Workplace

Look! Now the Secret Service Is Violating the Third Amendment!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Gee, will somebody be fired now? Oh, probably not.

The Berkshire Eagle reports that while the U.S. Secret Service was protecting Vice President Kamala Harris’ during her July 27 visit to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, its agents used Alicia Powers’ hair salon, Four One Three Salon at 54 Wendell Avenue, as a comfort station without her permission. They taped over a security camera on the building’s back porch, broke into her establishment, used the bathroom, ate the mints on the counter and left without cleaning up or locking the back door.

After the Secret Service conducted a security sweep of the building in preparation for Harris’s appearance, Powers went to Cape Cod for a scheduled vacation. On the Saturday morning of Harris’s event, Powers’ phone alerted her at the Cape that there was activity on the salon’s back porch. A female agent had “walked around the porch, walked around the side of the building and then popped back up on the porch, grabbed the chair, hopped up and taped [over] the camera,” Powers said, explaining what her security cameras showed. “[The tape] blacked out the camera completely.”

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

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

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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Olympics Ethics Quiz: The Sexist Commentator

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Horror.

Bob Ballard is a veteran sports announcer with the BBC who has reported on sports since the mid- 1980s. He’s been involved in covering several Olympic games. However, a wan sexist joke he uttered that would have been standard fair on sitcoms in the 1960s got him sacked from the Paris Olympics broadcast.

After the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay that ended with a gold for Team Australia, Ballard felt compelled to comment on the team’s delay leaving the Paris Aquatic Centre. “Well, the women just finishing off. You know what women are like, hanging around, doing their makeup,” Ballard said. Immediately his female broadcasting partner Lizzie Simmonds, a former Olympian and his Eurosport co-host, struck. “Outrageous, Bob,” she said. “Some of the men are doing that as well.” Ballard laughed.

Eurosport, which distributes the Olympic broadcast in Europe (owned by the same company that now owns CNN) confirmed that the comment caused Ballard’s Olympics to be terminated. “We can confirm that Bob Ballard has been removed from our commentary roster with immediate effect,” it said in a statement this week.

Take THAT, insufficiently female athlete-extolling pig at the Parity Olympics!

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was Ballard’s dismissal, fair, proportional and just?

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Ethics Hero: Orioles Catcher James McCann, No Weenie He!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wow.

Blue Jays rookie pitcher Yariel Rodríguez threw a first-inning 95 mph fastball that hit Baltimore Orioles back-up catcher James McCann directly in the face. Blood gushed from his nose and mouth, and he immediately dropped to the ground. Team trainer Brian Ebel began providing treatment at the plate, but McCann got to his feet, still bleeding, and went to first base. O’s manager Brandon Hyde summoned him to the dugout while the Jays were replacing their wild pitcher, but McCann was adamant that he could continue. It was the first game of a doubleheader, and McCann didn’t want the O’s young star catcher, Adley Rutschman, to have to catch both games, an invitation to injury.

“I felt like if I could get the blood to stop flowing then I could stay in the game, and that was what I was able to do,” McCann said. When play resumed, McCann went back to first, wearing a fresh, unbloodied jersey.

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Unethical Film and Theater Reviewer Bias, Part I: “Straight People Can’t Act”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Film and theater reviewer biases and politics have always been a blight on the field: the late, absurdly worshiped New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael would pan terrific John Wayne movies just because he had supported Barry Goldwater. It’s hard to watch a revival of “Hair” (or the stunningly bad film version) without wondering, “What were those reviewers raving about, with that faux rock music and the trite book?” Why, peace, pot and love, baby! ” Hair” was against the war in Vietnam, so it had to be at least as good as “Oklahoma!”

Now, of course, in the era of the Great Stupid, explaining what Big Brother’s tastes in the arts require is a job requirement for film and theater reviewer who are paid in real money rather than free passes. In a New York Times column about how “outdated” classic musicals (that is, insufficiently woke) can be salvaged by appropriately sensitive directors, for example, readers were informed by an “expert” that only gay actors can convincingly play gay characters.

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Baseball’s Unethical Trade Deadline

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Let’s take a break from the election to focus on the things that really matter.

