What else could he say?
Chief Justice John Roberts’ Statement Regarding The Dobbs Leak
What else could he say?
The First Rule of “Anti-Racism Fight Club” Is Do Not Talk About “Anti-Racism Fight Club”…
Nah, the public schools aren’t indoctrinating children!
Admittedly, this happened in Washington D.C., which has an anti-white, racist, Black Lives Matter-supporting mayor, but still…
The principal of Janney Elementary School in the District casually informed parents in a letter last November that
Today students in grades pre-k through third grade participated in the Anti-Racism Fight Club presentation with Doyin Richards. As part of this work, each student has a fist book to help continue the dialogue at school and home (be sure to check out the helpful links on page 18). We recognize that any time we engage topics such as race and equity, we may experience a variety of emotions. This is a normal part of the learning and growing process. As a school community we want to continue the dialogue with our students and understand this is just the beginning.
“Just the beginning!” Richards, a Critical Race Theory consultant and propagandist, spoke about the themes in his “Anti-Racism Fight Club Fistbook for Kids” explaining that “white people are a part of a society that benefits them in almost every instance,” and that “it’s as if white people walk around with an invisible force field because they hold all of the power in America.”
“If you are a white person,” the Fistbook for Kids” explains, “white privilege is something you were born with and it simply means that your life is not more difficult due to the color of your skin. Put differently, it’s not your fault for having white privilege, but it is your fault if you choose to ignore it.”
Ethics Quote Of The Month: Justice Samuel Alito
“We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly.’
Justice Samuel Alito, in his tour de force majority opinion draft declaring that Roe v. Wade is no more.
The next sentence: “We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
That unequivocal statement by Alito makes it very clear that the Supreme Court majority, whether it be five or, if Roberts doesn’t chicken out, six, fully understands that the pro-abortion forces will go ballistic when and if Roe is reversed. This means that the leak isn’t going to put any more pressure on the Justices than they expected.
Law professor Josh Blackmon [not “Jon,” as I mistyped originally], a libertarian, read the opinion draft and this was his verdict: Continue reading
Ethics Observations On The Dobbs SCOTUS Opinion Draft Leak And Reactions To It
Ethics Alarms posted briefly on the stunning leak of what appears to be a draft of a majority opinion striking down Roe v. Wade and the related Casey decision. [The link to the draft is in that article.] The position here is that any analysis based on the draft itself is premature and irresponsible, since the document is 1) a draft 2) not even necessarily the latest draft, and 3) the opinion as well as the support for it on the Court could change materially before the actual opinion is released.
The only ethics issue immediately clear is that regarding the leak itself, and, by extension, the leaker. Leaks always constitute a unethical breaches of trust; only in the rare cases where they reveal actual criminal activity can they be justified. For a lawyer to leak any information related to a professional obligation or representation is grounds for disbarment, and permanent infamy within the profession. This leak cannot be defended, and pundits, politicians or activists who praise the leaker reveal their own ethics bankruptcy. Keep a watch out for the leak apologists. Then relegate them to your “Untrustworthy” file.
Now the focus shifts to the reactions to the draft, and it is fair to say they constitute a freak-out. Prime among them is the hypocritical and hysterical joint statement by Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi. Imagine: these are leaders of the party that has accused Donald Trump of undermining core American institutions.
The statement is breathtakingly dishonest. None of the members of the Court ever stated that they would not vote to overrule Roe. They said it was the law of the land, which is true, and stated their support for the principle of stare decisus. That did not preclude their voting to reverse Roe later based on a case that hadn’t been briefed or argued yet. I have read enough of the draft to know that Justice Alito clearly explains that stare decisus has always had exceptions (but I knew that) where a wrongfully decided Constitutional case had to be reversed, writing.
“We have long recognized, however, that stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,’ and it ‘is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.’ It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue ‘be settled than that it be settled right.’ But when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution — the ‘great charter of our liberties,’ which was meant ‘to endure through a long lapse of ages,’ we place a high value on having the matter ‘settled right….On many other occasions, this Court has overruled important constitutional decisions. … Without these decisions, American constitutional law as we know it would be unrecognizable, and this would be a different country.”
It should be very easy for Republicans and anyone else to explain the demise of Roe to the public. It was, as Alito says, a bad decision from the beginning, and it was time for the rights of the unborn to be considered, and not just the imaginary right of mothers to have their children snuffed out.
