Ethics Quiz: The Teenage Anti-Semite

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned from her post as NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s director of appointments. The Anti-Defamation League dug up comments she made as a teenager that registered as anti-Semitic; this happened just a day after Mamdani announced her appointment. Da Costa, 33 (above) is married to a deputy city comptroller, and he is, ironically enough, Jewish. When she authored the social media posts in question, however, she wasn’t married and couldn’t imagine that her dumb posts would come back to sideline her career.

“Money hungry Jews smh,” she wrote in one 2011 post, when she was 18, using the abbreviation for “shaking my head.” “Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” she wrote in another post. “I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Da Costa said in her resignation statement. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”

Long-time readers here may remember Ethics Alarms posts about the “Hader Gotcha,” named for a young Major League Baseball pitcher of note (he’s still pretty good) who was forced to grovel an abject apology for tweeting offensive things when he was in high school that almost nobody read. I wrote in one of the early EA posts on the phenomenon,

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Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part II: The Important Stuff

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

 

Yes, I’m feeling this hopeless right now.

Contrasting in gravitas and significance this week have been at least three revelations that the Axis of Unethical Conduct will try mightily to keep out of the public eye and our consciousness. Instead, we will be bombarded with Rob Reiner’s wonderful movies, “the collapse of the Trump Presidency,”and, of course, Epstein. With an ethical Fourth Estate, however, and a POTUS who wasn’t determined to destroy himself, these stories would be leading the news:

1. Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified, then included in the final Georgia Presidential vote tally. This obviously places Trump’s claims that the election results were corrupted in a new light, especially his controversial appeal to Georgia’s governor to “find” the votes necessary to flip the state into Trump’s column. The margin in Georgia was a whole lot less than 315, 000.

The startling admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board. Before that, as we all know by now, Trump had been accused of trying to “overthrow” the election and his lawyers have been disciplined for trying to halt the certification of what they believed was an unconstitutional election. No, Georgia alone couldn’t have stolen the Presidency, but this additional information certainly undermines the five year narrative, as well as the already dead-in-the-water state prosecution of Donald Trump.

The Federalist is covering the story. I have not seen any report in the Washington Post, the networks, or the New York Times.

2. Newly-declassified documents show that President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice pressured the FBI to conduct its 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home while the FBI repeated warned that such a raid was not justified.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced in an X post, “Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway.” “Based on the records Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice. Read for yourself,” Grassley added, linking to the documents posted online.

It was not a “miscarriage of justice,” it was a deliberate political hit job using law enforcement as a means to taking a Biden political rival out of the 2024 race. Who was the threat to democracy, again?

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Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part I: 4 Self-Inflicted Wounds

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>

EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,

1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”

2. Trump’s presumed-competent Chief of Staff inexplicably gives interviews to a 100% anti-Trump Axis member, Vanity Fair, in which she dished about colleagues, suggested chaos in the White House, and opined that the President resembled an alcoholic even though he is a lifetime abstainer.

3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.

But wait, there’s more!

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Stay Classy, DC Police Chief Smith! [Corrected and Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I’ve got four posts up today, and I’m tired, but I can’t resist this one…

Outgoing D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith decided to show what she was made of as she spoke as the honoree in a good-bye ceremony yesterday. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform had accused her of manipulating data to make it seem that crime has decreased in the District of Columbia when it had not. She could have stuck around, of course, until the final numbers were in, but instead she decided that she would leave her post “to be with her family.” That’s always a good dodge when you’re being investigated. In her farewell speech, she played the God card (she’s also a reverend at a Baptist church in D.C.), then the “haters” card, and finally the “it’s not my fault” card. Wait: are the statistics correct, or are they wrong? Smith’s argument somehow came out, “The statistics were accurate, but if they’re not, somebody else rigged them!”

That’s accountability, D.C. Government style!

“How dare you? How dare you attack my integrity? Attack my character? You don’t know who I belong to!” she said. Wait, what does THAT mean?

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Gee, Who Couldn’t See This Coming? Oh, Right: Just About Everybody…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Except me.

