Unethical Quote Of The Week (And Nominated For Un-Self-Aware Quote Of The Year): Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

wait_what_logo

“If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun.”

—–Hillary Clinton, forgetting all sorts of things in her speech in response to the Orlando massacre.

Cowabunga, Hillary!!! Do you think, while I am trying to explain why the only responsible course for an ethical citizen is to vote for a horrible candidate like  you in order to stop Donald Trump from becoming President Asshole, you might at least try not to make it harder by talking like an autocratic idiot yourself? Do you think you could do that, please?

PLEASE???

Not for the first time, Hillary Clinton just made one of those boomerang assertions that applies to her as much as those she is supposedly criticizing. Her all-time classic, of course, was when she said that the victims of sexual abuse had the right to be believed (unless, of course, the sexual abuser is her husband and meal-ticket, in which case she personally will see that said victim is discredited and destroyed.)

Was the statement in her speech even worse? Hmmm, close one! Here is Hillary, herself under a criminal investigation by the FBI for violating a federal law or five and still running for President because, after all,  it’s just an investigation, and in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave one does not lose rights and privileges until one is actually convicted in a court of law. And yet here she is saying that an FBI investigation should suspend a Constitutional right.

Talk about throwing blood in the water. Talk about cynically appealing to low information voters. Talk about pandering. Talk about walking into a buzz-saw.

Talk about stupid…

I would not be the first to ask, fairly and accurately, if Hillary also believes that merely being investigated should suspend other rights, like the right to not to be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to have a lawyer, the right not to have to incriminate oneself, and the right to free speech? Does she know that the right to purchase a gun is also as much of a right as any of these? Or is she really saying that she wants to eliminate that right?

Perhaps she was just speaking carelessly, irresponsibly and in vague generalities–like, oh, just to pick an example out of the air, Donald Trump.

You’re not making it easy for me, Hillary.

Not at all.

Comment of the Day: “Can Anyone Analyze The Orlando Mass Shooting Objectively?”

/ Jack Marshall / 126 Comments

gun control nation

I was thinking about re-posting an essay here from 2012, when Humble Talent, one of Ethics Alarms’ most prolific and thoughtful participants, filed this comment on today’s observations about the post-Orlando shooting. Not to be a spoiler, but this quote at the end is simply a fact:

“What I’ve settled on, and this might be defeatist, but what I’ve settled on is that this is the price we pay for freedom. 3000 gun deaths a year In a population of 350,000,000 is the cost of freedom, and objectively, it’s probably even a good trade, even if subjectively it tastes like ash.”

In 2012, I reached the same conclusion:

“The right to be free creates the opportunity to be irresponsible, and ethics is the collective cultural effort to teach ourselves, our children and our neighbors not to be irresponsible without having to be forced to be responsible at gunpoint, with the government holding the gun. I know it seems harsh and callous to say so, but I am not willing to give up on ethics—the belief that enough of us can do the right things even when we have the freedom to do the wrong things—to prevent the occasional school massacre or murder-suicide.”

We’re both right. The right to arm ourselves is at the beating heart of American democracy, and those who would eliminate it understand neither the right, nor the United States.

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Can Anyone Analyze The Orlando Mass Shooting Objectively?”

I’m so… tired. I called it… I called it all: Terrorist attack on American soil, big, guns, Trump’s gamble paid, Islam, ISIS, Allahu Akbar, gay people targeted for being gay. I’ve never been so depressed at being so right. Continue reading →

The UN Officially Admits It Has No Integrity

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
"It is true: I am a weenie, and the U.N. can be rolled..."

“It is true: I am a weenie, and the U.N. can be rolled…”

The United Nations’ 2015 “Children and Armed Conflict” report originally listed the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen under “parties that kill or maim children” and “parties that engage in attacks on schools and/or hospitals.” Based on the work of U.N. researchers in Yemen, the report attributed 60 percent of the 785 children killed and 1,168 injured to the bombing coalition.

But  Saudi Arabia  threatened to stop its funding of other U.N. projects, so, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admitted,  the U.N. was revising the report to “review jointly the cases and numbers cited in the text,” in order to “reflect the highest standards of accuracy possible” ….and to “temporarily” remove the Saudi-led coalition countries from the report’s annex in the interest of protecting these programs.

Ban said he made a the difficult decision based on the need “to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many U.N. programs.”

“It is unacceptable for member states to exert undue pressure,” Ban said, absurdly. If it is unacceptable, why does the U.N. accept it?

The UN published a factual report, and has now announced that the report will be inaccurate because it yielded to extortion in involving the lives of children.

Corruption. What justification is there to trust an organization that allows a member to do this?

The news media should stop quoting United Nations reports on health, climate change, hunger, or anything else. It has admitted that it can be bullied, pressured and bought. It has no credibility, and should not be treated as if it does.

_______________________

Sources: NPR, The Intercept

 

Can Anyone Analyze The Orlando Mass Shooting Objectively?

