James Woods, “Vulgarity,” And Me

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I liked actor James Woods as an actor for several reasons; among them that he always made interesting choices within a narrow range, had great energy, and even when he was playing his most repellent characters (Woods’ specialty), managed to find humor in them. I get a kick out of him as a personality because he is one of those actors who resembles in real life his on -screen image, and doesn’t apologize for it. He’s smart (unlike, say, Robert DeNiro), not afraid of controversy, and doesn’t take any crap without giving back as good as he gets, or better. Because Woods is an unapologetic political conservative and past the age where he can credibly play hit-men and pimps, he also has been forcibly retired by Hollywood and hasn’t had a role in almost a decade. Well, that’s OK; I’m sure he’s well off financially, which is why he can spend so much time infuriating progressives on Twitter.

Recently, Wood was chided by a Twitter follower who complained about his “vulgarity” in some posts and announced that he was “unfollowing” Woods’ Twitter feed. Woods’ reply:

I’m sure you’re not expecting a response, but I am willing to address your concerns. And you may be further surprised that I hear your point. Vulgarity is beneath all of us, if we truly wish to “hear” the “other side.” Unfortunately for you, I don’t.

So blow me.

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The WaPo’s Factchecker Suddenly Discovers That Joe Biden Lies A Lot

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Donald Trump, as the media kept reminding readers and listeners, engaged in a virtually non-stop stream of “lies,” and this became a theme of its Axis of Unethical Conduct duties of undermining the Trump Presidency. There was never any question about the fact that Donald Trump’s relationship with truth, facts, reality, history, promises, assertions, choices of words, opinions, and everything in between, has always been a matter of his mood, purpose and convenience. Sometimes he lies, sometimes he exaggerates, sometimes he forgets, sometimes he spins—it’s exhausting following him, really, and no question about it, public officials and figures who ask for and must have the public trust can’t communicate like that: it’s unethical, whether we are talking about competence, fairness, responsibility—it doesn’t matter. It’s wrong. However, the news media and Trump’s political opponents, once they realized the man’s habits and proclivities, decided it was advantageous to call anything Trump said that could be challenged or disagreed with a “lie.” The Washington Post, in particular, had a ball with this approach, and created a running database of all of Trump’s “lies.” Trump, of course, made their job easy because, vie Twitter, he made more statement, many of them off the cuff, than any five U.S. Presidents in our history combined.

Or maybe it’s three. Or seven. I was estimating. If Trump said that, the Washington Post would label it a lie.

Does President Biden lie as often as Trump did? I don’t know: it’s close, but you wouldn’t know that by reading and watching the mainstream media…or the Washington Post. Nobody set up a database of Biden’s lies. They were just “gaffes,” you see, because old Joe has always been confused. Or they were “mistakes.”

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Suspend Sunny Hostin’s Law License

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A mere Ethics Dunce designation for The View’s Sunny Hostin isn’t sufficient, because she’s a regular co-host on ABC’s daily cultural offal pile where all of the women are ethics dunces at best. Hostin’s one of the worst, which is quite an achievement, but she’s also a lawyer, making her admission yesterday especially despicable.

I’ve seen the video several times but can’t find a way on Word Press to embed it. Sorry: you can view the evidence on Twitter here. Babbling on about voting with the ladies, Sunny expressed suspicions regarding how absentee ballots were being handled, because, she explained, she had an odd experience while dropping off her son’s absentee ballot which she had filled out for him.

Hostin is a different kind of idiot than the other idiots on the panel: she’s an arrogant, cocky idiot who thinks her law degree means that her idiotic opinions aren’t idiotic. Thus she admitted committing a federal crime on national TV and didn’t even realize it. I’d guess the average first year law student could figure out that this is a serious violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct in every U.S. jurisdiction. Not Sunny, though.

It isn’t a technical violation either; it’s serious. Usually unethical conduct by lawyers when they aren’t practicing law are ignored by bar disciplinary committees, but Rule 8.4, Misconduct, holds that “It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to:

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Oh! Now After Eight Years Of Accusing A Renowned Law Professor And Lawyer Of Sexual Assault, You Now Think You “May Have Been Mistaken!” Sure, OK!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Wait, what?

