The Chicago Teachers Union President Scores A Jumbo, Among Other Accomplishments….

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

…like Unethical Quote of the Month, Ethics Dunce, “It Isn’t What It Is” Master, “Biggest Hypocrite of 2023” frontrunner…oh, lots of Ethics Alarms awards. Plus, she outed herself as a rhetoric-challenged idiot who has no business teaching children, much less presuming to lead those who do. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates has been an vociferous opponents of parents who advocate for the ability to eschew public schools (which, as we know, are terrible educationally and politically) for other options via school vouchers. Here are some of her publicized comments:

  • “School choice was actually the choice of racists. It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children. Now it’s the civil rights struggle of our generation?”
  • “I’m also a mother. My children go to Chicago Public Schools. These are things that help to legitimize my space within the coalition.”
  • “‘Segregation Academies’ …Call them private schools supported by taxpayer funds-vouchers-so your norther cousins understand better.
  • “I can’t advocate on behalf of public education without it taking root in my own household.

…and more. You know what I’m going to write next, don’t you? Surely you’ve seen this kind of set-up before. Yes, Gates recently placed her own teenage son in a Catholic high school located in Chicago’s South Side. This was so outstanding an example of hypocrisy by a politically involved public figure that even a CNN Democratic flack talking head was moved to challenge her on it.

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Ethics Dunces: Too Many People To Count Who Were Responsible For This:

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Yes, it’s Bluto’s (John Belushi) now iconic gaffe in “Animal House” come true: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” Those are German planes on the cover of Michael J. Clark’s history book for young readers about the sneak attack that brought the U.S. into World War II.

Just think about all of the careless, irresponsible boobs, including the author and the cover artist, who had to breach the ethical values of competence, diligence and respect for that book to be published and put on the market. How many must it have been? Then you can add to that List of Shame our pathetic, ruinous education system, which has produced such a nation of dolts that not even a humble secretary or passing clerk had the knowledge to point out, when they saw the book as it made its way through production, “Uh, aren’t those German planes?” Anyone who did, thus preventing this epic embarrassment, might have received a promotion or a bonus. Or at least someone would have bought him or her a nice lunch.

And this is one more example where cultural literacy rot matters. If you can’t learn your American history, at least know your classic films.

Here’s Bluto:

Ethics Quiz: Oprah’s Surprise

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I did not see this coming at all. Obviously, neither did Oprah Winfrey.

On August 31, Winfrey and Dwayne Johnson united on their Instagram and TikTok accounts to promote their People’s Fund of Maui, which they had co-launched with a combined $10 million donation. The fund would support the victims of the Maui wildfires, and O joined with The Rock to call on the public for more contributions. The following accompanied their joint video, shot in Hawaii, naturally:

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Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun,This Forum Makes Two In A Week, Not Just One!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I want to thank everyone who pitched in to make the emergency Open Forum earlier this week as lively and interesting as it was. Now don’t rest on your laurels, though: as usual, there’s a lot out there in the ethics trees and underbrush to chew on…

What ever happened to the Doublemint Twins? I worry that they ended up like this…

Don’t Kid Yourself: This Unethical Quote Of The Month From MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah Is More Indicative Of Where The Left Is Headed That You’d Like To Think…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“I think Donald Trump MUST die in prison…because either we’re going to protect the Democratic Republic or we’re going to allow people, in this case Trump to chip away at our democracy and chip away at what we believe in these institutions.”

That was Dean Obeidallah, long an extreme deranged leftist featured on the air and on the web by MSNBC (because extreme deranged leftists are the only alleged journalists and pundits that MSNBC deems worthy of a public platform), confirming again the totalitarian impulses of Democrats and the progressives of 2023. In an interview with Mediaite’s most left-biased reporter, Obeidallah ranted in part,

Trump MUST die in prison because I don’t care if he was 45 years old, you should get life in prison if you attempt a coup, and there should be no chance of parole. I don’t care who it is….That’s why I’m so passionate about, like with every fiber of my being, that Donald Trump has to live out his natural days, his last days of natural life in a prison cell…….And people accuse me like, oh, you say things that get people riled up like, nope, I or get what you said. I get organically riled up about this because I believe in this system. And, and if you don’t believe in it, so be it. But if you believe in it, I don’t think there’s any conclusion could bring that. Donald Trump has to end up in a prison cell and live his last days out in that prison cell.

In those three dots, Obeidallah claimed that the riot at the Capitol was an “attempted coup,” which is legal, factual and linguistical nonsense, and that’s what he thinks Donald Trump should be locked up for without a chance of parole. I’ve instructed my family that if I ever say anything that stupid in private they should bash in my head with a brick, and Obeidallah is paid by MSNBC for to give that level of ignorant, hysterical, inflammatory and irresponsible commentary over the air. I guess I owe Tucker Carlson a mea culpa: I thought he was too much of a demagogue to be allowed on TV. Continue reading →

The Democrat Porn Star Virginia Legislature Candidate Renders The “Ethics Dunce” Designation Obsolete: “The Naked Porn-Performing Political Candidate Principle” Perhaps?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t know what you call this, but whatever it is, “ethics dunce” just isn’t enough.

