Several Republican Congressional offices received American flags bearing “obscured” swastika symbols, Rep. Dave Taylor, the hapless boob who is responsible for hiring a Congressional staff that either can’t recognize a Nazi emblem or doesn’t see anything wrong with displaying it, finally explained as he tried to spin how one ended up hanging in his Rayburn Building office by the Capitol.
Taylor, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement yesterday that numerous Republican offices had been targeted by an unidentified group or individual who distributed altered American flags that had a Nazi swastika their center. They were “initially indistinguishable from an ordinary American flag to the naked eye,” he said. “My office was among those that were subjected to this ruse.” And was apparently the only one that didn’t immediately see the swastika and decide, “Holy crap! That’s no American flag! That’s a trap! Burn the thing! Quick!” Do you believe that sinister symbol in the flag above wasn’t visible to the naked eye?
…since he (it?) sure has been speaking for a lot of Democratic Party candidates…if you can believe its (his?) alleged victims.
Of course, you can’t.
In California, the leading candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor, Rep. Katie Porter, has been bedeviled by emerging videos of her abusing staffers, refusing to tolerate probing questions from interviewers, and generally acting like a witch on wheels (It’s Halloween!) Porter and her political allies insist that these clips don’t show “the real Katie,’ which is comforting, since that demon impersonating Porter just stops short of spewing green vomit.
Then there is Jay Jones, who in his passionate apology last night (during a televised debate between the two candidates for Attorney General in Virginia) characterized his extended discourse on how much he wants to murder his political opponents and see their children dead as a “mistake.”
This is one of those situations where my ethics alarms steered me to exactly the opposite position of almost everyone I know. Like the Axis media, they are generally pronouncing Sec. Hegseth’s cracking down on leaks at the Pentagon as one more “assault on democracy.” No, it is just another example of the Trump Administration having the guts to do what should have been done long ago.
What Hegseth called in a tweet “Press Credentialing for Dummies,” news organization reporters are now subject to the following rules:
1. No roaming free in the Pentagon. Good.
2. Reporters must wear badges identifying them as such. Good.
3. Press can not solicit criminal acts. Best of all.
Ethics Alarms has long held the position that “journalists” abuse their privilege under the First Amendment by freely (smugly, irresponsibly) engaging in information laundering by publishing leaks from individuals who broke the law or their ethical duties by telling reporters what they were forbidden to reveal. Since we now know that these untrustworthy professionals (which means they are not professionals at all) do not have the best interests of the nation at heart, making news organizations agree to reasonable restrictions as a condition of holding press credentials is the responsible course.
I endorse the analysis at Victory Girls on this issue, which wrote in part,
Freedom of the Press means that you get to REPORT news items. It does not mean you get to demand and be granted access to wherever you want. The media and far too many politicians have forgotten or are willfully ignoring that salient point….in World War II there was a slogan. A very important slogan: “Loose lips sink ships.” To be blunt, people were shitcanned from their jobs or even thrown in prison during that time period for breaking those rules. [But]in the last twenty years at least, Pentagon weenies and the media have cultivated relationships that have led to media breaking stories chock full of those “unnamed sources” about Pentagon dealings. Too many of those reports, especially during President Trump’s first term, were designed as hit jobs.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. In protest of the new restrictions, most of the news organizations covering the Pentagon, even Fox, are boycotting the assignment rather than agree to Hegseth’s terms. The news media brought this on themselves; they will find no sympathy here. They have been, after all, “enemies of the people.” I see no reason to trust enemies with access to Pentagon secrets. In fact, doing so is unethical: incompetent and irresponsible.
Sorry, late start today, which is unfortunate, because there are a lot of ethics fires breaking out…
That video above is a Halloween decoration, believe it or not. Amanda Peden and Sam Lee are a South Carolina couple who are obsessive about elaborate Halloween displays. Since 2023 they have been featuring a “burning house” theme complete with rising smoke; it’s completely safe, and their family goes happily about the day while passersby think there is real fire in the neighborhood. Apparently it fools a lot of people and the fire department is now accustomed to getting calls about a house fire. Amazingly, the firer chief says its all in good fun and he doesn’t mind. I almost made this an Ethics Quiz. The article I first read about the extreme “decoration” said that some members of the community think such a display should be illegal. I’m not far from that belief as well, but ultimately it’s art. As long as no one tries to claim it’s a symbol of democracy under Trump, I’ll support the impulse.
Now burn up the internet with your ethics commentary….
