It Looks Like Donald Trump Was Betrayed By Another One Of His Lawyers, Someone Else…Or Himself

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Just because Trump is paranoid doesn’t mean almost everyone around him isn’t trying to stab him in the back.

From the New York Times:

Shortly after turning over 15 boxes of government material to the National Archives in January, former President Donald J. Trump directed a lawyer working for him to tell the archives that he had returned all the documents he had taken from the White House at the end of his presidency, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The lawyer, Alex Cannon, had become a point of contact for officials with the National Archives, who had tried for months to get Mr. Trump to return presidential records that he failed to turn over upon leaving office. Mr. Cannon declined to convey Mr. Trump’s message to the archives because he was not sure if it was true, the people said.

The story was leaked to, naturally, Maggie Haberman, the full-time Trump Fury on the Times staff. She’s currently peddling a book full of anti-Trump tales, gossip and embarrassments. A lot of her stories over the last six years have been about what the President supposedly said behind closed door, or suggested, or asked others to do, none of which actually came to anything but the point is to make Trump look bad, dangerous or stupid. Of course, ethical aides, associates and lawyer don’t tell hostile reporters (or anyone at all) about such conversations because they are in the positions they are because the President trusts them. Donald Trump has been betrayed by such people more times, I would estimate, than all of the last six Presidents combined. Continue reading →

The Failure Of “Bros”: Why Don’t Minorities Accept The Right Of Majorities To Feel Like They Do?

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Gee, what a shocking development! Non-gay audiences haven’t flocked to see a romantic comedy that advertises itself like that!

I’m a movie fan. I have lots of gay friends, family members and associates: I worked in the theater for decades. I respect them all; I support their right to live and love and marry whomever they please; I want them to be treated like any other law-abiding Americans in all things as they are judged solely on the content of their character, and regard discrimination and bias against them as despicable and unconscionable.

But I don’t enjoy watching gay sex and related activities.  I have every right to feel that way. I would no more pay, or take time out of my sock drawer duties, to see “Bros” than I would watch an NFL game, or attend a one-man show by Alec Baldwin. So sue me. But I think there are millions of Americans with similar tastes, and they span the generations.

Apparently the makers of “Bros” convinced themselves that non-gay (I will say “cis” when there is a loaded gun at my head and not before) Americans, who are, believe it or not, the majority, would go to see a romantic comedy about gays because they have been told that they should, and are bigots if the don’t comply. Non-gay America replied, “Bite me!,” and good for them. Continue reading →

October Surprise! Ethics Observations As Herschel Walker’s Past Strikes Back…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The first observation is that neither of the surprises should surprise anyone at all. Former NFL football star Herschel Walker is about as vulnerable a political candidate for high office as one can imagine, even in the “Get Trump!” era. I’ve covered much of this already. He’s exaggerated his scholastic achievements, hidden the fact that he has several children conceived without the formality of marriage, admitted bouts with mental illness and a suicide attempt, and vaguely acknowledges committing domestic violence.

Walker has no political experience or relevant achievements that would make him a qualified candidate for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. He’s a local celebrity and has personal charisma; he is also an African-American in a state with a lot of black voters (and football fans). That’s about it. In the United States of America in the Age of the Great Stupid, that can also be enough.

It was irresponsible for the Republican Party to present such a cynically-chosen nominee to the voters of Georgia, incompetent for voters to check his name in the primary, and certifiably stupid for the GOP to store a substantial amount of their chances of taking back control of the Senate on such a shaky vessel.

Yesterday, they all got what they deserved… Continue reading →

‘Hi! I’m Chris Cuomo! I’m An Incurable Dummy, A Proven Liar, Proudly Biased, Unprofessional, I Was Fired For Sexual Misconduct And Ignoring Conflicts Of Interest, And Now I Want You To Let Me Tell You What To Think…’

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Those weren’t quite his words, but that is a fair summary of the message sent by disgraced CNN face-man Chris Cuomo, aka. Fredo, as he launched his new NewsNation show, creatively named, “Cuomo.”

