Well, I feel like scum and I am scum. Today is my younger sister’s birthday, and I whiffed, even though we had talked earlier this week about me taking her out to dinner. I never forget her birthday—everyone else’s, but never hers, because it’s the day before Halloween. Not only did I disappoint her, but she’s in a house with no TV or internet after a big storm here. Now she doesn’t want to do anything. It was just a terrible, disrupting week on too many fronts to count, and I lost track of times, dates, and space. I’m working all weekend, and worked late into the night the last two days, but that’s no excuse. I can’t believe I did it. Both my son and wife refuse to celebrate their birthdays for philosophical reasons, and I haven’t wanted to think about mine since my father dropped dead on the date in 2009. But my sister really needed some attention this year, and I failed her.

1. What describes this situation? “Live by the sword, die by the sword”? “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”? “Assholes gotta asshole”? Ashlee Marie Preston, the transgender activist who was among the leaders of the protests against Dave Chappelle for his routines on “The Closer” about trans people, and who helped trigger the protest at Netflix, was subjected to a deep Twitter dive, and guess what? She has tweeted nasty things about Asians and Hispanics. Like, for example, “Asian hoes act like they wont get karate chopped in they muthafuckin throat. What is this hoe staring at? Mind ya beeswax #Bitch”. Now, I could not possibly care less about the opinions of any activist about anything who expresses themselves like that, but apparently some people are calling Preston a hypocrite. No, she appears to be pretty typical: an trans African American who is offended when anyone jokes about her own “tribes” but who feels perfectly justified in denigrating groups she doesn’t belong to. It’s exactly like Democrats, progressives and their media allies in the Axis of Unethical Conduct having the gall to complain about the “Let’s go Brandon!” gag after denigrating President Trump without restraint for four years.

2. The contrived offense that refuses to die. Ugh, THIS again. The Atlanta Braves are in the World Series, so now the nation has to watch Atlanta fans go through their idiotic ritual of miming a tomahawk chop while they sing a fake, generic Indian war chant. Now, it’s no more idiotic than “the Wave,” or chanting “Yankees suck!,” but political correctness activists have been calling such silliness “racist” for as long as they have been trying to eliminate Native American-inspired team names, mascots, and logos. See, there are two objectives: move up the power hierarchy by making others do what they want even in an area they don’t care about, and make sure American culture has no references to Native Americans at all. I’m not sure why Native Americans would want that, but these activists seem to think so.

Continue reading →

I’ve never done this before and may never do it again; nor am I lacking candidates for Comment of the Day among the recent posts here. However, this comment by Althouse reader “This Person” was so gloriously to the point that I couldn’t resist.

Ann is accepting comments again after a brief interruption following her ill-considered tantrum over people paying more attention to commenters than her, or something. The Comment of the Day is, as regular readers here will immediately see, about the Ethics Alarms Rationalization #64, “Yoo’s Rationalization,” or “It isn’t what it is.” This has become the operating principle of the Democratic Party as it has forsworn accountability among its leaders and embraced the Big Lie tactic as enthusiastically and destructively as…anybody in history.

What clinched the COTD prize for This Person was his perceptive focus on Barack Obama as the most forceful instigator of this now routine party reflex. (Do note that #64 is named after the Republican lawyer who argued that waterboarding wasn’t technically torture. Both parties have used Yoo’s Rationalization, but only Democrats (so far) have become addicted to it.)

Here is This Person’s Comment of the Day on this Althouse post.

***

Continue reading →

Marlon’s been getting a workout here lately, and that’s even with me trying hard to avoid him by periodically using Geena Davis’s iconic movement from “The Fly” as a stand-in. In more positive Halloween news, this morning’s musical Halloween ethics seminar for New Jersey Lawyers went beautifully. Mike Messer decided to replace his Boris Karloff riff for “The Monster Mash” with a New Jersey mobster impression for the parody I shared yesterday on the famous New York ethics case from the Seventies, “The Dead Bodies Case” (Also known as “The Buried Bodies Case.”). It was so funny that we’re going to try to get a YouTube video of it for law schools to use when they cover the case, as most do.

If you are not familiar with that case, which has been referenced on “Law and Order,” “The Practice” and other legal TV shows of yore, go here.

1. Now THAT’s an unethical wife! In Connecticut, Donna Marino, 63, is charged with forging her husband’s signature on legal documents, pension checks, monetary settlements, and social security checks after she convinced him that he had Alzheimer’s Disease. He didn’t, although he obviously is none too bright. Investigators concluded that she forged her husband’s signature on his checks and legal documents, then deposited the funds—$600,000 worth—in a secret bank account. This went on for 20 years before John figured out that something was amiss. Donna kept him believing that he had the dreaded dementia illness by telling him that he didn’t remember wandering aimlessly around the neighborhood and not knowing her earlier in the day.

Sounds a little like the plot of “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” one of my favorite Halloween movies.