Ethics Alarms only covers a fraction of the statements by prominent people that prompt the response, “What, if anything, were they thinking?” For example, I was torn today whether to mention Kamala Harris saying in a recent interview (with Axis journalist Kara Swisher, whom I have been calling out for her hackery for 30 years) on her book tour (What were they thinking to send Kamala out on a book tour?), that “some have said” that she was “the most qualified candidate ever to run for President.” Because Swisher is such a hack, she didn’t have the integrity to burst out laughing and tell Harris, “Oh, Kamala, you are so funny!” Yeah, and some have said, “I am the Lizard King!” and “Of course dogs can talk, they just don’t have anything to say!” Maybe, MAYBE, and I am giving her the benefit of the doubt here, Harris was only the second least qualified Presidential candidate of a major party in U.S. history. But I digress.
In last night’s predictably horrifying town hall meeting on CNN featuring American communist Bernie Sanders and Dunning-Kruger victim Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), AOC went for the Gold and may have said the stupidest thing that not only she has ever said in public but perhaps the stupidest thing any elected official has said in public, though Rep. Hank Johnson expressing a fear that so much U.S. military personnel and equipment on the island of Guam might cause it to “tip over” creates a daunting challenge.
Ranting in her usual pop-eyed hysterical style about how evil corporations were polluting the nation and that “rivers were on fire” because they were “pouring chemicals” into waterways and killing people, AOC was quick to name the first corporate villain to pop into what she audaciously calls her “mind.” Was it Monsanto, mayhap? Dow Chemical? Dupont? LyondellBasell Industries, the largest U.S. chemical company? Oh no. The Congresswoman, regarded by many pundits as the rising leader of the Democratic Party, has bigger game in her sights, and she immediately, without hesitation, named the vile polluter.
“Deloitte.”
Yes, the accounting firm. I’ve been trying to think of a company that she could have named that would be less guilty of pollution. The Boston Red Sox? I dunno, the team flies a lot. Hey, but anyone can make a mistake. Right? It was just a “speako.” It isn’t really evidence that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t know what the hell she is talking about half the time, is it?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Is it unfair to hold such an obvious brain fart against AOC?
Yikes. Fortunately she is also a fired nurse, and, I presume, a permanent ex-nurse.
Crystal Tadlock (that’s not her above; it’s the late Louise Fletcher as nightmare nurse Rached in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), who worked in the intensive care unit at Memorial Hermann Greater Heights Hospital in Houston, had a Mel Gibson moment abusing the police who arrested her for DWI last week on October 11.
“I’m a fucking nurse!” Crystal began, in a drunken rant that was duly recorded. “When you come through my hospital, don’t worry, I’ll let you die,” she went on. “All your family members, and this is all on recording. Greater Heights, bitch. Don’t go there.”
Oh, don’t worry, Crystal, I’m sure they won’t. I don’t know who in their right mind would, after listening to that threat. So the hospital hires medical professionals who are drunks and who are capable of killing patients as revenge, eh? Good to know.
It may be time to become a Christian Scientist.
Does anyone want to bet against my conviction that Crystal, like Mel, Michael Richards and others who have sunk their careers and reputations with similarly outrageous outbursts, will resort to the Pazuzu Excuse in her inevitable groveling apology? That she will swear that what she said doesn’t represent who she really is or express her true feelings, that those frightening threats just tumbled out of her mouth from who knows where, that “something came over her”?
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, involves the question of whether Louisiana’s congressional map violates the 15th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it clearly includes two districts with boundaries based on race. The objective was to create two majority black districts. In other words, use race as the reason for determining Congressional districts.
Justice Jackson’s head-exploding argument? Giving blacks special advantages in the matter of representation was like making special accommodations for the handicapped under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Black Americans, you see, are permanently handicapped because of the crippling effects of slavery (which ended 160 years ago) and Jim Crow (which ended 100 years later, about 60 years ago.)
“So going back to this discriminatory intent point, I guess I’m thinking of it, of the fact that remedial action absent discriminatory intent is really not a new idea in the civil rights laws. And my kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson said.
“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities,” the DEI Justice explained. “And so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings. And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary; that’s irrelevant. Congress said, the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities if readily possible. I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. The idea in Section 2 is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system. Right? They’re disabled. In fact ,we use the word ‘disabled’ in [Milliken v. Bradley]. We say that’s a way in which these processes are not equally open. So I don’t understand why it matters whether the state intended to do that. What Congress is saying is if it is happening … you gotta fix it.”
Got it! American blacks are permanently disabled. This is the rote justification for affirmative action forever, DEI (which Jackson understandably has an affection for), and reparations for slavery. It is a jaw-droppingly demeaning characterization of black Americans, and pure stereotyping.