“So, this show is going to be different than what I’ve done in the past because I’m different and I’ve spent a lot of time looking and listening on the sidelines…It’s obvious to me that we need people in my position to do more,” Chris babbled in his premiere yesterday. “To not just play or even referee the game that is plaguing our politics and society. That means exposing the game, show when it’s played, show how it’s being played, and also to be more transparent about where my head is on the issues that we cover.”

Who are people in “his position,” do you think? People who only got their prominent jobs on TV news (not to mention an admission to law school) because their fathers were famous and popular governors of New York? People who think “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment, as Cuomo once claimed on Twitter? People who use their positions of public trust to pimp for their corrupt brothers? There is nothing, quite literally nothing, about Chris Cuomo or his record at CNN before he was justly though tardily fired that would make any human being with enough functioning brain cells to give a marmoset a good game of Scrabble think, “Hey, I can learn something from this guy!”

Continue reading →

Now THAT’S A Grudge!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Icky, unethical, or just remarkable devotion to an agenda? Whatever it is, I’m sort of impressed. When most people say, “I’ll piss on your grave!” they are just indulging in wishful thinking.

Dean Eichler, 68, of Bergenfield, N.J. was finally secretly recorded on video pulling into the Tappan Reformed Church Cemetery in his SUV for his daily ritual. As he leaves the motor running, Eichner slowly walks towards Linda Torello’s grave while unzipping his fly. Eichner urinates vigorously on her final resting place, then returns to his SUV and drives away.

43-year-old Michael Murphy used hidden cameras to catch the performance after finding traces of urine along with plastic bags with feces whenever he visited his mother’s grave in Orangetown, New York. The elderly man visits almost every day at around 6:00 am. He is, as you might guess, Linda’s ex-husband whom she divorced 48 years ago. Michael got permission to set up the cameras; apparently this ritual has been going on for a long, long time. Interestingly a woman, assumed to be Eichner’s spouse, accompanies him on his morning visits.

Murphy says that his mother’s brief marriage to the guy ended when she became pregnant and he didn’t want to be a father. (There’s got to be more to the story than that!) “How he found my mother’s grave site we are not sure. But this stems back to a problem almost 50 years ago,” Michael wrote on Facebook. He says the family has had no contact with him since 1976.

Police say there is nothing they can (or will) do about routine grave-pissing, but Linda Torello’s son is trying to determine if a complaint for grave desecration will prompt some action.

You know, the late Stephen Sondheim could have written a musical about this.

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Pointer: Oddity Central

Monday Ethics Madness, 10/3/22: Remembering O.J., And More

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

October 3 is another date that lives in infamy…ethics infamy, legal infamy, celebrity infamy, race relations infamy. On this day in 1995, the sensational, infuriating trial of O.J. Simpson ended with his acquittal of the double murder of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman. After 252 days, jurors decided that Simpson’s guilt had not been proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” despite more than enough evidence to convict just about anyone else who didn’t have an all-star team of criminal defense lawyers. Among the many ethics alarms set off by and during the trial:

  • The imbalance between the resources available to the state in high-profile criminal cases and what a wealthy defendant can use to defend himself stood out in sharp contrast to the situation in typical cases, where the imbalance is reversed.
  • The influence of the Rodney King riots and the deft manner in which Johnny Cochran turned the trial into racial payback perverted justice and the culture—but was the epitome of zealous representation, the lawyer’s creed.
  • A weak judge, Lance Ito, allowed the defense to engage in unethical and otherwise questionable tactics, but in a setting where lawyers are arguably obligated to exploit every advantage a trial judge lets them get away with.
  • Prosecution incompetence, exemplified by such decisions as not asking for a different venue, seeking to seat African-American women on the jury, insufficiently vetting Mark Fuhrman, and the infamous gloves debacle, literally allowed Simpson to walk free from a double murder.
  • The weakness of the jury system was exposed, as the Simpson jurors proved easy to confuse regarding complex and technical scientific evidence.

