Ethics Dunce: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This news item has the added advantage for me of adding to my file, now voluminous, of ridiculous legal theories that nonetheless cannot be sanctioned violations of Rule 3.1: Meritorious Claims & Contentions, aka. “Frivolous claims” when they are used as the justification for lawsuits. (The profession’s aversion to punishing lawyers for Hail Mary lawsuits apparently applies to all lawyers accept those representing Donald Trump.) Mostly, however, it demonstrates how completely incompetent another progressive big city mayor is when it comes to dealing with crime.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) announced yesterday that his crime-ridden hell-hole of city, rife with property crimes and murder, will be suing automakers Kia and Hyundai for “their failure to include industry-standard engine immobilizers in multiple models of their vehicles.” This, the theory goes, is why there are so many car thefts in the Windy City.

Yes, it’s the cars’ fault that they get stolen! It certainly isn’t the fault of the car thieves, whom the new mayor wants to see treated with compassion, care and as little punishment as possible. Even though the crime explosion in Chicago was the main reason he defeated the previous mayor, Lori Lightfoot (that, and the fact that she was dishonest and incompetent), Johnson’s plan to stop crime is pure John Lennon wishery: defund as much of the police as possible, seek “restorative justice” and “treatment over punishment,” and have judges who will avoid handing down jail sentences.

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Ethics Quiz: Trump’s Mugshot

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

I’ll say right now, up front, I love it. This might be the most appealing, brilliant thing Donald Trump has ever done in the realm of politics. If he came up with that expression himself, bravo. As a director, I couldn’t have devised a better one for him under the circumstances.

What the photo communicates is…

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On Trump, Tucker, The GOP Debate And The News Media On A Depressing Wednesday Night, Part 3

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

1. The whole evening and its contents spun into an ethics train wreck. My favorite? Vivek Ramaswamy deliberately evoked Barack Obama’s line calling himself a “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too,” in his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech when he was running for the U.S. Senate, despite the fact that 99% of Americans had forgotten about the moment and just about as many couldn’t care less. “Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage?” Ramaswamy said. What the heck was he doing? Comparing oneself to Obama isn’t great strategy at a GOP debate, and Chris Christie, who is alert to such things, responded, aptly, “The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama,” Christie said. “And I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur.” Touche!

But perpetually embarrassing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, attending the debate as a “Trump surrogate” thought part of her job was to emulate MSNBC race-baiters. She said, “Greene: “I was pretty disgusted by Chris Christie and his racist comment towards Vivek Ramaswamy… He compared him to Obama. I thought that was pretty racist.” She actually said that. Several things come to mind:

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On Trump, Tucker, The GOP Debate And The News Media On A Depressing Wednesday Night, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m feeling better now, sort of, so let us dig in to the hope-suffocating debacle that was last night’s Republican candidates debate. Why debacle? Well, thanks to the complicity of Tucker Carlson, there was no way for viewers to compare any of the candidates to the front-runner who thinks it’s ethical to sit on his lead. (Certain to achieved a .400 average by sitting out a season-ending double-header in 1941, Ted Williams, as a matter of integrity, insisted on risking the historical achievement and played both games anyway, raising his average to .406.) In the harsh glare of live TV, none of the assembled did what they had to do, which was convince substantial numbers of viewers that “Hey! This option is less obnoxious than Donald Trump and would beat Joe Biden!”

As a group, the candidates failed the easiest test, when they were asked by Martha MacCallum, “Do you believe in human behavior causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.” None of the candidates had a sufficiently articulate and knowledgeable response, and having one should be hard. DeSantis used it to grandstand (We are not schoolchildren. Let’s have the debate…”) and then ducked the question. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, meanwhile, ducked the question ANd fled into Fantasyland, saying, “First of all, we do care about clean air, clean water. We want to see that taken care of, but there is a right way to do it. The right way is first of all, yes, is climate change real? Yes, it is. But if you want to go and really change the environment, we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.”

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On Trump, Tucker, The GOP Debate And The News Media On A Depressing Wednesday Night, Part 1

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What an awful display of what Americans will have to choose from if it wants to avoid the Democratic Party’s determined march to censorship, world governance, environmental fascism, abortion at will, open borders, racial preferences and more.

The unethical, frankly nauseating Tucker Carlson suck-up session with Donald Trump was the bottom of last’s night’s barrel, as the former President continued his rejection of the opportunity for voters to see him next to his competitors for the GOP nomination—it’s called “having respect for democracy and the American public, you ass—and allied himself with twin narcissist Carlson’s “Take THAT, Fox News!” campaign. Carlson again showed that he is no journalist, just a self-aggrandizing hack, by never asking Trump a single critical question or anything Donald might take umbrage at, like, say, “Where in the Constitution is your mirage that the Vice-President can refuse to certify the election?” or “How can Americans trust you to be President when you have advocated suspending the Constitution? ” Nah, Tucker was more interested in pressing Trump on whether Democrats would try to have him killed. I suppose, if Trump had not already disqualified himself for any major elected office with his despicable, irresponsible—but not illegal or impeachable—conduct after the 2020 election in one’s eyes, this might have helped:

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Oh-Oh, I May Have To Apologize To Michael Savage…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Michael Savage (real name: Michael Weiner) is in his eighties now, and his exposure is limited to out-of-print books (he wrote 40 of them) and podcast that can be easily avoided. I used to stumble across his syndicated rant show on the car radio in D.C. now and then, and I was repeatedly horrified, not just that enough Americans would listen to his mad white nationalism to provide him with a living wage, but that there were people who thought like him at all. Savage is a misogynist, mocks autism, wants to eliminate all immigration to keep the U.S. as white as possible, and generally represents the worst pathologies of conservatism, allowing the news media to use him a template to smear anyone to the right of Barack Obama. In the early 2000s his theme was that liberalism was a mental illness; he even published a book about that theory. Like so much of Savage’s bile, that position seemed especially ominous to me, an echo of both fascism and the Soviet treatment of dissidents. I alluded to this obsession of Savage’s in a 2009 essay on the old Ethics Scoreboard, writing,

