On President Trump’s $230 Million Justice Dept. Compensation Claim

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

This situation is a) unprecedented b) raises ethics issues that a typical first year law student or a bright 16-year-old could figure out c) is easily resolved, though the solution would be messy to execute and d) is being misrepresented by the news media because of course it is. I have been stalling, I admit, exploring it here because I am sick to death of Trump related controversies, but I just discussed it 45 minutes ago in an ethics seminar, so I can’t avoid the story any longer.

The Facts:  Donald Trump, then a lowly private citizen (but ex-President) submitted a claim, lodged in late 2023, seeking damages for alleged violations of his rights by the F.B.I. and the special counsel tricked -up Russian election tampering investigation. In the summer of 2024, his lawyers filed a second complaint accusing the F.B.I. of violating Trump’s privacy when it raided Mar-a-Lagoin 2022 for to search for classified documents. That claim also accused the Biden Justice Department of malicious prosecution (Gee, ya think?).

Naturally, the Biden Justice Department (which also had a conflict of interest, as it was unlikely to relish the prospect of admitting wrongdoing during the Presidential campaign, did nothing, leaving the matter to be resolved after the election. But Trump won, and many of his lawyers are now officials in the Justice Department. They have, essentially switched sides. Even the President, not known for his sensitivity to ethical matters, realizes the problem. “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Trump has said, adding: “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”

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Ethics Alarms Hybrid Day Part 2: Confronting My Biases #24 & Ethics Quiz of the Day: Prop Children

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Rachel Campos-Duffy is a regular sofa-sitter on Fox News’ IQ-killing morning show “Fox & Friends.” She is notable for one of the worst voices possessed by any talking head on TV, which is saying something: why someone at Fox hasn’t sent her to a vocal coach is a mystery, and the producers’ failure to make this happen is, I believe, irresponsible and incompetent. But I digress…

As noted in the previous post, October is National Down Syndrome Awareness Month. Campos-Duffy has a daughter, age six, with Down syndrome. She is her 9th child with former Congressman Sean Duffy, now Trump’s Transportation Secretary,who resigned from Congress in September 2019 after Valentina Stella Maris Duffy was born. (I wonder who takes care of all those kids, in a two career family?)

This morning Campos-Duffy brought her daughter onto the show as she spoke about Down Syndrome, its various ranges (Valentina is a high-functioning sufferer), and the challenges of raising these children. Her daughter was dressed up elaborately as “a flamingo dancer,” as the astute Fox hostess put it, and squirmed distractedly on the sofa next to her mother while paying no attention to her surroundings or what her mother was saying.

Campos-Duffy spoke about her child in such remote terms that I wasn’t sure that the little girl was her child. I half expected Valentina to blurt out, “I’m right here!” The spectacle reminded me of Jim Fowler’s visits to the Johnny Carson “Tonight Show,” when he would talk about a boa constrictor, stork or a pangolin while Johnny mugged and it crawled all over him.

At one point Valentina wondered away, off camera, while her mother was taking about her, and Rachel laughed uproariously. “See? She’s toilet trained!” Campos-Duffy said mysteriously as her two male colleagues also yucked it up at whatever the little girl was doing.

At one point, Mom asked Valentina a couple of questions, which the girl answered “yes” and “no.” Wow, she does tricks!

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It’s Ethics Alarms Hybrid Day! Part 1: Confronting My Biases #24 & Ethics Quiz of the Day: Monthly and Daily “Honors”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month, which is what triggered Part 2 of Ethics Alarms Hybrid Day, 2025. Most Americans are aware barely aware of DSMAD, however, since it shares its distinction with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Domestic Violence Awareness Month,National Disability Employment Awareness Month, ADHD Awareness Month, National Physical Therapy Month, and Mental Health Awareness Month.

But wait! There’s more: It’s also National LGBTQ+ History Month, Filipino American History Month, Hispanic History Month, Italian American Heritage Month, and Polish American Heritage Month too. It’s also Cookie Month! And I’m sure none of us neglect celebrating American Archives Month, celebrating the work of archivists and the value of historical records, and my personal favorite, Black Speculative Fiction Month, which honors the achievements of black authors in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, because since stories and novels are so much more fascinating when the author has the right skin color.

