Ethics Dunce: Edmond Public Schools (Oklahoma)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Caleb Horst, a senior at Edmond North High School in Oklahoma, was suddenly ordered by by his school to stop flying an American flag on his pickup even though he had been “flying it for quite a while.” This provoked a flag-flying protest at the school by students who supported Horst (How could the school not see that coming?) as well as objections from parents. Then State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters issued a statement on Twitter/X stating, “No school in Oklahoma should tell students they can’t wave an American flag.”

“We’ve had Americans die for that flag, die for students to have the right to carry the flag, to wave the flag, to be proud of that American flag,” Walters wrote. “My department right now is working on guidelines that we will be issuing to districts to ensure that no student is ever targeted for having an American flag and also that our schools will promote patriotism.” 

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The Nauseating Arlington National Cemetery “Get Trump!” Fake News Episode [Corrected and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

A few preliminary comments to frame this story:

  • Again, this is how the news media sets out to fix a Presidential election.
  • Like so many of these incidents, by the time it has been spun, distorted and manipulated, the typical voter has no idea what really happened and lacks the time or interest to find out.
  • The double-standards applied to smear Donald Trump in service of the Democratic party can only be described as nauseating, because it goes beyond unethical and beyond corrupt to truly sickening. This sort of thing has been going on for most of a decade.
  • Because Ethics Alarms has to cover this [insert word for disgusting substance here] this blog and its author have to put up with constant accusations of “supporting Trump” and pushing right-wing narratives. I resent that, and I resent having to take time to discuss stories like this. I, along with everyone else (except that many of those everyones like the Left’s trashing of democracy) have been watching the mutated Left, also called the Axis of Unethical Conduct here, breach all previous standards of fair politics and journalism ethics in its determination to destroy and defeat Donald Trump. After all,  he is, due to some warped cosmic sense of humor, the major obstacle to its ultimate triumph. This assault on the public’s ability to know what is happening around it is, as I have said repeatedly, the worst, most dangerous and most important national ethics scandal since Jim Crow, or maybe McCarthyism.
  • I don’t want to write about this crap; I don’t have time for it, and doing so confers no benefits on me whatsoever.

With that off my metaphorical chest, here are the key points in the story. Characterizations may differ, but I am confident that what follows is accurate:

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Well, I Guess I Feel a LITTLE Better Now That It’s Clear That a Lot of Israelis Are As Ethically Clueless As So Many Americans…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Over night, Israel’s largest labor union called for nationwide strike to push for a hostage deal, threatening to shut down “the entire Israeli economy” Tel Aviv’s international airport announced that it would halt departures and arrivals of flights for two hours, and intense protests have broken out in response to Israel’s military recovering the bodies of six hostages killed in Gaza. The protesters say Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not done enough to protect the hostages. To be blunt, the protesters are ethics dunces and morons….much like the American students, Democrats, pundits and the Biden administration trying to pressure Israel into a ruinous cease-fire with Hamas.

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Ethics Hero: Pro Golfer Sahith Theegala

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Clearly, I don’t follow pro golf like I once did: I never heard of this guy (at first I thought his name was the second row on my keyboard). Now I think I may write in his name for President.

Playing in the PGA’s $100 million Tour Championship, (never heard of that tournament, either) at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Sahith Reddy Theegala, an American professional golfer from Orange, California, called a rules infraction on himself, costing him two strokes. The self-reporting ended up preventing Theegala from tying for third place, and may have cost him five million dollars.

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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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