From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

That’s how VP nominee Tim Walz responded when asked about the American hostage found murdered by Hamas.

Nice! So sensitive, caring, and…courageous.

Sarcasm aside, can anyone think of a positive way to interpret that reaction? “No comment” would be cowardly enough, but turning tail and escaping…wow.

My translation? “I’m sorry, but our handlers haven’t briefed us on how to maneuver around the difficult issue of Palestinian atrocities, and our campaign strategy is to reveal as little of our real opinions as possible, because its our only chance. See ya!”

How hard would it be to do a Clinton, and at least say, “I feel the family’s pain.” It’s phony, of course, but it least that response would show Walz as someone who is smart enough to pretend to care.

What a dumbass.

More Election Ad Deceit in NH

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Former Senator Kelly Ayotte is the GOP candidate for Governor of New Hampshire. She is also one of the long-time Roe v. Wade opponents who is being targeted by pro-abortion groups in attack ads. If you listen closely, some of the ads reveal the dark and ominous heart of the ‘We Love Abortion!’ movement.

I have had to watch one such ad repeatedly while following the Boston Red Sox as they are just-barely contending for a wild card berth. A sad-eyed mother reveals that when she was pregnant, a doctor who checked out the embryo (that was well past the usual legal abortion period in many states including New Hampshire) told the mother that “my baby would not survive.” She goes on to say that Ayotte is so cruel that she would make a mother like me “carry” a baby for months knowing that “it would not survive.” Ayotte supports the current 24 week limit on abortions.

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Once Again, Ethics Alarms Must Ask, “How Many Insults To Their Intelligence From Biden and Harris Will Voters Tolerate?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It was the fatuous and insulting “Biden” message above about the American hostage found murdered in Gaza that mandated this post, but I was already thinking about the ongoing insults after seeing a Harris TV ad last night that made my head explode.

I couldn’t find it on YouTube this morning, but Kamala was smirking as she again wafted vague about the “opportunity economy” while giving the political equivalent of singing “Imagine.” She said that “everyone should be able to get a car loan.” How would that work, exactly? It was Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank’s delusion that everyone should be able to get a home mortgage that set up the 2008 economic collapse. She says that she will lower prices and lower taxes, yet Harris cast the deciding vote on trillion-dollar government pork buffets that exploded inflation and made more taxes crucial if the U.S. is going to avoid a National Debt Armageddon. She says she refuses to return to the “politics of the past,” whatever that means—when governments didn’t try to lock up their political opponents, maybe?

There is literally not a single substantive policy statement in the whole ad, not one. Isn’t everyone insulted by ads like that? What kind of dolt would see and hear such deliberately non-substantive boilerplate recycled from “Hope and Change” and say, “Wow! I’m going to vote for her!” Why would anyone vote for a candidate who is so obviously using platitudes to avoid letting them know what she is really planning to do?

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Ethics Quiz: The Undated Envelope

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled 4-1 last week that voters fialing to include an accurate, handwritten date on the envelopes used to submit their mail-in ballots should not have their votes disqualified, though the state’s law requires it. The majority argued that the state constitution’s clause about “free and equal” elections precludes disqualification for such a “technicality.”

The ruling will probably keep several thousand Pennsylvania votes cast by careless morons from being thrown out in the upcoming election, which is expected to be especially close in that state.

“The refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote” in the Pennsylvania Constitution, wrote Judge Ellen Ceisler for the majority. The opinion made victors of the left-supporting groups who sued to loosen some more voting requirements.

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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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More Thoughts About “The Box”….

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This is very strange. I wrote about the ethics horror movie “The Box” just this year, yet had no memory of writing the post or seeing the whole movie, despite stating in the post that I had. Then I noticed that the post was dated February 28, the day before I found my wife’s body in our living room. Apparently the shock erased some files.

Moreover, it is creepy that I posted on a movie about a couple that pushes a button on a mysterious box after being told that doing so will kill a stranger but also result in their receiving a million tax-free dollars from an anonymous authority, and shortly thereafter discovered that my own wife had died of unknown causes.

Did somebody push that button?

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I Witnessed Trump Derangement Syndrome In Person Last Night

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It was scary.

I was engaged to moderate a “talk back” on ethics and the issues raised in the British drama “A Number” last night. I may write about the play here later: it is an ethics story involving a failed father who sends his disturbed son away and replaces him with a clone, thus providing the father with a “do-over.” One of the main issues we discussed was whether the father evoked any sympathy as he tried to cope with the serial disasters his conduct had triggered, including the original son murdering his clone.

After the discussion, I was chatting with audience members as they filed out of the the theater. An elderly woman, her face flushed and contorted in anger, came up to me and said, “I completely agree with you that the father is a sociopath. He reminded me of Trump! I wanted to go up on stage and strangle him!” By the end of her statement, she was almost shouting.

“Thanks for coming!” I told her.

The character of the father has absolutely no resemblance to Donald Trump in any respect, not attitudes, actions, manner, appearance…nothing.

Promoting Your Institution By Emphasizing the Most Negative Perspective On Its History: Good Plan, U.Va!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m not certain what to call this, and solicit your suggestions. Incompetence? Woke virtue signaling? Self-hate? Betrayal? Insanity?

The Jefferson Council, an organization of conservative University of Virginia alumni, has criticized the recent tone of the school’s student-run campus tours that are supposed to convince prospective applicants and their families that U.Va is the place for the graduating high school students to continue their education. The tour organization, the University Guide Service, has been alienating prospective students, the Council says, by immersing the hopeful, bright-eyed young idealists with a “woke version of U.Va history.”

The cheerful tale of the storied university’s origins, the alumni complain, begins by describing how the university’s land was stolen from the Monacan Indian tribe, then goes on to describe how the Rotunda (above) designed by Thomas Jefferson as the center of campus, was constructed by slave labor. They believe that a tour for prospective students should emphasize Jefferson’s positive contributions to the nation, like, oh, authoring the mission statement for this great democratic experiment, his indispensable contribution to securing American independence, his achievements as the third President of the United States, his brilliance and an architect and inventor, those little details. There was nothing unusual about using slave labor when the University of Virginia was established in 1819. Why would an institution emphasize that in a promotional tour?

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What IS It About Democrats And “Stolen Valor”?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It’s not enough that Kamala Harris deliberately placed on the ballot to be elected one heartbeat from the Presidency a Democratic governor , Tim Walz, who has been lying about his military combat record for more than 20 years. (Well, that was just “bad grammar”…). Nor that Richard Blumenthal, the senior United States Senator from Connecticut, also a Democrat, was cheerfully elected by Connecticut voters in 2010 (and re-elected in 2016 and 2022) despite repeatedly lying about being a Vietnam war veteran. For “Wait, there’s more!”…Wes Moore to be precise, the Democratic governor of Maryland.

Moore, shown above as he gave a highlighted speech for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago (he did not have a piece of the application for a prestigious White House fellowship in which he lied about receiving a Bronze Star hovering over his head, though) has been dispatched by the Harris campaign as a surrogate to defend Walz on cable television! What a good choice! After all, who better to try to rationalize lying about military service than someone who has done it himself!

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