It used to be that I could count on a tsunami of comments and clicks when I aired my unalterable conviction that pot, weed, cannabis, marijuana, what ever you want to call the junk, was a blight on civilization, that legalizing it would be a big net loss on society, and that the elite advocates for legalization were selfish, irresponsible creeps who wanted their little highs at the cost of kids, the poor, and the less-than-bright harming themselves, their families, their employers and their future prospects. Once the states started giving up after the culture had pushed them into the mendacity that the drug was as harmless as Junior Mints, I gave up too. I was right, they were wrong, the embrace of stoned kids and adults would be one more malady in a nation where we have too many already, but the metaphorical genie was out of its bottle and there is stuffing it back in.

At this point in my life, the whole subject just ticks me off.

Now comes “expert” Aaron E. Caroll to explain that yes, well, we really did legalize grass before we really knew what the hell we were doing. [Gift link!] Huh! Who would have thought it? He writes,

“…we should acknowledge that policy moved faster than the evidence on public health effects. The challenge is whether we are willing to adjust course when we encounter unintended consequences…”

I wouldn’t call consequences that were completely predictable and likely “unintended.” The spoiled grown-up (sort of) college kids who just wanted their bongs had plenty of people—like me—telling them that siding with Cheech and Chong was irresponsible and reckless, but they didn’t care about kids, the workplace, side-effects, any of it. Next he writes in part,

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No Man’s Land”: The Alice Cooper Christmas Song

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Guest post by JutGory

This time of year, Ethics Alarms has many posts about Christmas music.  Every year, it leads me back to the question: Did Alice Cooper write a Christmas song?

Mirroring the debate about whether “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie, or just a movie that takes place at Christmas time (some have credibly argued it is actually a Hanukah movie), is “No Man’s Land” by Alice Cooper a Christmas song, or just a song that is set at Christmas time?

“No Man’s Land”?

Yes, “No Man’s Land,” Track 4 from what is probably Alice Cooper’s most obscure album, “Dada,” the last of his “blackout albums,” released when he was stuck in the throes of severe alcohol and drug abuse.  “Dada” is to Alice Cooper what Music from “The Elder” is to KISS, except that “Dada” is not derided nearly as much as “The Elder,” and is considered by many to be a hidden gem in Alice Cooper’s catalog.

“No Man’s Land” takes place around Christmas.  Is that enough to make it a Christmas song?  “Baby’s It’s Cold Outside” is considered a Christmas song and Christmas is not mentioned even as it endorses patriarchal rape culture.  “Jingle Bells” is a Christmas (or Thanksgiving song) even though it does not mention Christmas, but perpetuates a culture of White Supremacy.

And, “No Man’s Land” is a love song.  As I thought about Christmas love songs, of course, and Mariah Carey’s 1994 song, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came to mind.  As I contemplated the lyrics of that song (which I will quote as little as possible in order to avoid banishment from our esteemed host),  I became convinced that Mariah Carey stole the idea for “All I Want For Christmas Is You” from Alice Cooper’s “No Man’s Land”.  I am 29% positive of it.   You can judge for yourself.

By way of introduction, for those who do not want to seek out the audio on the internet, “No Man’s Land” does not have the typical feel of a Christmas song, either in form or in content.  There is not a lot of pausing between verses, as you find in “Little Drummer Boy,” “White Christmas,” or practically any other Christmas song.  Many of the stanzas are a single sentence that are spat out without taking a breath.  This is no “Silent Night.”  The stanzas are often structured like a normal song, but the rhythm and word arrangement often uneven and offbeat as one stumbles through the story.

So, yes, “No Man’s Land” is a Christmas Love Song, the Christmas Love Song that only Alice Cooper could write!  Here it is:

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Two More Reasons Why We Can’t Have Nice Things…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

1. Once, a guilty pleasure of surfing the web and social media was seeing amusing videos of dogs and cats, and other animals too, behaving anthropomorphically, spectacularly, or adorably. Now, “thanks” to artificial intelligence, no such video can be trusted. The more remarkable it seems, the less trustworthy it is. Unethical people seeking views on Facebook and elsewhere post these fake videos as real, because viewers knowing they are staged and manufactured robs them of most, if not all, their entertainment value.