Someone here has been very unethical, and probably criminal. I wonder who?

From the New York Times:

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey E. Epstein who for years maintained that the law professor Alan Dershowitz had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, settled a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Dershowitz on Tuesday and said that she might have “made a mistake” in accusing him.

In a joint statement announcing the settlement, Ms. Giuffre said, “I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations.

“I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz,” her statement said.

The joint statement announced the end of litigation between Ms. Giuffre and Mr. Dershowitz — who had also sued her — as well as of two other lawsuits between Mr. Dershowitz and the lawyer David Boies that stemmed from Ms. Giuffre’s accusation….

The terms of Ms. Giuffre’s deal with Mr. Dershowitz were not immediately clear on Tuesday, though the statement and the court filing said that no payments were made by any of the parties.

I don’t understand this at all. Is there any doubt that there is a lot, including a secret, back room agreement, that we are not being told about? My mind is still a bit foggy, so I can’t recall all of the movies I have seen where crucial witnesses in mysteries, crimes and conspiracies making almost the exact same statement Virginia Giuffre is quoted as making, recanting previous accusations and assertions they appeared to be absolutely certain of but suddenly had second thoughts after finding their dog hanging from a tree, or a horse head in their bed, or receiving a third party check for a lot of money. But boy, there are a lot of them. Continue reading →

15 Dawn’s Early Light Post-Election Ethics Notes

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Spuds woke me at 5:30 am, so I might as well get this up now….

1. The good news is that there’s not going to be any violence: the one scenario that makes civil unrest vanishingly unlikely occurred. There was no GOP “wave,” but the party still will get control of the House, albeit unimpressively, and can eke out a bare majority in the Senate, although we might not know for sure until December. Yay.

2. I watched Fox News and CNN track the election returns. Neither were overtly biased; both played it straight.

3. The unavoidable conclusion from the night’s proceedings is that the vast majority of voters will vote for inanimate carbon rods it they have the right party affiliation. This is not a healthy, competent or ethical way to behave in a democracy, and it plays into the hands of manipulative power-seekers.

4. The Stopped Clock Award: I hate to say this, but Mitch McConnell was right: his party shot itself in both knees by running too many sub-par, extreme or otherwise unqualified candidates.

5. Both #3 and #4 above are illustrated by John Fetterman’s victory. He is wildly unfit to serve and was irresponsible to stay in the race. Dr. Oz was a foolish, needlessly poor choice to oppose him.

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Ethics Quiz: When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring And You’re A Drunk College Senior

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Sophia Rosing, 22, a University of Kentucky student, was drunk. Really drunk; drunl as a skunk, as the saying goes. As she tumbled into a campus dorm lobby, the student at the front desk, Kylah Spring, tried to stop her, because Rosing had not presented her ID. The besotted senior launched into tirade against Spring, physically attacking the young black woman while calling her a “bitch” and a “nigger,” the latter over 200 times.

When campus security arrived, Rosing kicked and bit the officers as they tried to place her under arrest. University Police were finally able to take Rosing into custody just before 4am. She was charged with public intoxication, assault and disorderly conduct.

The incident was, of course, videoed and posted on social media. Rosing is out on bail, but she will certainly face criminal penalties.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is….

Beyond the criminal penalties, what are fair, just and ethical consequences for Sophia Rosing now?

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Just Think: There Are Thousands Of Supposedly Mentally Fit Citizens Who Are Going To Vote For This Idiot Today [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I continue to be awash with remorse for not coming up with a list of 2022’s “Dirty Dozen” to highlight the most unethical and unfit candidates for office. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a New York Democrat representing the state’s 17th Congressional District, might even deserve to nudge out a member of The Squad. Well, probably not, but still: asked by an interviewer, “Hudson Valley residents are feeling pain at the pump and at grocery stores, what have you done, and what do you plan to do to help solve our inflation problem?” Maloney replied,

Yeah, well, I grew up in a family where, you know, if the gas price went up, the food budget went down. So by this time of the week, we’d be eating Chef Boyardee if that budget wasn’t gonna change. So that’s what families have to do.

