with the names of their employers, as well as the Twitter handles of several owners of local businesses in his district that donated to Trump. He added, “Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump. Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’”
First, MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Alene Vance sends out the completely false tweet above. Of course Fox News covered the hearing. Why would she do that? Is it because she works for all all-anti-Trump-spin all the time network? Or is it because she’s a hard core partisan, having been an Obama U.S. Attorney? Maybe its because she’s not a journalist, and has no idea what kind of standards journalists are supposed to use before reporting “news.” Then again, virtually nobody at MSNBC appears to know what ethical journalism is.
Whatever the reason, she tweeted it, and immediately confirmation bias set in, with such sophisticated political analysts as horror novelist and well-established Trump-hater Stephen King helping to spread the word–three “words,” really: Fox won’t report news unfavorable to Trump, Trump is afraid of the Mueller Report (never mind that anyone’s been able to read it for months) and that Mueller’s testimony was going to be a likely calamity for the President—to his more than 5 million followers. [NOTE:It wasn’t. It was a calamity for “the resistance” and Robert Mueller’s reputation]
I know this is too stupid to even comment on, but since my mind is still very much on my recently departed Jack Russell Terrier Rugby, and because this tweet really meets the definition of racist, unlike some other recent tweets being labelled as such, I won’t resist posting on it. I could resist, but I won’t.
Here’s the tweet:
What an idiot. Also…
Twitter hasn’t suspended the account.
Nobody who has actually owned a dog would ever analogize the relationship to slavery.
Nobody who thought for twenty seconds before tweeting this would make that analogy either.
What about all the African-Americans who own dogs? Oh, right: slavery was practiced by African tribes too. I guess that explains it.
Human Events Managing Editor Ian Miles Cheong tweeted back, “Listen, I just wanted to thank you for driving more people towards the right.Trump wouldn’t be president without people like you.”
All right, that’s enough stupidity for one day. Between the anti-manspreading chair and this, I’m way over my limit.
Sitting on the sidelines watching the party that has been calling him a traitor, a liar, an imbecile and a Nazi for over three years explode into self-destructive but nicely revealing internecine, generational, ideological warfare, with key leaders calling each other racists and other uncomplimentary things, President Donald J. Trump decided that the most responsible course was for him to tweet this:
This is gross incompetence and stupidity.
I did like the Red State headline regarding this inexplicably self-destructive behavior:
“As Democrats Fight a Civil War, Trump Strips Naked and Runs Onto the Battlefield.”
I know we’re getting perilously close to Julie Principle territory here. The Congresswoman says and tweets so many ignorant, logically flawed, impulsive and silly things so often that it seem ungallant to keep swatting at them.
On the other hand, elected officials, especially members of Congress, have an ethical duty not to make their supporters, followers and the public in general dumber and more ignorant than they already are. The tweet above does that: it misrepresents laws, law enforcement, the nature of abortion, reality, justice, too much to process, really.
It also shows seriously damaged critical thinking skills and an abysmal grasp of analogies. “Right?” No, NOT right, you fool. Abortion bans target the intentional taking of what these laws deem human life. Got that? Intentional. No ICE agents set out to cause the deaths of premature babies that were, in fact, placed in peril by their mothers who endangered them by bringing them along as they attempted to break U.S. laws. There is no valid comparison here. None. Continue reading →
1. Boycott/extortion update! Let’s see if Georgia has as much guts and principle as Alabama, and tells Disney to go fly a kite.
Hugh Culverhouse, Jr., the University of Alabama’s largest donor, called for a boycott of Alabama , both the University and the state , because of Alabama’s defiant, anti-Roe abortion ban, recently signed into law. The university’s law school was renamed Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law last September 2018 after the Florida businessman pledged $26.5 million to the university. In response to Culverhouse’s boycott call, University of Alabama System Chancellor Finis St. John recommended to the Board of Trustees that it return the $21.5 million the law school it has actually received from Culverhouse, and restore the name to “The University of Alabama School of Law.”
Good. That’s exactly how states should respond to attempted extortion by individuals and corporations to control their lawmaking and bend the state to their wills rather than the decisions of voters. The whole story is at TaxProf Blog.
2. Nah! A reverend like, say, Martin Luther King would never engage in the kinds of sordid acts his biographer claims! They are men of God!
Bobby J. Blackburn, the pastor of Elevate Church in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, was arrested this week and charged with the prohibited use of an electronic communication system to procure a minor to commit a sex act. Blackburn is also the owner of Giovanni’s, a pizza restaurant in Prestonsburg. A girl who worked there showed a police sergeant images of an iMessage conversation she had with Blackburn in which he asked the minor to engage in a “threesome” with him and another girl, also a minor. He also made other sexually explicit requests.
Rev. Bobby tried to weasel out of his mess by bringing a third young woman to the police station and having her claim that she sent the incriminating messages from his phone. It didn’t work: under questioning, she admitted that she was lying and that Blackburn ordered her to make the false claim under threat of losing her job.
