Workplace

The Karine Jean-Pierre Principle: Incompetent and Unprofessional (But Historic!) Hires Will Perform Incompetently and Unprofessionally

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One would think this is obvious, but since the most unprofessional and incompetent White House spokesperson of all time—yes, even worse than Sean Spicer!—still has her job despite the stunt she pulled yesterday, it clearly isn’t obvious enough.

Yesterday? Oh, that. Yesterday President Biden’s DEI paid liar couldn’t deal with Peter Doocy’s questions about FEMA gaslighting regarding its strange shortage of funds to handle hurricane relief while the Biden-Harris administration was sending nearly $157 million to assist displaced people and refugees in Lebanon. Jean-Pierre—who can be seen on “X” and elsewhere denying to reporters that FEMA spends money relocating illegal immigrants and in earlier video clips saying that it does—called Doocy’s daring to question the administration’s excuses “misinformation.”

In case this fact has eluded you somehow, Democrats now use “misinformation” to mean “facts, interpretations and opinions that interfere with a narrative that advances our interests.” When Doocy refused to accept Jean-Pierre’s evasive and contradictory answers, such as stating that FEMA had plenty of fund for hurricane relief despite both President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas stating otherwise, Historic Paid Liar resorted to “slamming her notebook shut and storming out of the briefing room.”

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The Teamsters: Saving Democracy By Being Undemocratic

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…you know, like rest of the Establishment Left.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the US’s largest and most powerful labor unions, declined to endorse a candidate for President. This was widely seen as a rebuke of Kamala Harris, but it also revealed the hypocrisy and ethics rot at the union’s core (and, sad to say, most unions’ cores). The Teamsters, as usual, polled members on their Presidential preferences prior to making an endorsement. The September telephone poll showed 58% of Teamsters members supporting Republican candidate Donald Trump, and 31% said they support Harris. Too close to call? The union justified its decision by citing major political divides among its membership and dissatisfaction with each candidate’s stances on key union priorities; I call BS. Is there any doubt that if the numbers had been reversed, the Teamsters would have endorsed Harris and pointed to a nearly 2-1 polling result to justify their decision?

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Opera Ethics! A Diva Attack In Seoul

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Yikes. A performer who did this in one of my shows would have to enter the witness protection program, because I would be hunting her down. With a crossbow.

South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to uproarious applause, was performing an encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” a famous aria in the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at an opera house in Seoul. His co-star, celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu who was singing the title role, marched onstage and demanded that he stop.

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An Obvious Life Lesson From Baseball: Imitating Movies Doesn’t Always Work Out Well…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

In the much-revered 1988 Kevin Costner film “Bull Durham,” veteran minor league catcher “Crash” Davis mentors a raw, talented rookie pitcher (Tim Robbins) and gets him ready for major league stardom. One of the catcher’s most audacious teaching devices is that when the cocky and none-too-bright pitcher insists on shaking off his signs, “Crash” tells the batter what the next pitch is going to be. Resulst: a massive home run and an chastened pitcher. It’s funny in the film.

The Minnesota Twins apparently have no sense of humor. The team released minor league catcher Derek Bender yesterday for emulating “Crash.” Bender was playing for the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels, the Twins’ Low-A affiliate, and in the second game of a doubleheader last week, Bender tipped off several hitters for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Detroit farm team, regarding the next pitch starter Ross Dunn was going to throw. Lakeland scored four runs in the second inning and won the game 6-0 to capture the Florida State League West division and eliminate the Mighty Mussels from playoff contention.

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I Know, I Know: “The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants.” Tough. Grow Up.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Norfolk Southern’s board has fired CEO Alan Shaw after an investigation found that he has been “engaging in a consensual relationship with the company’s chief legal officer,” the colorfully named Nabanita Nag. She was also canned from her positions as executive vice president corporate affairs, chief legal officer and corporate secretary.

Those are the lovebirds above.

Because this is a firing for cause, Shaw might have lost millions of dollars in what otherwise would be a “golden parachute.” This kind of vertical messing around is always stupid and unethical (but so romantic!), but it is particularly reckless for a CEO who is on metaphorical thin ice already, for then the “King’s Pass” is not going to be in play.

His two-year tenure included bitter labor negotiations that nearly resulted in an economy-crippling strike and the horrific derailment in East Palestine, Ohio that released tank cars full of toxic materials. This was not a good time for the company’s chief executive to go all Woody Allen.

But there is never a good time. When Cupid’s dart strikes, the only professional, ethical decision is to suck it up and resist, or play Edward the Eighth and abdicate “for the woman you love.”

The fact that Shaw was married to someone else should have giving him a strong hint that his ethics alarms should be ringing.

What’s Going On Here? Whatever It Is, Someone Is Extremely Unethical…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I love this story! It has everything…except any certainty about who is telling the truth.