Or they could try library paste, dog food, and maybe just eat the dog. Yup, that’s what families have to do when Pat’s party restricts pipelines, drilling leases and energy production while spending billions on specious climate change solutions for uncertain conditions that can’t be solved by U.S. policies anyway and at best might benefit Americans a hundred years from now. Or not. Whatever.

The Congressman’s answer isn’t just callous and demonstrative of voids in responsibility and analysis. It’s signature significance for an asshole of epic proportions. Fortunately, it looks as if Maloney is going to lose his seat, but it’s close.  How in the Wide Wide World of Sports could any sentient voter cast a ballot for such a jerk? Oh, right: to save democracy to be run by clueless morons. See, even Maloney is preferable to a Republican because, as Rob Reiner told MSNBC’s Joy Reid last week to no resistance at all, the members of that evil party

…are only interested in power. They are only interested, and they will do anything to get the power. And they are willing to kill, literally kill, to get the power.

And they probably don’t even like Chef Boyardee!

UPDATE: Somehow, I missed the fact that Maloney was also the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair….which tells you something about the party, and it isn’t good.

A Non-Election Day Ethics Special! An Ethics Test For Baseball Hall Of Fame Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The major League Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown released its eight-player Contemporary Baseball Era ballot yesterday, as part of its revamped enshrinement process. A 16-person committee including of Hall of Fame players, baseball executives and veteran sportswriters will vote on the candidates at baseball’s winter meetings in December. A player must receive 12 votes to be elected.

All of the eight players failed to get enough votes through the regular voting process. The players on the list, limited to distinguished players who made their greatest contributions from 1980 to the present era, include…

  • Barry Bonds
  • Roger Clemens
  • Curt Schilling
  • Albert Belle
  • Don Mattingly
  • Fred McGriff
  • Dale Murphy, and
  • Rafael Palmeiro.

A clearer ethics test for the voters would be hard to imagine. The threshold question is whether last year’s admission to the Hall of Red Six icon David Ortiz, who once tested positive for an unidentified performance enhancing drug according to test results that were illegally leaked, will be regarded as sufficient precedent to admit Bonds, Clemens, and or Palmeiro. That Bonds was a long-time steroid cheat who did great damage to the game is undeniable. The evidence against Clemens is weaker, but still damning. Palmeiro had the distinction of going before Congress and proclaiming that steroids were the bane of the game and he would never sully himself by using them, and quickly thereafter testing positive himself. None of those three should be admitted to the Hall, and the presence of current Hall of Fame members, I hope, may ensure that they are not. Continue reading →

Election Day Ethics Warm-Up, 11/8/2022: Joys Of Democracy Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

That’s a screen shot from the video of a fight that broke out last week at a rally for New York Governor Kathy Hochul when some supporters of Republican Lee Zeldin showed up. That’s a white male Democrat with his hand on the neck of a black female Republican, but for some reason, the mainstream media has chosen to publicize it as they carry forward the message of Republicans being a threat to democracy….

Nevertheless, the flagship of the pro-Democratic Party bolstering media is apparently strictly heeding the talking points memos and going all the way with this narrative. Here was the New York Times’ editorial board’s explanation yesterday about “What’s at Stake in These Elections”:

Eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election on the basis of spurious allegations of voter fraud and other irregularities. Many of them are likely to win re-election, and they may be joined by new members who also have expressed baseless doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. Their presence in Congress poses a danger to democracy, one that should be on the mind of every voter casting a ballot this Election Day.

It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

No, eight GOP Senators and 139 Representatives in fact voted to withhold certification of the 2020 Presidential election in a largely symbolic vote expressing doubts about the integrity of the vote and seeking further investigation, just as Democratic Senators and Representatives did so in 2000, 2004 and 2016. They did not “seek to overturn” the results—that’s not reporting or even honest punditry. It’s misleading spin from the Times editors, just like so much of their paper’s news reporting since 2015.