I’m going to spend most of my time devoted to this episode reading the draft, but here are links to various news reports and commentary: ABC News, The Daily Beast, HuffPost, CNN, New York Times, CBS News, Reuters, Washington Examiner, Associated Press, Fox News, NPR, Townhall, Slate, The Guardian, CNSNews, Al Jazeera, Outside the Beltway, Washington Post, De Civitate, Insider, Bloomberg, NewsOne, USA Today, A Lawyer Writes, emptywheel, pjmedia.com, The Nation, Breitbart, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Signal, Vox, Washington Times, The Comity Channel, Deadline, KLAS, The Daily Caller, Men Yell at Me, PennLive, The Hill, The Moderate Voice, littlegreenfootballs.com, NBC New York, Ninja Smith & Friends, WCMH-TV, HotAir, Variety, Deseret News, BuzzFeed News, NBC News, RedState, Mississippi Free Press, Mediaite, Things Worth Thinking About, thot pudding, homeculture, National Review, Big League Politics, WCTX-TV, Twitchy, Talking Points Memo, SCOTUSblog, CNBC, Jill Filipovic, Lawyers, Guns & Money, The Daily Wire, Maxwell’s Newsletter, A Propensity …, Gem State, Louder With Crowder, PharmaHeretic’s Newsletter, First We Think, Vanity Fair, New York Post, Law & Crime, Raw Story, The 19th, The Texas Tribune, Dana Loesch’s Chapter …, Power Line, The Racket News, New York Magazine, Fortune, Hennessy’s View, Trash Chair Thoughts, VICE, UPI, The Gateway Pundit, GC News, Instapundit, Watch Night News, Rolling Stone, Sacramento Bee, The Even Place, Let’s Get Politigal, WPRI-TV, Daily Insurrection, Mother Jones, Super-Probably Relevant …, Mercury News, The Right News, The Western Journal, TheBlaze, Althouse, Unfogged, Ace of Spades HQ, Teresa L’s Newsletter, Boing Boing, CBS Denver, IJR and Progress Report
Further observations:
Professional Ethics Breach Alert! The Draft SCOTUS Abortion Opinion Leak
The issue right now is simple. Someone with access to Justice Alito’s draft majority opinion in THOMAS E. DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL., PETITIONERS u. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, ET AL. leaked it to Politico. This is the worst breach of professional ethics in the history of the Court. It is the worst breach of professional ethics in the history of the federal court system. If a lawyer, such as a law clerk, was responsible, he or she should be, and probably will be, disbarred.
The draft is here.
I haven’t read the draft: the thing is 67 pages long, and I just got it. The conclusion, however, is clear:
We end this opinion where we began. Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.
The judgment of the Fifth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Showing Cotton Bolls As Part Of A Lesson On Slavery: OK. Making Black Students PICK Cotton Bolls? Uh, NO. Is This Really A Difficult Line To See?
Apparently so, at least for some members of the teaching profession whose judgment parents are supposed to trust blindly, according to President Biden and others.
Just a few days ago, Ethics Alarms discussed [#3] the vile treatment of a social studies teacher by the San Francisco’s Creative Arts Charter School, which suspended her and forced her to grovel an apology for bringing cotton bolls, into her class as part of a lesson on the cotton gin and its impact on slavery and the Industrial Revolution. Commenter Curmie, a teacher himself, properly condemned the school’s reaction in a post on his own blog, here.
However, a Rochester, NY white middle school teacher told his class of mostly black students to pick seeds out of cotton bolls during his lessons on slavery in a seventh-grade social studies class. In another fun exercise, the same teacher brought in handcuffs and shackles for the black students to put on. White children were allowed to opt out of the cotton-picking, reportedly, while black students were not. When a black child balked at putting on the shackles, the teacher threatened her with punishment.
The Worst President Ever? Part 1
In his Comment of the Day this morning, history-besotted commenter Steve-O-in NJ writes regarding the question of whether Biden, as the Washington Post ludicrously claimed in an editorial, is a “huge” upgrade over President Trump, “Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46.”
From a purely academic perspective, having a clear and unequivocal Worst President Ever would be useful for future ranking purposes, just as George Washington has been an invaluable role model against whom all of his successors must be compared. However, the operative words regarding Biden are “is headed.” It would be unfair, not to mention foolish, to grade Biden as the worst of the worst before he has even served half his term. True, there is little reason for optimism, but the President generally regarded as sharing the Top POTUS title with George, Honest Abe, was looking like a national disaster at this point in his first term.
How do we assess which of our leaders was “the worst”? Without objective standards, any ranking is going to be poisoned by bias and partisanship. When I first began studying the Presidency, Jack Kennedy’s house historian and shameless boot-licker and old New Dealer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was considered the authority on the subject. He essentially ranked all the Democrats he could as “great” or “near great” and saved the low rankings for Republicans. He even rated Woodrow Wilson, a true villain in U.S. history, as “great.”
This was the beginning of my distrust of historians that has only grown since.
This series has to be shorter than the topic requires, so I will aim at providing a solid foundation. First we need to settle on who the contenders for Worst President Ever are. I’ll disqualify some along the way. Here are the possibilities among our first ten Presidents:
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/2/2022: Noam Chomsky Praises Trump, And Other Amazements…
Well, today we stopped getting the New York Times on our lawn in the morning. The price went up again, and almost a hundred bucks a month is too much for the convenience of seeing where the Times places its propaganda, even though those blue tubular plastic bags the paper arrives in are perfect for cleaning up after Spuds on his walks. And I’ll have to find something else to read in the bathroom….
1. Priorities, Ann. Jeez. Focus! Perceptive but decidedly weird blogger Ann Althouse isn’t interested in the Times devoting thousands and thousands of words smearing Tucker Carlson as a racist, but she is perplexed that the paper used the term “stick-up.”