Above is a screen shot from one of the suddenly ubiquitous videos showing dogs frightening other dogs with Halloween masks. The link to the video, which WordPress wouldn’t let me embed, is here. It’s fake. Dogs, in my experience, are seldom fooled by masks. No dog would tolerate having a mask like that fastened to its head. No dog would go along with the gag and creep up on a sleeping canine companion. And no American Bully could leap like that all the way to the sofa.

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Last Friday Open Forum Before Christmas!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

There are quite a few versions of LeRoy Anderson’s medley “A Christmas Festival” on YouTube. The performance you usually hear had the legendary Arthur Fiedler waving the baton; Arthur was also the one who started using Anderson’s quirky, clever orchestral compositions in Pops concerts. You don’t hear Anderson’s works much any more except at Christmas, when his “Sleighride!” is unavoidable, but “Typwriter,” “The Syncopated Clock” and “Bugler’s Holiday,” among others, were all popular hits in the Fifties and Sixties.

I picked the video above because the Powerpoint reminded me of my wife, best friend, co-founder of ProEthics and indispensable partner Grace, who designed all of the presentations I used. She was proud of them and devoted so much care to making them colorful and interesting. And she asked me how the attendees of my ethics seminars liked each one of them. The sad fact was that nobody cared; the lawyers just wanted their credits. I might as well have been using a blackboard. The presentations were just a point of professionalism for us, and creative expression for her. Grace’s Powerpoints are still better than most of what you’re liable to see today. She was especially fond of the animations.

I don’t know about you, but I’m heading to the end of 2025, my third straight non-Christmas Christmas—-no tree, no wreath on the door, no music in the house, no decorations (well, I bought some red Poinsettias, but they’re all dead now) no parties, no Grace— at a near all-time low in optimism, happiness, financial security, confidence, companionship, self-esteem, trust in my profession, hope for the nation, and respect for my fellow citizens. This is unacceptable, and I am hereby inviting Cher to set me straight.

Thank-you.

Ethics Dunces: The Kennedy Center Board…No, Wait, I Mean the TRUMP Kennedy Center Board!

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh come ON.

“The Trump Kennedy Center?” As one of my Trump Deranged friends posted on Facebook, quite appropriately, “What’s next, The Trump Washington Monument? The Trump Lincoln Memorial? The Trump Jefferson Memorial…?”

I don’t even want to think about what’s next. Ugh. Ack. Yecchh.

You would think that after his Rob Reiner fiasco, the President would be just a teeny-weeny bit wary for a while. Clearly not.

If President Trump had any sense at all, he would thank the board but turn down the wildly inappropriate honor. But he doesn’t have any sense at all, not in these kinds of things.

I am aghast.

Comment of the Day: “In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In fairness, the spirit of Christmas, and because it’s just an excellent post that interprets the song in a fresh manner that I have never encountered, here is Dwayne Zechman’s rebuttal of the criticism by me and others of the popular Christmas song written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941. Did you know that the song was first recorded by the Trapp Family singers of “The Sound of Music” fame? That alone raises it a bit in my estimation. I also note that Dwayne, wisely does not defend the wretched lyrics in the David Bowie-Bing Crosby version. That would be impossible.

Here is Dwayne’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: ‘In Which I Call Ann Althouse’s Expressed Hatred Of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ & Raise My Hatred of the Bing Crosby-David Bowie Duet'”…

***

I have to take issue with all the dunking on “The Little Drummer Boy” that I’m reading here. It’s a favorite of mine, and the reason has nothing to do with the ridiculous scenario.

The reason is that this song is a microcosmic allegory of the Christian experience.

I don’t normally speak of my faith and religious beliefs here. I’m a firm believer in the notion that Truth stands on its own; it doesn’t need the support of religion in order to be true. So this post is definitely a bit of a departure for me.

“Come, they told me.” “A newborn King to see”

This is how it begins. We learn from others about the Gospel of Jesus. We are encouraged to come along on the journey.

“Our finest gifts we bring” “to lay before the King”
“So to honor Him” “When we come”

We begin the journey and quickly learn that, to those who invited us on this journey, it’s a big deal. There are songs we may or may not have heard. There are responsive readings that we almost certainly don’t know. There are people here whose whole lives are dedicated to their faith and their church. Am I expected to do that too? What IS expected of me? What does Jesus actually want from me?

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