2. Speaking of horror—Terry McAuliffe’s campaign. One piece of signature significance for a politician is how he or she reacts when facing defeat. McAuliffe, the Clinton fundraiser and acolyte who may be even more ethically challenged than they are (if that’s possible), is losing the battle with Republican Glenn Younkin (who is no prize himself) thanks to the Democrat stating outright that parents should stay out of the policy decisions regarding what their children are taught in public schools. As the old knight memorably said,

Now McAuliffe’s poll numbers are imitating John Malkovich at the end of “In the Line of Fire,” so he’s trying more and more blatantly dishonest tactics:

• As I wrote earlier, he has hired one of the Clinton lawyers who facilitated the Russian collusion hoax, and when this was discovered, McAuliffe’s staff sent out emails in all directions asking presumably friendly media outlets to “kill this.” And I mean all directions: Jonathan Turley reports getting one. (I’m insulted.)
• They even sent one to Fox News, which is remarkable given that the eeevil news network recently discovered and revealed that McAuliffe has spent nearly $100,000 advertising “fake news” websites on Facebook. The  advertisements have been viewed about to 3.5 million times, and are hidden on a Facebook page with a similar name to a local news website. The ads link to third-party websites that that promote Democratic candidates with partisan spin and propaganda. Fox is the only organization revealing this.
• I was just informed by a reader that she recieved a false flag promotion now being sent to Virginia voters. “Today we received a ‘pro Youngkin’ flyer that appears to come from the GOP because it features Trump,” the reader writes, ” ….but just above the address box is a dark black line – look very closely at the faded lettering (I had to use a magnifying glass) and you’ll see it is funded by the Democrat party with the approval of McAullife.” Nice one! I may have received one of these, but all campaign literature goes directly from my home’s floor to the trash. A genuine Youngkin mailer warns of McAuliffe attempting to place Virginia under “dictatorship.”

Continue reading →

No tricks, just ethics treats…

For those in a Halloween Legal Ethics mood, I will be presenting a special Halloween edition of Ethics Rock tomorrow at 9:00 am, for the New State Bar Association. The great Mike Messer will be singing my legal ethics parodies of pop songs with a Halloween flair. Here’s the parody of “The Monster Mash” (by Bobby Pickett) telling a version of the story all law students cover in their ethics classes, the famous “Dead Bodies Case,” from New York…”The Mobster’s Trash”:

Representing T. Soprano, late one night

He confessed to killing a famed playwright

A missing person and a fortune’s heir

“Want to see his body? I’ll show you where!”

[Chorus]

I saw his trash!

It was the mobster’s trash!

The mobster trash!

It was a body stash!

It was his trash!

The body’s throat had been slashed

And all for cash!

It was the mobster’s trash!

Tony found himself suspected of the murder but

There wasn’t any evidence that seemed clear-cut

The playwright’s daughter came to me and begged

Could I tell her I saw her Dad’s head crushed like an egg?

[Chorus]

In Tony’s trash?

It was the mobster’s trash!

I saw his trash!

Where her Dad’s corpse was stashed!

In Tony’s trash!

And his head had been bashed

And all for cash!

It was the mobster’s trash.

[Bridge]

***

Then Tony went to trial

I kept his secret all the while!

But under cross examination

Tony confessed and with a smile.

***

He said he killed the playwright and that he was glad

The guy owed lots of money, which made Tony mad

And worst of all, that playwright’s plays

Were derivative, self-indulgent and ran on for days!

[Chorus]

So he got trashed!

Thrown in the mobster’s trash!

I saw his trash!

Where bodies all got stashed

In Tony’s trash!

The playwright’s skull had been smashed

And all for cash!

It was the mobster’s trash.

After Tony spilled the beans I admitted to all

I had seen the dead playwright, but made the call

That I couldn’t let on that I had viewed the nightmare

And not just because I could end up there…

In the trash!

In the mobster’s trash!

With a gash

A fatal bloody gash

In Tony’s trash!

Cause my  throat would be slashed

I’m not that rash

To risk the mobster’s trash

Well they charged me with not handling a body right

And my law practice dwindled, almost out of sight

As for all you reporters, I’ll answer your quiz

But  don’t you dare ask where Jimmy Hoffa is!

Cause Jimmy’s ash!

In some mobster’s trash!

First he got smashed

Up like corn-beef hash

And he was trashed

Incinerated to ash

Yes he was trashed

They made him mobster trash.

1. This slippery slope leads right to the cancel bin for every jurist and politician of the 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th Century. Rutgers University Board of Governors approved a resolution October 6 to strip the name of Joseph P. Bradley from “Bradley Hall,” which houses two academic departments, a learning center, theater and campus post office.

Bradley, who graduated from Rutgers College in 1836, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1870. In 1971, the Board of Governors approved naming the building after Bradley, but that was before the culture decided that any prominent figure who hadn’t anticipated 21st century race cant and women’s rights orthodoxy had to be a vile and evil person, unworthy of honor. Bradley’s discredited views were especially noxious to students who had the benefit of more than a century and half of history and debate as he expressed them in two opinions. In 1883, he declared the first two sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 “unconstitutional.”

The law would have outlawed discrimination against African Americans in restaurants, public transportation or other private establishments. Bradley argued, however, that such protections do not apply to private businesses, only the actions of state governments, arguing that to “deprive white people the right to choose their own company would be to introduce another kind of slavery.” In 1872, Bradley backed the Court’s decision in Bradwell v. Illinois, finding that the Illinois State Bar could deny a qualified woman a law license because she was a woman. Bradley argued that the right to practice law was not constitutionally protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. He also pointed to “the laws of nature,” arguing that women have a responsibility to care for their families, as the “timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.…The harmony, not to say identity, of interest and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband,” Bradley wrote.

Continue reading →