One more example of how intellectuals who consider themselves above it all are useless, if not worse, during periods when their influence might be helpful.
2. On the other side of the activism spectrum, Noam Chomsky said in an interview that “one Western statesman of stature” is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it, and “his name is Donald J. Trump.” Now what is the ethical response to that? Chomsky has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that his is a toxic, biased, anti-American world view. Does this show his integrity? Or is the responsible reaction, “Why the hell would anyone care what Noam Chomsky thinks?”
3. Who says the Supreme Court justices can’t agree on anything? In Shurtleff v. Boston, the court held 9-0 that the city of Boston violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment when it refused to let a group fly a Christian flag outside city hall. The guts of the opinion:
Comment Of The Day: “Signature Significance: Washington Post Editorial Board’s Fantasy,” And Thoughts About The Worst Presidents
Steve-O-in NJ was inspired by the EA commentary on the Washington Post editors’ batty contention last week that Joe Biden was a “huge” upgrade over President Trump to write this Comment of the Day. I was reminded of it—I had intended to give Steve’s opus COTD honors earlier, but got distracted— when I realized that MSNBC was pushing the same gaslighting, prompting the previous post. The historical truth is that Joe Biden’s White House tenure so far wouldn’t give him a claim to being as a “huge upgrade” over any President using objective standards rather than partisan ones, as in “all Republican Presidents are worse than all Democrat Presidents,” which is the kindest way to explain the Post’s absurd assertion.
I am always interested in the topic of Presidential rankings, so after Steve-O has had his say, I’m going to follow up with an examination of how to assess who is the Worst POTUS Ever. Remember, leadership is also an official area of concentration for Ethics Alarms.
But first, here is Steve-O-of NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,“Signature Significance: Washington Post Editorial Board’s Fantasy”…
***
Just more proof that a lot of folks are so blindly partisan that they would not only vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it, but wouldn’t vote for God Himself if He didn’t. Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46. Grant probably no longer occupies the bottom of the ratings list. Harding was a corrupt, philandering son of a b****, but he had the wisdom to stand back and let the economy correct itself after the Panic of 1921. Obama was pretty feckless, but thankfully didn’t face any big new crises. Clinton was a pig, but the economy didn’t crash on his watch. So far, I can only compare Biden to Carter, the only president in recent history and even not so recent history who I can honestly and truly say has no strengths. Continue reading
Not “The Great Stupid,” Just Good Old Fashioned American Stupidity That Lets Bad Ideas Take Root And Demagogues Prosper…
Yesterday on her MSNBC show, Tiffany Cross featured Fernand Amandi, a Democrat pollster and adviser, and a regular on hers’s over-heated far-left hysteria orgy. Just think, the New York Times spent 6+ full pages today calling for the metaphorical life boats because Tucker Carlson’s monologues criticizing the Times and its pals for their anti-democratic efforts are getting longer, while Cross is part of an entire network that deals in toxic narratives and bias from dawn til dusk that the Times barely never criticizes at all.
This time, her frequent guest went quickly from gaslighting to totalitarian strategy.
First the gaslighting:
The Democrats have a wonderful story to tell! And I think it could be distilled to something as simple as: the Democrats saved your life. They saved your job. They saved the economy. And now they’re trying to save democracy from a Republican party that no longer believes [in] it.
Isn’t that great? Who besides Rob Reiner could say something so ridiculous on television and not have to leave with his head in a sack? Yes, Democrats really are going to continue arguing that if you vote Republican you’re going to die, that a tanking economy is a great economy, that the pandemic deaths (or deaths attributed to the pandemic to achieve maximum fear) under Trump were “blood on his hands” and the even greater number of deaths under Biden’s watch were still “blood on Trump’s hands,” and that the party trying to crush free speech, cripple the rule of law, weaken the integrity of elections, pack the Supreme Court and criminalize Democratic opposition is going to “save” democracy.
The bet is that progressive-dominated educational institutions and news media has left the public so ignorant and incompetent that this might sound reasonable.
Then Amandi provided the totalitarian strategy: to beat the GOP in the coming elections, all Democrats have to do is arrest them!
[I]t’s one thing to try and disqualify a Republican party that no longer believes in democracy, but you need a little bit of help. If the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General Merrick Garland, do not start issuing indictments, not to the front line of Proud Boys and picknickers of January 6th that led an insurrection, but to the perpetrators of the crime, the Members of Congress who we now know through text messages were plotters, the ringleaders at the top echelon of the Republican party, up into an including the Republican president, Donald Trump, voters are not going to believe that, they’re gonna just think that it’s political back-and-forth. The Justice Department needs to hold the perpetrators accountable….If these Republicans gain control, they will not give it back. We will lose democracy. And if you lose democracy, it’s not the sort of thing that you get back…You may not see it again in your lifetime in this country.
Why of course! Why didn’t we think of that before! The way to win elections is to arrest the leaders of the opposing party! That will save democracy!
And Tiffany Cross said, ” Yeah! I think that is the message that voters need to hear.” Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 