Her “logic” also misses an obvious and crucial point: when the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed, the U.S. was just barely leaving the Jim Crow era. Brown v. Bd of Education was only ten years old. Inter-racial marriage was still illegal in many states. Progressives and race-hucksters like Jackson refuse to acknowledge that there has been massive progress in race relations since 1964, and they deny that progress because it means giving up their own benefits from the phenomenon of presumed racism. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Jackson’s statement marks her as a racketeer.
That quote from Jackson is damning (and it bolsters the EA case that Joe Biden was the worst POTUS ever, since he appointed this partisan hack) and should be headline news, but it’s not. Gee, I wonder why… Over at SCOTUS blog, the new proprietor, Amy Howe, provides what she represents as a thorough analysis of the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais without mentioning Jackson’s outrageous theory at all. So far, I have only seen it mentioned on conservative blogs and news sites. In fact, I was driven to Breitbart, a site I banned for being biased and untrustworthy, to find the full quote.
Is Jackson the worst SCOTUS Justice ever? I think she’s worse than Sotomayor, which is pretty amazing, but no, I’m sure there have been worse ones in the Courts dim past. But she is pretty assuredly the worst Justice in my lifetime, and that would include the execrable Harry Blackmun, who inflicted Roe v. Wade on the nation as well as the indefensible majority opinion declaring that baseball, alone among professional sports and billion dollar private businesses, should be immune from the antitrust laws. Harry was an mediocre judge in over his head thanks to a Peter Principle Nixon appointment, but he was at least smart enough not to claim that being black was the equivalent of being disabled.
What’s going on here? Democrats just went through one of the worst public relations weeks (Imagine: this was one of the least of their embarrassments!) for their party imaginable. President Trump shined on the world stage. GOP candidates for governor in both Virginia and New Jersey were surging. So Republicans decide to say “Hold my beer!” and let their inner Nazis and racists frolic? What the hell?
The first incident is the most confounding. An image captured by Zoom in the background of a virtual meeting in the Congressional office of Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) showed the cubical wall below…
…with an altered American flag with a Nazi swastika in the stripes. Alongside the flag are pinned images of a pocket Constitution and a congressional calendar. Taylor, seemingly caught Heil-handed, naturally condemned the symbol as “vile” and said his office was investigating with the U.S. Capitol Police. “I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office,” he said in a statement. “The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms.”
Taylor called the flag “vandalism.” I call him an untrustworthy idiot if he isn’t a Nazi, and he needs to resign and then be stuffed into a barrel with fat Lithuanian midgets*, never to see the light of day again. This couldn’t happen if he didn’t have the management ability of the average dairy cow. Who has he hired to be on his staff? Were candidates screened so that anyone with an IQ over 70 was automatically disqualified? A. Someone puts that Nazi thing up. B. Nobody does anything about it. C. It’s visible to a third party during a Zoom call! This is res ipsa loquitur in throbbing neon lights. Taylor is responsible, there is no excuse for it, and however it happened, he should be jettisoned and back to Ohio, because it’s illegal to shoot him and too messy to have him tarred and feathered.
But wait…there’s more! The day before, Politico revealed these…
Cecil Brockman, 41, representing Guilford County (N.C.) in the state legislature, was arrested today on two charges of statutory rape and two charges of taking indecent liberties with a child. He was first elected in 2014; in Brockman’s most recent reelection bid, he secured about 63% of the vote.
Good choice. The North Carolina Democratic Party is calling for Brockman to resign. But here’s the fun part: Brockman had voted against the North Carolina parental rights bill to keep sexually provocative materials out of school libraries. The bill also required teachers and school administrators to inform parents when their children wanted to change their gender.
I could not determine whether the bill also required teachers to tell parents if a student wanted to have sex with a state legislator.
Brockman also had a Youth Academic Center named in his honor by the Housing Authority, presumably because he was so intimate with the Center’s membership.
Democrats are having one heck of a month, aren’t they?
The progressive/Axis/ Democratic Party/bleeding heart support for illegal immigrants is, I must confess, a mystery to me. The sentiment makes no sense from a basic principles of civilization perspective, nor a legal perspective, a rule of law perspective, a historical perspective, and definitely not an ethical perspective. It is all emotional, as in “How can you punish these poor people for just wanting a better life?,” which reminds me of Woody Allen’s crazy father in “Annie Hall,” who berates his wife for firing their cleaning woman. “She’s colored! She’s been oppressed! She has a right to steal!,” he shouts in a flashback. In 1977, everyone, literally everyone, knew that exchange was a joke. Today, thank to almost 50 years of woke brainwashing, a substantial segment of the population thinks it makes sense. “They have a right to get the benefits of citizenship! They’ve had a tough life! ” or, just as bad, “Ok, but since they came here illegally, they’ve been good! ” Right. How dare we take away from them what they took illegally in the first place, since we didn’t catch them sooner.
Ethics Alarms 