Like baseball.

Baseball’s Unethical Season is upon us. The trade deadline is tomorrow at 6 pm. It means that several teams…fewer this year than usual, but still…will announce to their fans that they won’t be trying to win any more, that hope is lost, and that they will put on the field from now on even worse squads than the ones that got them to this point.

This is because they have decided to trade or sell off many of their best players, especially veterans with big contracts or who will be free agents after the season, for unproven prospects. Those teams will “tank” for the foreseeable future, meaning accumulate losses so they can get high draft picks.

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The Other Shoe Drops: Why Can’t Leaders Accept Responsibility Until They Are Forced To?

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Gee, waddya know? The incompetent head of the Secret Service finally resigned.

Less than a week ago, Ethics Alarms expressed disgust and amazement that Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle hadn’t resigned from her job (She’s “historic,” see, so that’s why President Biden wouldn’t fire her.) “This is basic management ethics,” I wrote then. “When the organization leader fails that badly—and it is hard to imagine a worse failure—the leader takes full responsibility and leaves, because the organization cannot retain public trust as long as that leader is in place. There is no other honorable or ethical course.”

Yet she defiantly said that she would not resign, despite also saying that she accepted “full responsibility.” She had spent all of the time since the Secret Service’s incompetence nearly got Donald Trump killed making absurd excuses, trying to blame local police, and lying outright. Yesterday, Cheatle further soiled what remained of her dignity and reputation, evading questions and infuriating members of Congress trying to get to the bottom of what happened in Pennsylvania. Almost as one, the House members told her she needed to quit. If Cheatle has done anything laudable, it is bringing together the parties in a bi-partisan expression of outrage at a single target.

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Accountability? What’s Accountability? Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle Still Has Her Job, and Only the Prominence of a Confederacy of Ethics Dunces Can Explain That [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

I could go into an analysis of what was so stunningly dangerous and incompetent about the Secret Service FUBAR that almost got Donald Trump murdered, at this point just about the only way the Democrats would be able to keep the White House. I’m happy to wait for the results of Congressional hearings and the investigation, but as I heard many experts say on multiple networks, you don’t have to be an expert to figure from the time-line and what we do know that the Secret Service was spectacularly incompetent, and that Cheatle’s pathetic explanations (I particularly like “the sloped roof was too dangerous for our agents so we let a gunman use it to shoot Trump”) haven’t passed the giggle test. Her ridiculous statements and the fact that the agents knew an unknown person with a gun was within killing distance of Donald Trump and waited for him to take a shot before doing anything (like, say, keeping Trump off the stage: don’t those little earpieces work?) are res ipsa loquitur, so damning that conspiracy theories are unavoidable.

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Ethics Villain and Contender for “Asshole of the Year”: Sumaya Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

18-year-old Sumaya Thomas of North Liberty, Iowa was supposed to go on a blind date with a young man she had met on an online dating app. But by the time her date arrived at her abode to pick her up on the evening of June 16, Thomas had changed her mind. Did she tell him that to his face, like any normal, decent human being, apologizing for wasting his time and dashing his hopes? Oh noooo. Did she text him, the weenie’s way out? No. Did she just leave him on her doorstep, knocking and buzzing while she hid under the bed? No. Did she sneak out the back door? No, not that either.

Instead, Thomas called 911 and said her abusive ex- was outside harassing her because she was seven months pregnant with their child. She said she needed the police to get him off her property as he was threatening to “hit, punch, kick and stab her.”

Nice! A police car was dispatched, and when officers arrived they found an apparently calm, confused young man in the process of walking away. Upon being questioned about the situation, he explained that he had arrived to go on a date with the woman inside the house, and that he had only met her online a week ago.

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The Radio Host’s Firing: What’s (Really) Going On Here?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Over the weekend after President Biden’s less-than-reassuring interview on ABC, radio hosts Andrea Lawful-Sanders and Earl Ingram appeared on CNN. Both had held radio interviews with the President after his disastrous debate performance as part of the White House’s rehabilitation program. “Were those questions given to you by the White House, or the campaign, or did you have to submit questions ahead of this interview?” CNN host Victor Blackwell asked Lawful-Sanders.

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