Of course, October also has special days set aside to honor such boons as…well, why not give you the whole list? There’s Halloween and Columbus Day, of course, but also…

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Early Voters Are Unethical Voters

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Here in Virginia, many of my Trump Deranged, “the only GOOD party right or wrong” friends and neighbors had cast their votes for Democrats Abigail Spanberger (for Governor) and Jay Jones (for AG) long before the former had revealed herself as a cowardly, principle-free weasel and the latter had demonstrated that deep down he is a hateful ideologue with violent tendencies. Oh, most of them, perhaps all of them, would have probably voted for these two awful Democrats anyway, which is my point. Early voters have no standards. They just have teams, and they are blind cheerleaders for those teams. That means that their votes are not civically responsible or respectable.

In Maine, as you may well have read, a babbling fool who is a Maine Democratic U.S. Senate aspirant in the upcoming primary was outed this month as posting a wide range of Reddit comments between 2013 and 2021 endorsing political violence, shrugging off rape, using homophobic slurs and denigrating police officers and rural Americans. But early voting started on October 6, before that information was available to the public, so he’s hoping he is carried to victory on a wave of uninformed votes.

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Once Again, Unethical Tears For A Well-Earned Execution: Boyd v. Hamm

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Supreme Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson are in a tight competition for most flagrantly incompetent liberal member of the Supreme Court. Jackson appears to be well ahead, but Sonia let her inner sensitive Latina run wild in her recent emotional dissent in Boyd v. Hamm, in which the Supreme Court turned down the plea of a condemned prisoner to force Alabama to execute him by firing squad rather than by the relatively new method of nitrogen gas asphyxiation. (Sotomayor’s lame dissent was joined by her two Democratic, reflex-Left wing colleagues because they are nice.)

Some salient facts: Anthony Boyd was convicted of murder in the first degree because he and two drug-dealing comrades killed another drug dealer by binding him and setting him on fire. I’d say Boyd was ethically estopped from complaining that his own execution method was “cruel and unusual,” but he did, even though he had earlier been given a choice between death by firing squad and death by nitrogen, and picked the latter. This is more consideration than his victim was given; at least nothing in the trial transcript indicates that the victim was offered a choice between being roasted alive or having his head bashed in with a rock.

Sonia, however, want us all to feel horror that Boyd, who was executed after his last-ditch appeal to SCOTUS failed, suffered pain in the process of dying. “Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch,” Sotomayor opens her October 23 dissent. “Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.”

Wow. That’s some impressive legal argument.

My dissent from the dissent: I don’t care, and nobody should. The endless obstacles bleeding heart judges and ethically-confused death penalty activists have thrown in the way of our society’s obligation to set and enforce standards of conduct are destructive and costly. Boyd had a choice, and may have chosen the nitrogen method specifically so his lawyers could use it to stall the arrival of his day of reckoning. The murder he was convicted of committing was particularly heinous and cruel: I might be persuaded to endorse a system in which convicted murderers are executed in the same manner as their victims. But for such an individual to beg for a less “cruel” form of punishment is Death Row chutzpah. Yet Sotomayor fell for it.

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Bullying? Capricious? Stupid? Ominous? Autocratic? Whatever Trump’s Punishing Canada For Ontario’s Anti-Tariff Ad Is, It’s Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Last week, President Trump called off trade negotiations with Canada because the government of Ontario, one of the nation’s provinces, released a deceptively edited advertisement using former U.S. President Ronald Reagan to criticize American tariffs.  It was the beginning of the Ontario provincial government’s public relations campaign in the U.S. opposing tariffs, which of course have been a prominent feature of Trump 2.0.

In a typically restrained response, Trump erupted in fury against the spot, using all caps to call the ad “FAKE” as he announced the suspension of trade negotiations with Canada.  “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote on his personal social media platform Truth Social.

Ugh.

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President Tyler, President Trump, The East Wing, And Leadership [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

John Tyler was our 10th President (1841-1845) and the first Vice-President to reach the White House via the death of his predecessor. That was the ill-starred William Henry Harrison, the oldest elected POTUS until our recent spate of geriatrics, who died shortly after being sworn in. Tyler is regarded as an obscure and rather dishonored President—he served in Jefferson Davis’s Cabinet during the Civil War, but his one big decision was a crucial one that took guts and audacity. The U.S. may not have survived without it.

As with many parts of the Constitution, the Founders were infuriatingly vague on the question of Presidential succession. It was unclear whether the VP was to serve as an acting President until a special election was held, or whether he became President for the rest of the dead President’s term. Tyler was a Democrat who ran on a ticket with a Whig President, so settling the issue promised to be a political battle that could have escalated into a dangerous crisis. Tyler didn’t wait for Congress to debate the matter: he just took the oath of office, said “I am the President at least until until the 1844 election,” and dared anyone to try to block him. Nobody did. That set “The Tyler Precedent,” and we should all say a silent prayer to John Tyler for it.