That’s Susanna Gibson above with her husband (I don’t know where those annoying stars came from) performing on a porn website while she was already running as a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. The 40-year-old Democrat, along with her lawyer husband, have been appearing in flagrante delicto on an X-rated website, and offering to perform sundry sex acts in front of the camera, including those involving violence and bodily excretions, in exchange for money—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But after the conservative Washington Free Beacon was tipped off to this rare proclivity on the part of a political candidate and wrote about it, Gibson announced that she was shocked—shocked!—that anyone would feel that a candidate for the legislature soliciting money for sex acts was something the public had a right to know about. She found a lawyer willing to try to use Maryland’s “revenge porn” law to punish such people. Daniel P. Watkins of the Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch firm, argues that “it’s illegal and it’s disgusting to disseminate this kind of material”and says that he is “working closely with the F.B.I. and local prosecutors to bring the wrongdoers to justice.”

Sure, Danny, good luck with that! It’s a ridiculous idea for a law suit, but ya never know, so it slips under the wire as “ethical,” though any lawyer bringing such a suit should have to wear a bag on his head.

Ugh. Where to begin?

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That Bomb “Finger Gun” Should Have Never Been Made At All: How Did We End Up With “Finger Gun 4”??

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,

The NBC story concentrates on  “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.

I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”

But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,

The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.

I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.

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The Joe Biden Impeachment Ethics Train Wreck Gets Rolling Big Time With Ethics Estoppel, Government -Media Collusion And A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Spectacular

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

This hilarious episode pushed itself ahead of two other posts because its almost too good to be true, and by good, I mean “Yecchh!”

Let’s begin with the Republican House majority, led by jerks like Rep. Matt Gaetz, forcing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Biden. This is incompetent, irresponsible and unethical. To begin with, it’s a waste of time and the public’s attention, which is too divided and limited already. Second, as the GOP proved the last time it executed a futile impeachment, it is more likely to lose votes than to gain them. Third, there is no chance of conviction in the split Senate, zero. If the impeachment is supposed to be some kind of an official rebuke, it won’t be seen as one or taken as one, so the mere impeachment itself will have no substantive consequence or significance. Finally, Republicans impeaching Biden will look like revenge and “tit-for-tat” rather than responsible statesmanship, because it is revenge to a great extent.

Next come the Democrats and their news media agents screaming that there aren’t constitutional grounds for impeachment. I think there are, but it doesn’t matter: the Democrats killed impeachment as a useful Constitutional tool of democracy deader than a frozen mackerel when it concocted two unjustified and purely political impeachments of Donald Trump. There was no impeachable high crime with the first, and the Democrats were so determined to slap Trump before he was out the door that they didn’t even follow due process with the second. Both were obviously partisan, and since members of the party and its allies had been advocating the impeachment of Trump for something literally before he served a day in office, there was no way either impeachment could be objectively viewed as legitimate.

Ethics Alarms has pointed out too many times since Phony Impeachment #1 that the Democrats have guaranteed not only that their next President—Biden, unfortunately—would be impeached as soon as the GOP had control of the House, but that every President hereafter would probably be impeached when the opposing party has a House majority in an endless cycle of payback. Yes, somebody should be standing up for the importance of legitimate impeachments, but the Democrats forfeited that privilege when they broke the system. (What? I thought Trump was the one who threatened constitutional government by defying “democratic norms”!) They are complaining that there aren’t proper grounds to impeach their President? This is as perfect an example of Ethics Estoppel as I can imagine. Democrats cannot make such an argument, not without provoking mockery and contempt. They asked for it, and now, having guaranteed that it would arrive as ordered, they are whining about insufficient evidence.

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“Curmie’s Conjectures”: Curmie Doesn’t Like Being Lied To, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

by Curmie

It would seem that prevarication has supplanted baseball as the national pastime.  Name a politician you’d trust to tell you the truth if a lie would be more convenient.  I can’t, and if there’s one out there, it sure as hell isn’t one of the frontrunners in the next Presidential election.

My most recent post concerned getting lied to by the post office, and their subsequent bewilderment that I didn’t appreciate their mendacity.  It’s not just those with ties to the government, though.  Companies feel the need to get in on the act, too.  So, here’s Part II of my rant.

We’ve been in our current house a little over 22 years.  The garage door opener wasn’t new when we moved in.  A few days ago, the chain snapped.  So I went to the local Lowe’s, checked out the possibilities, came home and discussed the options with my wife, and ordered a new opener online.  So far, so good. 

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Quick Ethics Takes On A Wasted Trip To D.C.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

  • I was supposed to testify in an arbitration hearing today. I headed to D.C. through the usual awful traffic, finally arriving at my destination after a 45 minute trek, and was informed that my commentary had been postponed suddenly despite being scheduled months ago, and despite my arranging my schedule around it in what has been a very busy September. This occurred after I stayed up until 2 am prepping for my testimony. I could bill for the wasted 90 minutes this fool’s errand took me, but I won’t; ditto the 14 bucks for parking. There were some messed-up communications from the attorney who retained me, but I should have double-checked that all was still as scheduled, and I didn’t.
  • Walking from the parking garage to where the hearing was scheduled, I counted the number of people or all ages walking along looking at their cell phones compared with those who were not: 28 with, only 6 without! This is a genuine social malady with, I suspect, long-term negative consequences that we haven’t begun to understand or prepare for. It reminded me of “Bowling Alone.”

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