What voters really have an opportunity to do today is demonstrate the genius and vigor of the American system by signalling their bi-partisan disgust at the arrogance, ineptitude and undemocratic ways of Democratic governors and lawmakers, in their dictatorial pandemic response, their rejection of the rule of law, their embrace of race-based preferences, their climate change madness, and their attempt to demonize and criminalize political opposition. Not since the Great Depression has a political party so deserved to be shamed and ejected from power. (In fact, the Democrats deserve such a fate more than the post-’29 crash Republicans did, but that’s a discussion for another day.) One market research authority predicts the midterm loss for the Democrats will be 75 seats in the House of Representatives and 11 seats in the Senate, which would be glorious, and the stinging message the party has earned. Others prognosticators (like the Times) are being far more optimistic about the likely fate today of their allies. Either prediction could be the product of confirmation bias, wishful thinking, or missed signals.

We shall see. But up in Founding Father Heaven, I’m pretty sure who Tom, George, James, John (Abigail) and Ben are rooting for this time.

1. Integrity! The campaign of Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate and poster boy for brain-damaged politicians, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday claiming that mail-in ballots with an incorrect or missing date should be counted despite the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling against them being included in the vote count, since doing so violates state law. The claim is that not counting the votes on the grounds of an issue with the date violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that election officials cannot deny someone the right to vote based on an error on the ballot that is “not material” to determining whether the individual is qualified to vote under state election law. Of course, there was very limited use of mail-in ballots in 1964; this is literally an effort to exploits a loophole in order to allow dubious votes to determine a close election.

The media has cast the GOP lawsuit that resulted in the ruling as an effort to infringe on voting rights. Yes, requiring voters to follow the minimal requirements of legal voting is so, so unreasonable—that’s the argument. It reminds me of the Democratic claim during the 2000 Florida recount that the pathetic voting attempt of an idiot who couldn’t figure out how to punch out a chad and wrote “I vote for Gore!” on the ballot should be counted. As I wrote at the time, “Why not just shouting out his choice near the polling place? How about tying a note to a rock and throwing it through a window?”

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Why There’s No Ethics “Dirty Dozen” This Election, And Those Wacky Shavers: Whatever The Truth Is, The Father Is Unethical And The Son Is Untrustworthy

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This story reminds me that I used to have a post every election cycle listing my “Dirty Dozen”—a list of 12 candidates for re-election or office that I deemed ethically unacceptable. The list would include, in addition to automatic honorees like Rep. Maxine Waters, such oddities as Rich Iott, whose candidacy foundered when it was discovered that he had an obsession with dressing up as an SS officer. Usually I made an effort to include an equal number f Democrats and Republicans—it wasn’t hard.

It wouldn’t be hard this time, either. What would be hard, indeed, I decided, impossible, would be to keep the list to just a dozen. To begin with, “The Squad” would take care of all of the Democratic slots right off the bat. Every one of them (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri) is an embarrassment: incompetent, blindly ideological, and anti-American to the core. There wouldn’t even be room for Waters, or Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Majority Whip (and hypocrite “election denier”) James Clyburn, or the ridiculous Stacey Abrams. Then we have Nancy Pelosi, who has crossed more ethics lines with each passing year, and the truly horrible Adam Schiff (D-Cal). I couldn’t fit John Fetterman onto the list, or any of the awful Democratic governors running for re-election—and if I tried, then there would be no room for the Republicans who should never hold political office, like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), or (you knew this was coming) Herschel Walker, the creepy Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who compared the Capitol riot to a “normal tourist visit,” and Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky) who thought this was an appropriate Christmas card…

Well, I could go on, but this is depressing me. The point is that there are far, far too many ridiculous, incompetent, unethical people making our laws for anyone to be able to trust the government….and I haven’t even drilled down to the state level, where it’s worse.

So meet the entertaining Shavers. Clyde Shavers, the Democratic candidate for Washington state’s 10th legislative district, claimed to be an officer serving on a nuclear submarine in the Navy for eight years. He wasn’t one. He also has claimed to be a lawyer. He isn’t a lawyer either; in fact, he doesn’t know what a lawyer is. On his website, Shavers writes,

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