Chad Condit, California Senator Marie Alvarado-Gil’s former chief of staff, has filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against her. He alleges that she pressured him into performing sex acts for her enjoyment when they were traveling together on her official business.

Point of interest #1: Does that name ring a bell? Yes, Chad is the son of Gary Condit, the former Congressman who was a suspect in the Chandra Levy disappearance and murder. He allegedly was having a sexual affair with her, an intern who worked in his office. Now, for this family, the alleged sexual harassment is on the other foot—well, you know what I mean.

Point of interest #2: Alvarado-Gila, meanwhile, is a longtime Democrat who recently got national headlines when she switched to the Republican Party, saying that the Democratic Party had become so extreme that she could no longer support it. I’m ruling that she is—if guilty, of course—is an embarrassment to both parties.

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The Corpse In The Cubicle

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I heard about this a couple of days ago, and couldn’t see exactly what the ethics issue was. I still can’t, but as with the rotting toe in the plug of tobacco that I have mentioned here prominently, this is an example of res ipsa loquitur. Something’s gone terribly wrong, somewhere. There’s no doubt about that.

Denise Prudhomme, 60, a loyal employee of Wells Fargo checked into her office cubicle in Tempe, Arizona on the morning of Aug. 16, a Friday. Nobody noticed that she never checked out, well, at least of her office: she was found dead there at the end of the work day on August 20, the following Tuesday. On-site security called police: they noticed a funny smell—at least they weren’t used to the odor of dead employees rotting away; that’s something—-and called the police.

The Washington Post reports, “It was not immediately clear how Prudhomme went unnoticed over the four-day period, which included the weekend.” Yeah, I’d say that’s a bit strange. A Wells Fargo spokesperson said she sat in “an underpopulated area of the building.”

Well, its even more unpopulated now!

Wells Fargo said in a statement that the company is “deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague,” (whoever she was).

I was just perusing the Wells Fargo website where it describes its “culture” for potential employees. Among the items I noticed that seem rather inconsistent with a company that wouldn’t notice that a member of its “team” had dropped dead for four days…

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It Sure Looks Like Kamala Harris Never Worked At McDonald’s. Does It Matter?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Today RealClearPolitics reporter Paul Sperry tweeted that the Harris-Walz campaign is no longer referencing her alleged job at McDonald’s when she was in college, and has not responded to media questions about the location of the McDonald’s store (obviously somewhere in California, if anywhere) or the exact dates of her employment.

“So what?” you well might say. And under normal circumstances, I well might concur. The Harris campaign is anything but normal, however. This a candidate for President who is trying to get elected as a generic Democrat, which she most assuredly is not even in an era of extreme, anti-democratic Democrats. Her party has decided that its best, indeed its only chance to win in the wake of the catastrophic Biden administration’s record is to create a thumbs up or thumbs down vote on Donald Trump, an election in which the identity, record, beliefs and policy agenda of his opponent are irrelevant as long as his opponent isn’t demonstrably senile. This relegates almost all of the campaign discussion to trivia and boiler plate puffery, and mostly to how Harris and her managers choose to package her, because to most American, those who haven’t been paying attention to an inert Vice-President, packaging is literally all there is.

Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area in the summer after her freshman year in college, is a relatively recent addition to her official life story. It first surfaced in 2019, when Harris ran for President and tried to wrest the nomination from Joe Biden, a politician whose trademark has been his working stiff roots. Since taking over the top of the 2024 ticket from poor Joe, Harris has again been evoking the fast food job to portray what the Washington Post called “her humble background.” (Harris, the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher and a tenured Stanford economist, does not come from a humble background.)

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On “the Truthful, Brief, 21-Point Biography of Kamala Harris”: Ten Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I don’t know who “Cynical Publius” is: does it matter? (Grok is the irritating Twitter/”X” AI bot, and I couldn’t stop it from photo-bombing my screen shot.)

Points:

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 14: Female Baseball Broadcasters

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There is really no good excuse for this one, just reasons, but I’m trying, I really am.

Major League Baseball is making a concerted effort to get more women into the baseball broadcast booths for both radio and TV. I don’t know if this is a DEI-inspired initiative or just a rational response to a long-lasting gender prejudice. Either way, there is no reason why a woman who knows the game, has a pleasing voice and is an experienced broadcaster shouldn’t be doing play-by-play or color commentary.

I am not used to it, however; nobody is. Baseball games to loyal fans are the voices of Vin Scully, Earnie Harwell, Mel Allen, Curt Gowdy, Harry Carey, and the rest. It didn’t help that the first prominent national baseball female broadcaster was whoever the young softball star was who was put in a three-person ESPN Sunday Night Baseball booth next to Alex (yecchh!) Rodriguez several years ago. Cheatin’ A-Rod was terrible as always, but she was embarrassing: NOW should have petitioned to have her fired. She was cute, which I suspect was the major reason she got the job, but most of the time she was giggling or laughing. She set the cause of female baseball broadcasting back at least a decade.

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