“This is What Happens…”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Except that this was no shark attack, and it wasn’t a boating accident or Jack the Ripper. This is what happens when an entire political party decides that it will never give an elected official the minimal bi-partisan support required to make our three Branch system work, and will ignore, breach or distort basic, core essential democratic principles and traditions to destroy him for as long as it takes.

That arm belongs to Lady Liberty.

Yesterday, two of the terrible consequences of the Democratic mania to destroy Donald Trump, first as President, then as ex-President and Presidential candidate, became especially vivid. Let me say, because if I don’t blow my metaphorical horn no one else will, that Ethics Alarms warned about all of this, tirelessly and repetitiously.

WordPress shows me the 10 tags I have used most frequently since Ethics Alarms began in 2009. Nine are what you would expect on an ethics blog: fairness, ethics, responsibility, integrity, trust, respect, hypocrisy, honesty…and the 2016 Post Election Train Wreck. That tag originated in 2016 when Ethics Alarms first blew the metaphorical whistle on the Democrats’ (along with “the resistance” and the news media) destructive, divisive, unprecedented and totalitarian-tending reaction to the (greatly deserved) loss by Hillary Clinton in a presidential race they thought was a sure thing. I have said repeatedly that the 2016 Post-election Ethics Train Wreck is the most serious and important ethics story in the 21st Century, and one of the five or so worst in our nation’s history. We survived the others, but were lucky. There is a substantial chance that this time, our luck will run out.

Continue reading →

Observations on Being Forced to Watch Network and Cable TV

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

A lost remote (it’s got to be around here somewhere!) has trapped me in Direct TV for the last two days, and I noticed…

1. I saw yet another unclever, gratuitous example of those working in the once ascendant, now gutter-level medium of television (Edward R. Murrow would be so disappointed…) thinking that using code for “fuck” is hilarious and appealing. [This recurring topic was discussed again just about a week ago]

The local Fox channel was promoting the syndicated “Family Feud” show, itself now almost continuously obsessed with smutty questions and answers, with the catch phrase, “What the Feud!” Does the letter ‘F’ now automatically suggest “fuck?” Is the implication that “fuck” is intended, buried somewhere or barely implied intrinsically hilarious to the average TV audience? The depressing phenomnon reminds me of when my theater did a special performance of “Moby Dick Rehearsed” for middle-school kids and a lot of them couldn’t stop giggling and making wise-cracks every time an actor mentioned the whale—“Dick,” you know—or said “she blows.”

Continue reading →

More on the Hur Report, the President’s Brain, and the 25th Amendment

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A lot more, in fact. I tried to figure out how to stitch all this together, but I’m resorting to bullet points:

  • Jonathan Turley issued an excellent blog post explaining why the 25th Amendment is highly unlikely to be successfully employed to send our declining President into retirement. Do read it, but the short version is that if a President is sufficiently compos mentis to object to his removal for being incapacitated (or has staff acting on his behalf to do it), the 25th Amendment’s elaborate procedures all but guarantee that the effort will fail because going forward would require a 2/3 majority in both Houses of Congress. The amendment contains significant safeguards against the 25th Amendment coup scenario that “the resistance” and Democrats were pushing when Trump was President.(I should have made this point back when Ethics Alarms was analyzing the dishonesty of 25th Amendment arguments by the Trump-Deranged during his term.) One particularly significant statement by Turley: “The various experts and pundits who called for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment are notably silent this week, even after [Biden’s] own Justice Department cited his diminished faculties as a reason for not charging him.”
  • Professor Alan Dershowitz, a progressive legal expert relegated to Fox News and other conservative platforms because he refuses to warp his analyses to “get” Trump,  harshly criticized Special Counsel Hur’s report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents as “unfair to both sides” yesterday. I believe his analysis is correct. He said in part,

Continue reading →

Super Bowl Ethics Dunces: The San Francisco 49ers

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

To be fair to the losing Super Bowl team’s players, it is quite possible that the brain damage they have suffered by their repeated concussions while collecting millions to entertain US gladiatorial combat fans and enrich NFL owners, sponsors and conspirators was responsible for the fact that they didn’t know the rules of the game they were playing (!). Nonetheless, the term “professional” in “professional football player,” in addition to meaning that the Super Bowl participants are compensated monetarily, is generally taken to also mean that they know what the hell they they are doing.