/ Jack Marshall / 167 Comments

blind men elephant

We know that Omar Mateen planned an attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. We know he used a pistol and an AR-15 rifle—which he purchased legally– to shoot over a hundred people, leaving  50 people dead and 53 injured. We know he was homophobic, that the FBI interviewed him three times,  and that he had pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State as his deadly assault began. We know that  his father is a pro-Taliban, anti-American activist. We know that the shooter’s  co-workers noticed that he was unstable, but that his bosses were reluctant to take any action for fear of appearing “racist.” We will Mateen’s ex-wife says he was prone to violence and that she believes he was mentally ill.

We will undoubtedly learn more. Still, that’s a lot of data. Isn’t it possible to objectively, dispassionately weigh and measure causes and effects and come to fair and reasonable conclusions that can guide policy without partisan gridlock?

It is possible to at least try, but so far, pundits, elected officials and activists aren’t trying. They are allowing confirmation bias to dominate their thoughts; what matters isn’t what caused this tragedy, but what they want to believe caused it.

To arch conservative pundit Michael Walsh, for example, the problem is that the United States allows Afghanis and Muslims to be citizens:

Ah, Afghanistan, the land of sexually primitive boy-molesters who channel their aggression into wife-beating and mass murder…That’s par for the course for marriages to Muslims, as many real American women who’ve married one of them knows. Flowers, limos, candy… and the second after the vows, domestic prison and beatings for life or until they can escape….The Florida shooter is Exhibit A why the notion of “birthright citizenship” — he was an Afghan Muslim who by sheer chance was born in New York — needs to be drastically curtailed in light of changed circumstances.

Continue reading →

The Times’ Timothy Egan Doesn’t Get It: Hillary Lies, Trump Just Has No Respect For Facts

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

polygraph

In a Sunday Times op-ed called Lord of the Lies, Timothy Egan argues that Donald Trump, and apparently only Donald Trump, should be fact-checked live in any Presidential debates. Egan is adopting the current fad among journalists, which is the argument that Trump is so bad, the media should apply a double standard, making sure his misrepresentations are immediately debunked, while presumably allowing Hillary to continue to issue whoppers every time she talks about Benghazi, her State e-mails, the Clinton Foundation, her record as a champion for victims of sexual assault, etc.

I already pointed out how unethical it was for CNN to employ an  on-screen fact-check of a Trump speech ( “Trump: I never said Japan should have nukes (he did).” ) especially since they will never do the same to Hillary (“Hillary:I never sent e-mails marked classified (She did…)”)  Egan thought CNN’s intrusion was just peachy, though, because the news media now believes their task isn’t to be fair to both candidates and treat them the same, but to employ any means necessary to defeat that one journalists have determined shouldn’t win.

A larger problem with Egan’s thesis—even more than his apparent belief that the notoriously biased PolitiFact is “non-partisan”)—is that he doesn’t know what a lie is. He adopts the flat-out wrong definition of lie used by most fact-checkers in fact: if they disagree with a statement or can show it is untrue, it’s a lie. That’s not what makes a statement a lie. For example, PolitiFact is demonstrably biased and Democratic-leaning, far more so than the Washington Post’s Factchecker or Fact Check.org. But I wouldn’t assume that Egan is lying when he says otherwise. Progressive journalists just assume PolitiFact is fair and non-partisan because they think they are fair and non-partisan. They are deluded, not lying. That’s an important distinction. Continue reading →

Fair, Accurate, And Devastating: A Hillary Super-Pac’s Anti-Trump Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Donald Trump has said and done so many outrageous things since his November, 2015 mockery of a disabled journalist that many have probably forgotten how ugly, cruel and undignified it was. Trump also, you may recall, denied that he even knew the journalist was disabled—one of his many Jumbos (“Elephant? What elephant?”) since that accursed day that he entered the presidential race. Now a super-PAC supporting Hillary Clinton has taken that moment and employed it to make a vivid point, easily summarized as, “This guy wants to be President?”

Continue reading →

Gut Check For Obama: The Responsible Thing Is To Pull Out Of The 2016 Olympics

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Rio2016-Logo-2

UPDATE: 6/18/13 Now this.

The responsible thing, in fact, would have been to pull out before now.

The Olympics, which were supposed to represent the ideal of pure, individual amateur (For love, not money) athletic achievement, metastasized into a bloated, hyper-nationalist insult to those ideals long ago. In addition…

…The Olympic organization is corrupt, accepting bribes to determine which nations host the games.

…The competitions are corrupt, with banned performance enhancing substances being used widely and with the assistance and knowledge of participating nations, in some cases. At the end of last year, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)  issued a report calling for Russia to be banned from international athletics at all levels for flagrant doping violations and a “deeply rooted culture of cheating at all levels” within Russian athletics.

Have the Olympics banned Russia? Of course not.

Meanwhile, an IOC investigation revealed that 23 athletes have tested positive in a massive doping scandal that could ban a total of 31 yet-unnamed athletes “from 12 countries and six sports” from participating in the 2016 Olympics.

…The games now have the shadow of terrorism hanging over them.