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Broadway Musical Revival Ethics: “Damn Yankees”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As a professional stage director of some success and the artistic director of a D.C. area professional theater dedicated to producing important American stage works that had fallen out of favor, this is a topic that I have both thought about a great deal and also dealt with directly. My primary rule in such matters is “if it works, the show is successful, and the audiences are entertained, then the alteration of a classic show is artistically and ethically defensible.” There are, as always, exceptions. I think the current production of the classic musical “Damn Yankees” at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage may be one of them.

The show is a 1955 musical comedy (that’s the excellent 1958 film version above), with a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, based on Wallop’s 1954 novel “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.” The real stars of the show were rising young musical comedy writers Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, twenty-somethings who were boldly invading the domain of Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter with a whole new style of the genre, full of energy and satire. “Damn Yankees” was their second smash collaboration (“Pajama Game” was the first), and the pair looked poised to bring a long string of hit musicals to the Broadway stage. Then, while “Damn Yankees” was still running on the way to 1,019 performances, Ross, just 29-years-old, died. Because the pair wrote both lyrics and music together, Adler never had another success on Broadway after his creative partnership was shattered.

“Damn Yankees” is set during the 1950s in Washington, D.C., when the Yankees had dominated baseball and the World Series since the 1920s and the Washington Senators had been perennial losers for almost as long. The joke was “Washington, D.C.: first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” The novel and the musical took the amusing proposition that only a deal with the Devil could elevate the hapless Senators over the Yankees and get them into the Series….and that’s what happens.

The new production at The Arena couldn’t leave a classic alone, apparently feeling that today’s audiences can’t enjoy looking through a window at a time and a culture long past. D.C.’s baseball team is no longer the Senators (the city lost two of those) and the current team, the Nationals, play in the National League, well removed from the Yankees. The new adapted plot takes place in 1999-2000, the last time the Yankees had a brief dynasty and won two straight World Series. But the team was no longer the presumptive champion year after year, so the whole premise is forced. (The Boston Red Sox have won more World Series than the Yankees in the 21st Century). In 1955, the Yankees were indeed in the Series, facing the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 2025, they were eliminated in the play-offs. Worse still, the desperate losing franchise in the show is no longer the Senators, but the Baltimore Orioles, who, although they have been going through a rough patch lately, have never been perennial cellar dwellers, and they didn’t finish last in 1999 and 2000 either.

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“Social Media Is An Idiot Detection Service,” Episode #789K

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Today’s episode, from “X”:

Sharmine Narwani, we are told, is a well-known journalist and political analyst specializing in West Asian geopolitical issues. She believes that Islam was around six centuries before Muhammad was born. She wants to spread her ignorance far and wide.

The tweet has 25,000 “loves.” I regard it as a pre-holiday “Coming Attractions” feature, warning us of the fatuous Jesus=Illegal immigrants analogies we will be getting from our woke friends (and a lot of pulpits) all too soon.

(Pointer to Glenn Reynolds, who accurately notes, “Actually, of course, it was a Jewish kingdom when Jesus was born. And it didn’t become Arab or Muslim until the Mohammedan invasion of the 7th century. Today’s inhabitants of “Palestine” are settler-colonialists. Israel is fighting a war of indigenous resistance to colonization.”

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Another week, another wave of hypocritical, “Yikes, Trump is President!” freakouts. In addition to the weekend’s “No Kings” children’s theater, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (Guess which party!) grabbed the Senate floor on Tuesday to “ring the alarm” on President Donald Trump’s “tightening authoritarian grip on the country.” Then he blabbed on for 23 hours, the second-longest speech in Senate history, and said absolutely nothing new, original, that didn’t ape old, old Axis talking points, or the wasn’t pure projection.

Let’s see: Merkley accused the Trump administration of undermining checks and balances, attacking free speech (funny, coming from a Democrat), attacking the press (they aren’t attacked enough), “politicizing the Justice Department,” (VERY funny coming from a Democrat) and using the military to suppress dissent, which only makes sense if you define defying federal law and attacking law enforcement officers as “dissent.” He made the familiar, apparently opinion research-tested claim that this President isn’t “normal” (having studied all of these guys rather extensively, I have no idea what a normal President is or would be. Every one is absolutely unique.)

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