Comment of the Day: “Ethics Quote of the Week: The New York Times”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Steve-O-in NJ has some trenchant comments about what the Democrats are doing, or trying to do. Personally, I think the operative word here may be “denial.” Or cowardice. Or a political party that has become wedded to lies as its primary tactic whatever the issue, and can’t kick the habit even when it obviously isn’t working any more.

At the 1968 Masters Tournament, pro golfer Roberto De Vicenzo (above) signed an scorecard without checking it, thereby costing him a spot in an 18-hole playoff for the storied championship. He said, “Oh what a stupid I am!” and it stuck with me, as well as with many others, remembered as a poignant expression of regret and self-recrimination. I wasn’t in the ethics biz back then, but I admired the golfer for an honest, brutal assessment of his accountability. I am certain that he never again signed a scorecard without checking the strokes.

What the apparent plan of the Democrats in the wake of last November’s disaster—that is, the Harris-Walz ticket and their stunningly incompetent campaign—is to admit nothing, learn nothing, and to keep existing in as miasma of self-deception. Good luck with that. And I can’t wait to hear the argument asserting why anyone should ever trust a party that responds to failure like that to run anything, not just an economy, but a shoe-shine stand. President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced last week that about $4 billion in unspent federal funding for California’s absurdly delayed and overbudget high-speed rail project has been terminated.  This boondoggle was originally passed as a ballot initiative in 2008, a 800-mile rail line to be completed by 2020 in two phases on a $33 billion budget, connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles and branches stretching north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. In 2019, Newsom announced that there was no path to completing the original plan after costs ballooned, so the project was cut back to a 171-mile section between Merced and Bakersfield. Of course, the responsible course would have been to end the project entirely. High speed rail, however, as one wag wrote last week, is to transportation what wind farms are to energy: woke, virtue-signaling fantasies unmoored to reality.

Here is Steve-O’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quote of the Week: The New York Times”:

***

Continue reading →

I Guess, This Being An Ethics Blog, I Have To Post On “Coldplaygate.”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Social media has gone bonkers since last Wednesday night, when Andy Byron, the married CEO of New York-based software development company Astronomer, was caught by a “Kiss-cam” cuddling Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of human resources, on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert at Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Mass. When the two realized they were on camera, they went out of their way to look as guilty as possible, pulling apart, with her turning her back on the camera and him ducking out of view.

Morons. When you are caught beyond escaping, life competence dictates that you must have the presence of mind to maintain whatever shred of dignity you may have left. (Practice helps.) The couple’s futile efforts at a cover-up prompted Coldplay front man Chris Martin to say from the stage: “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy.”

Then the clip gained millions of hits on X, TikTok and Instagram, so it was easy to identify the illicit lovers. Astronomer announced that it had put Byron on leave, saying, “Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.” Over the weekend, Byron resigned.

The incident is an instant classic, which means people will remember it longer than the usual day-and-a-half. The Philadelphia Phillies made fun of the scandal by screening a video on the Jumbotron during Friday night’s game showing the team’s mascot Phillie Phanatic in an embrace with a fuzzy green companion. Commemorative merchandise, such as a sweatshirt bearing the legend “I TOOK MY SIDEPIECE TO THE COLDPLAY CONCERT AND IT RUINED MY LIFE” can be purchased online.

Ethics notes…

Continue reading →

The President Sure Makes It Difficult To Defend Him Against Contrived “Scandals” When He Keeps Doing Unethical Things Like This….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Is the most recent idiotic, over-his-skis, abuse of power and position outburst by President Trump a genuine big deal? No, it isn’t. But his gratuitous attempt to re-open the old political correctness victories resulting in the forced name changes of two sports teams, the Cleveland Indians (boringly recast as “the Guardians”) and the Washington Redskins (even more boringly renamed “The Commanders”) is exactly what Trump does not need right now. What he needs is to project some stability even as the disgusting Axis keeps trying “Hail Mary” fake controversies like the Epstein “client list” and the supposed Trump plot to get rid of Stephen Colbert.

It is not the President’s business to stick his metaphorical nose into the naming of sports franchises; they aren’t the Gulf of Mexico. Presuming that it is his business plays right into the “king” narrative, and for Trump to do that is just plain incompetent. The effort has no upside and lots of potential political problems, as illustrated by the second Truth Social post in the series.