And much more.

1. More college loan ethics! The Consumer Financial Protection Board ruled last week that colleges that lend directly to their students cannot later refuse to release a student’s transcript as a way of forcing them to make loan payments. The issue arises with for-profit colleges that can make their own loans to students.  The bureau said transcript withholding as a tool to collect these debts is “designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments,” and are therefore abusive and excessively punitive.

“Faced with the choice between paying a specific debt and the unknown loss associated with long-term career opportunities of a new job or further education, consumers may be coerced into making payments on debts that are inaccurately calculated, improperly assessed, or otherwise problematic,” the bureau wrote. Continue reading →

For Amherst College Students, A Values And Self-Respect Test…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

…and for Amherst itself, a test of how well its totalitarian indoctrination program is working. Just look at this head-exploding thing:

Well.

The new policy at Amherst College has each student and teacher fill out an anonymous survey to state whether they want a mask mandate in their classroom. If a single student, or the instructor, so desires, everyone will be required to wear a mask, despite the fact that masking as the paranoid and largely useless security-blanket response to the lurking Wuhan virus and its relatives is no longer required by CDC guidelines (Science!) and that masks are now almost exclusively worn by phobics, lock-step progressives seeking to show their fealty using the equivalent of a Nazi armband, and people so immuno-compromised that they probably shouldn’t be out in public at all. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Day: Blogger Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

“Who is Miles Teller?”

—Ann Althouse, at the end of her blog post commenting on the premiere of “Saturday Night Live” and the New York Times’ review of it

The SNL premiere was guest-hosted by Miles Teller.

I’ve got some income-producing work to do for a client early this morning and I shouldn’t be working on an Ethics Alarms post, and I know I’ve been picking on Ann a lot lately, but I really can’t let this pass.

It’s really simple: if Althouse is going to engage in popular culture commentary as if her opinion should be taken seriously (as in “is worth reading on her blog”), then she has a base obligation to be at least minimally informed regarding American popular culture. She isn’t. She has never been, and I have read her blog for more than two decades, back when she was a law professor. There are arbitrary pockets of pop culture that she is obsessed with (like Bob Dylan songs), but it has always been obvious that Althouse is not very conversant in classic films or network TV; she’s even blogged about this hole in her experience. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that if one is going to critique popular culture, especially a show that at least purports to satirize current personalities and themes within pop culture, it is irresponsible, incompetent and arrogant (dare I say, “stupid”?) do do so when you literally don’t know what you are talking about.

Sixty-something Ann Althouse asking “Who is Miles Teller?” is the exact mirror image of those lazy jokes on TV and in movies about clueless Millennials who ask, “Who is John Wayne?” or “Who were The Beatles”‘ after a Boomer makes a reference to them or their equivalents. Saturday Night Live has always featured as guest hosts actors and singers (and sometimes, less successfully, politicians) who are currently popular, in the news and hot commodities, so Ann had to know that if Miles Teller was hosting the first show of the season, he must qualify. If she wasn’t familiar with him, then obviously she should have Googled his name: it would take all of three seconds. Her question, at the end of a post suggesting that “Saturday Night Live” is tired, unfunny and irrelevant (not that it isn’t), conveys stunning elitism as well as the qualities I already attached to it.

Continue reading →

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The FBI’s Draft Termination Letter To FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What more is there to be said? Well, just a little.

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Stop Making Me Defend Kamala Harris!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ugh. Even the trustworthy right-ish media misled inexcusably on this one, and, of course, “Republicans pounced.”

Two days ago, Indian actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas asked Harris at a Democratic National Committee event about the Biden administration’s goals as a “global influencer” on climate policy when it comes to poorer countries.

“It is our lowest-income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making,” Harris replied. “And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”

How did this become a statement by Harris about how aid would be distributed to communities in Florida and South Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Ian? Let’s see:

Continue reading →