Zealots on both the Left and the Right, rather than make an honest effort to challenge the views and assumptions of those on the other side, increasingly opt to smear their character with broad and crude generalizations. Democrats and liberals hate America, and want to destroy everything that is good and decent. Republicans and conservatives are fascists and hypocrites. Liberals are evil: they encourage the killing of babies and the destruction of the family. Conservatives are evil: they secretly lead lives of sexual excess and mad fetishes. This mode of public debate could be laughed off as self-evidently ridiculous, except that individuals held in high regard by millions engage in it routinely. Listen to conservatives Michael Savage (whose writings claims liberalism is a mental illness) or Marc Levin on your radio. Or read one of newly-seated Democratic Senator Al Franken’s books, before he realized that accusing all Republicans of being fat, venal and stupid was a serviceable road to power.

That was a correct assessment then and is correct now; the problem is (and calling it just a “problem” is, as Jonathan Turley would say, “problematic”) that the two polar extremes have largely now taken over national discourse. Their excesses are just as repulsive (or should be), but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone with influence who can act as a counterweight.

But I digress…the original inspiration for this post is that Michael Savage’s assertion that “liberalism is a mental disease” appears to be coming true. Witness Ryan Polly, whom , a hospital system of over 20,000 employees, MaineHealth, has chosen to place in a position of power in its organization. Polly is a vice president of DEI there” the fact that any organization actually spends money to create a bureaucracy around the latest leftest fad is itself evidence of a metastasizing cultural malady, but Polly is special. According to a Fox News report, he hosted an antiracist prayer service in which white attendees were made to apologize for their internalized racism, because, Polly teaches, all whites (like him) are racists.

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And As Long As We’re Talking About The Ethics Rot At The Washington Post…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

This headline: “In Trump cases, experts say defendant’s rhetoric will be hard to police.”
No news organization where the ethics alarms ring beyond the janatorial staff would allow that to go out into the world unless it was confident that a totalitarian regime would soom be handing out favors.

Wrote Ann Althouse, in one of her better distillations of an ethics issue: “Rhetoric should be hard to police.” Funny, that creature of the First Amendment, the Washington Post, think it’s a problem, writing, “Advisers say the Trump campaign sees a benefit in him testing boundaries by publicly attacking judges and prosecutors — either he gets away with it, or he gets to play the victim for being censored by the courts.”

Ann’s reaction, in my terms, is “Good!” She comments, “It’s a great free-speech safeguard that restrictions on free speech generate the argument that there’s a violation of free speech. Those whose freedom of speech is violated should “play the victim.” If you don’t like your opponents “playing the victim,” one option is not to victimize them.”

Whatever sadistic god decided to make a repulsive creep like Donald Trump the target of the most ominous and dangerous attack on the democratic system and the Constitution in our history has a lot of explaining to do. It is essentially impossible to feel sorry for Trump, but fair and civically responsible citizens must rally to his side while condemning the mob pursuing him, at least on principle. It literally doesn’t matter whether Trump is a jerk, a secret cannibal or Jack the Ripper come to the 21st Century in H.G. Wells’ time machine. If we let the corrupt Democratic totalitarians silence and punish him to clear the field for what’s left of Joe Biden, nobody is safe. There has to be some way to punish the Left without letting a vicious, unaccountable creep sit in the place of Washington, Lincoln, FDR and Reagan.

Isn’t there? Please?

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The Unethical Mainstream New Media Isn’t Even Trying Any More…

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Witness the Washington Post’s announcement that they have hired Alexi McCammond to be an opinion editor. The Washington Post has been hemorrhaging credibility, integrity and subscribers for years, and one might think that it would be seeking some objective, serious, ethically competent old hands to right the metaphorical ship. One might, and one would be wrong. Heeeeeeere’s Alexi!

McCammond began her political reportage career covering Democrats for Axios. While following Biden’s presidential campaign, where she eventually began an intimate affair with Biden’s then campaign press secretary T.J. Ducklo. This is what is called in the days when journalists cared about things, a disqualifying conflict of interest but neither told their employers about their relationship until after the 2020 election. McCammond’s ability to be considered an objective commentator on the Biden campaign was, of course, corrupted, but never mind: Axios, hack outfit that it is, didn’t care, saying, “We stand behind her and her coverage”,” and because she was “a valued member of the Axios team.” Then, probably with the assistance of the White House, the love birds got their own feature in People magazine. Ducklo was quoted as saying, “We’re both really happy, and we wanted to do it the right way.” This the rough equivalent of Clarence Thomas saying the same thing about his relationship with billionaire Harlan Crow. There is no “right way” for a reporter to be in a romantic relationship with a key staffer of the politician she’s covering.

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The Canada-Meta Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Boy, who do you root for in a face-off like this?

Meta Platforms—that’s Facebook and Instagram— ended access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada earlier this month in opposition to a new law requiring internet companies to pay news publishers. The Online News Act was passed by the Canadian parliament to force platforms like Google parent Alphabet and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers (including the government) for news content. Part of a global trend to make tech firms pay for news, both Meta and Google told Canada in June they would block access to news on their platforms in the country if the law wasn’t changed.

“News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line,” Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada, said in a public statement. But, she said, “people using our platforms don’t come to us for news.”

Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge responded,”This is irresponsible. They would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations. We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the Government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”

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