Apparently, they did not. That’s unforgivable.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Nate Silver

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“You don’t demonstrate your seriousness that Trump is an existential threat to democracy by going through the motions to renominate an 81-year-old with a 38% approval rating who 75% of voters think is too old without giving anyone a choice because that’s just how things are done.”

—-538 founder Nate Silver on Twitter/X, reacting to the Democratic Party attempting to keep RFK Jr. off state ballots

Silver has proven himself to be generally left-biased, but he’s not stupid, and he’s not corrupt. He can see the clear hypocrisy in the party’s conduct and rhetoric, and doesn’t even have to reference its other totalitarian moves, like weaponizing the justice system to try to stop voters from choosing its most feared adversary.

Oh…Nate’s observation was just two days ago, and 75% is already out of date. The first post Hur report and Biden old man rant poll shows 86% of the public convinced that the President has passed his metaphorical pull date.

Incorrigible Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

I love that photo of Lessig! As a director, if I wanted to stage a pose that screamed “pompous jerk,” that’s exactly what I would tell an actor to do.

But I digress…Prof. Lessig is an unusually unethical faculty presence even for Harvard, as Ethics Alarms has documented since 2015 . That is when he ran for the Democratic nomination for President promising to be a “referendum President” who would serve only as long as it took to pass the Citizens Equality Act of 2017, a potpouri of progressive agenda items of varying wackiness. Once he had persuaded Congress to pass that dog’s breakfast, Lessig would step down, and his Vice President would become President. And who did the esteemed government prof regard as qualified for that position? Oh, just Elizabeth Warren, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robert Reich, Van Jones, Jon Stewart, Sheryl Sandberg, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Joe Biden, among others.

What a great plan!

Continue reading →

The Super Bowl Produces an Early Nominee For Ethics Alarms “Asshole of the Year”: KC Chiefs Tight End Travis Kelce

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Cowabunga! This goes beyond the mere jerkish behavior one (or at least I) expects of NFL players.

Kelce has been getting nationwide publicity because of his romance with superstar pop artist Taylor Swift. He knew all eyes would be on the couple during the annual concussion-fest that is always the most viewed single event network TV offering, the Super Bowl (won in thrilling fashion, or so I was told, by the Chiefs in only the second overtime game in SB history). So how did Kelce, fully aware that his fans young and old would be watching, handle his moment in the spotlight?

You see it above: After the Chiefs lost a fumble in the second quarter of the game, Kelce was seen on live TV yelling in Coach Reid’s face and even bumping him. In any other sport, and usually this one, the disrespectful player would be benched, fined and suspended. One NFL player, seeing Kelce’s outburst, tweeted that if he did something like that, he’d be kicked out of the NFL.

Oh no, it was all in good fun, we were informed afterwards. Even though he embarrassed his coach and taught young NFL and Taylor Swift fans that it’s just fine to treat your superiors, bosses and authority figures like dirt, “sources” on the team assured the media that the player “respects Coach Reid. It’s really just about the passion of the game. It wasn’t anything serious.”

Right. Making hostile physical contact with your boss in front of team mates on national TV is nothing serious. I remember Reggie Jackson doing something similar to Yankees manager Billy Martin in the dugout during a game in Fenway Park, and Martin had to be restrained from attacking Reggie, who was immediately suspended.

But Martin had some self-respect, and Reggie wasn’t dating Taylor Swift, I guess. And Kelce? Asked about his actions, he told ESPN. “I was just telling him how much I love him.”

Ha. Funny.

What an asshole.

To be fair to Kelce, he probably already is suffering from brain damage, so that’s something of a mitigation. He and Taylor shouldn’t worry: Donald Trump is still the odds on favorite to win “Asshole of the Year,” as he usually does.