…Expenditures by hosting nations always divert resources into inefficient and unnecessary projects, as greater national and social priorities suffer in the pursuit of pride and prestige. Following a pattern that we have seen in other countries, some poor Brazilians  have  lost their homes as part of preparations for the games. Continue reading →

I Can’t Decide Which Is Worse, That “Hamilton” Is So Greedy, Or That They Won’t Admit It

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

 

Hamilton

 

Producers of the smash hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” soon to sweep the Tonys in historic fashion, have raised the top premium seat price to a record-obliterating $849.

The previous high for Broadway show’s ticket prices was $477 for the best seats to “The Book of Mormon.” The producers are taking advantage of the fact that the show has reached mania status, something like the Dutch tulip craze. Waiting lists for tickets are months long. The show is a cultural phenomenon, but it is still a show.

This musical, reinventing the genre with a hip-hop score and an intelligent, challenging book, could be that rarity, a popular musical that matters, and one that draw young…even straight!…young people back to a genre that has been rapidly declining and increasingly irrelevant to modern popular culture. So given that opportunity,and already making money hand over fist, what does the production do?

Raise tickets to an obscene level. Ensure that the tickets to other shows will rise too. Make live theater, which is already too expensive for any family to attend not named Pritzger or the equivalent, even more elite and even more inaccessible to normal, working Americans. Continue reading →

The Flat Learning Curve Again: Obama Signals His Desires In A Law Enforcement Matter Of Some Considerable Consequence

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

curve-flat…and not just any law enforcement matter, but an investigation of a former Secretary of State and presumptive Presidential nominee.

Nice. You see, Barack Obama just doesn’t care. That’s the only possible explanation for this pattern which goes way back to 2009, when he opined on whether his old friend from Harvard, Henry Louis Gates, was the party at fault in an altercation with a Cambridge, Mass, police officer. That was his first year as President, so maybe it’s plausible that this “Constitutional scholar” and allegedly brilliant man didn’t know that the President of the United States warps the justice system and law enforcement when he declares how he thinks they should handle a particular matter, since he is at the tippity top of our rule of law. Obama has done this again and again, however—with Trayvon Martin… in the Big Branch Mine disaster…as Obamacare approached a key challenge in the Supreme Court…in the military sex abuse scandal…regarding Arizona’s illegal immigration laws, and regarding other matters. He has to know by now that it biases the process, but his supporters cheer, the news media makes excuses, only Republicans, the “conservative media”  and Ethics Alarms complain, so he keeps doing it anyway. He can get away with it, so he just doesn’t care.

Nice.

This, however, was special. The same day that the White House admitted that the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s intentional mishandling of official e-mails for her own personal needs–she didn’t want citizens to be able to see her business and political machinations using the Freedom of Information Act—was a criminal investigation, he endorsed Clinton for President in glowing terms.

Fox News’ Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen asked White House Paid Liar Josh Earnest about the appropriateness of this—heaven forfend that any non-conservative-biased news outlet would ask such an obvious and necessary  question, queried “You have other employees of the executive branch, career prosecutors, FBI agents, working this case who have now just heard how the president wants to see this case resolved, in essence. Isn’t there some conflict there?”
Continue reading →

When You Consider The Wisdom Of Obama’s Campaign To Destigmatize Felons, Please Also Consider Felicia Menge Kelley

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments
Portrait of a justice-involved individual...

Portrait of a justice-involved individual…

As it attempts to bolster its political support by sucking up to convicted criminals and their families, the Obama administration has been incrementally making it more difficult to distinguish felons from law-abiding citizens, arguing that once they have paid their debt to society, maybe they are no different. HUD, carrying out the Obama administration’s new theory that felons are just plain folks,  has decreed that landlords risk federal investigations if they reject rental applicants based on the applicant’s undisputed criminal record in newly-released guidelines. 

The Justice Department and the Department of Education are now using a euphemism to make convicts and those with rap sheets sound like they have a hobby: the new cover-phrase is “justice-involved individuals.” (Hillary Clinton is apparently a justice-involved individual.)

The problem with all of this is that being convicted of a felony is not like catching a cold, and often provides a strong clue that the individual involved is not quite as trustworthy as the boy scout or girl scout next door. Take, for example, this story:

From the ABA Journal:

A woman with a history of financial crimes in multiple states got a job as an office manager and bookkeeper for a North Carolina law firm, after a background check failed to pick up her earlier convictions under a different name.

That resulted in a loss of more than $150,000 to the firm, Yow, Fox & Mannen, District Attorney Ben David of New Hanover County told the Port City Daily. The firm’s now-former employee, Felicia Menge Kelley, 44, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to one count of embezzlement and was sentenced to a prison term of between 82 and 111 months, the newspaper reports. She will also be required to pay over $145,000 in restitution.

Kelley, who has previously worked for other law firms in the Jacksonville area, was convicted earlier under the name of Felicia Dawn Menge…

But I’m sure she’s just an exception to the rule…and gives a bad name to decent, hard-working, justice-involved individuals. It’s not like they are criminals or something.