Here’s a New Way For a Public School Teacher to Be Unethical!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Mario Perron, a middle school teacher at Westwood Junior High School in Saint-Lazare, Canada, has apparently been secretly selling his students’ art projects on the web for his own profit. A pupil stumbled across the teacher’s website with listings for drawings created by the student and fellow classmates in class, and reported the discovery to the school, according to CTV News. The usual investigation is ongoing, but how else would class art projects end up on line being sold for as much as $100? Here, for example, are some of the student drawings being sold on mugs…

Wow. People will buy anything online. The drawings also are being offered on T-shirts and phone cases.

The father of the student who made the discovery told reporters, “I’m extremely disgusted with [the teacher]. It’s extremely, you know, it’s unbelievable…Is this teacher asking for certain types of projects to be done to be able to sell them? Is he asking for these types of portraits to be done so it meets the market?…I’m not impressed with the school, or the school board.”

Perron’s LinkedIn profile says he has been a full-time teacher at Westwood Junior since September 2019 His profile also promotes his personal website, 1-mario-perron.pixels.com, which is where he offered his students’ artwork for sale without their permission or knowledge.

_________________

Pointer: JutGory

Unethical “Journalist” of the Month: Jason Sattler

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms just added “Unethical Journalist” to its categories. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier, but the furious “It isn’t what it is” caterwauling from so many mainstream media voices that it is absurd–absurd, I tell you!—for anyone to think that Joe Biden isn’t ready to win “Jeopardy” and recite the Constitution from memory sealed the deal. The spectacle has been as depressing for the public as it is embarrassing for the rotting profession of journalism.

Some sectors managed to barely turn around and accept reality, sort of: the New York Times, after publishing ridiculous denials from Paul Krugman and others, issued an editorial Sunday expressing alarm at the combined effect of the Biden DOJ’s Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 388 page report stating that the President had “diminished faculties” and was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” But even that cry in the dark concluded that Biden “needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86,” a statement that disingenuously implies that Biden has done anything that indicates he can do his job now, much less in five years.” How can he do “more” to show something is true when it is so obvious that it isn’t true? It’s like complaining that public schools need to do more to show that they are unbiased and competent.

And naturally, the Times’ only stated impetus for its alarm was not that having a mentally deficient President is a peril to the nation, but that “the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump.” (Don Surber, a newspaper journalist turned Substack pundit, notes that his old employers, which have seen their circulation more than halved in the last 20 years and opines that newspapers have destroyed their credibility by dropping all pretense of credibility and are doomed. “It is not that the media gets the story wrong; it is that the media seldom admits it was wrong,” he writes.)

Which brings me to “journalist” Jason Sattler.

Continue reading →

From Texas, A “Better Late Than Never” Horror Story

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

The Texas Monthly story is titled, “The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty.” Its tone is celebratory: a juror who made an unethical decision (though the writer attempts to mitigate it in many ways throughout his article) courageously decided to undo the wrong, and succeeded. Far from being impressed with the alleged ethics hero, Estella Ybarra, I found the story infuriating, and its conclusion that Ybarra should be admired untenable.

The story is in the familiar, long-form format familiar to readers of the New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic. We are given more details about the lives of all the participants in a drama than we need as well as thick context about every facet of the tale. It can be summarized easily, however, and relatively quickly.

In 1990, when Ybarra was 48 years old, she served on a jury charged with determining the guilt of a Mexican-American man accused of rape. She was the hold-out juror, Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men”; everyone else was certain Carlos Jaile (above) had raped an eight-year-old girl. Ybarra was not: she felt the evidence was thin. There was no physical evidence, the defendant had an alibi, and the main proof of his guilt offered was a child’s eyewitness identification after the fact. But, we are told, Estella was still learning English despite being born in the U.S. (Whose fault is that?) and didn’t understand the justice system very well. (Or that?). As a result, she allowed herself to be bullied into voting ‘guilty’ by the men on the jury, even though she was not at all convinced Carols Jaile was.

She went home after Jaile was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and wept, we are told. This is supposed to make her seem sympathetic. Later, Estella received a certificate in the mail stating that by serving as a juror and “accepting this difficult and vital responsibility of citizenship in a fair and conscientious manner, you have aided in perpetuating the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty and the only safe guarantee for the life, liberty and property of the citizen.” Ybarra threw the document into a drawer. She told the writer, Michael Hall, that she thought to herself, “We sent an innocent man away for the rest of his life.”

Continue reading →