A President can’t use government pressure to make a private organization change its name: that is a First Amendment violation and a pretty obvious one. Trump’s obsession with “I might…” trolling isn’t funny, and, again, gives his opponents and the Trump Deranged more ammunition for their unhinged hate and hysteria. He “might” revoke Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship. Riiiight. This kind of thing just makes the President of the United States look petty and weak. I don’t understand why Trump can’t see that.

I hated the decision to change the Redskins to the Commanders (heaven knows I wrote about it enough) , and hated the decision to change the Indians to the Guardians even more. But both the American League’s Cleveland ball club and Washington’s NFL franchise should send President a Trump a loud, clear “Bite me.”

Ethics Quote of the Week: The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I actually like this quote a great deal, and think the Times, for once, is spot on…

“Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.”

—-The New York Times in a piece called “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.”

The Democratic Party, in addition to being exposed as a the real foe of democracy domestically, advocates for open borders, puppet Presidencies, using the justice system as a political weapon, cheating in women’s sports, racial discrimination in hiring and, lately, communism, also has revealed itself as a party of abject cowards. Its latest favorite tactic is walking out of Congress when they don’t like what the majority is likely to do, but what the Times describes is astoundingly craven. The party’s analysis of why it lost the White House in 2024 is going to avoid what everyone knows are the reasons it lost

That, my friend, is a cover-up, but it is even worse than that. It is signature significance for an organizational culture that is so infected with “It isn’t what it is” reactions to unpleasant reality that it is even incapable of honestly addressing its own problems. How can anyone trust a party so self-hobbled to manage anything, lead anywhere, accomplish any goal or mission? Why would anyone trust such a party? How can you justify belonging to a party—believing in a party—that even lies to itself?

From the article:

Continue reading →

The Gabbard Files

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The big news in last ten days—I mean other than the allegation that Donald Trump wrote a raunchy birthday card (maybe) to Jeffrey Epstein once—was a newly declassified report released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that fingers former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey among others in the Obama Administration, and later in the Trump Administration, as having deliberately “manipulated and withheld” key intelligence from the public in order to advance the hoax that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election with the collusion of Donald Trump.

Gabbard said she would provide all related documents to the Justice Department “to deliver the accountability that President [Donald] Trump, his family, and the American people deserve…No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.” She said she was releasing information that showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials, including Obama.

Continue reading →

One More Reason To Despise The Unethical American Bar Association…

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative pubic interest law firm, commissioned research that demonstrated how the American Bar Association pressures law schools to adopt race- and sex-based hiring and admissions preferences using the threat of withholding its accreditation. The ABA oversees U.S. law school accreditation—this should stop—and abuses its power and woke biases to dictate law school discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity and gender in violation of Title VI and the U.S. Constitution. The report is titled,“Unconstitutional Accreditation Pressures Force Law Schools to Discriminate against Faculty and Students.”

Continue reading →

Epstein Ethics Train Wreck Update: Dershowitz Blows Up the Narrative, Ethically and Unethically

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

A threshold question: Harvard law professor emeritus and former Jeffrey Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz issued the definitive debunking of the stupid Jeffrey Epstein “client list” myth that the Axis of Unethical Conduct has been clinging to lately four days ago. Why wasn’t this major news, especially since the same paper it was published in, the Wall Street Journal, was getting Axis-wide babble over their far less substantive story about how Donald Trump penned a risque birthday card long ago in a galaxy far away?

Well, we know why, don’t we? The Dershowitz column undermines the “Get Trump!” effort, so it isn’t news that’s fit to print. Despicable.

In “The Inside Scoop on Jeffrey Epstein: I was his lawyer. I know things that court orders won’t allow me to disclose,” the Dersch reveals…

Continue reading →

Addendum to “On the Damning Birthday Doodle….”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was going to add this to the previous post, but decided that it deserved a special highlight. Red-pilled former Axis pundit Matt Taibbi is exercised over the apparent documentation showing the the whole Obama administration, including Barack, deliberately promoted the Russian collusion hoax as a way to cripple the incoming Trump Administration. That is part of an angry tweet sent his way.

Note the attempted equivalencies: on one hand we have a high level government conspiracy by Democrats to violate the Constitution while framing a President of the United States, and on the other, at worst, a raunchy gag birthday greeting from two decades ago.

This is how unhinged from reality, proportionality, sanity and common sense the American Left has become. That poor fool who tweeted Taibbi is not an isolated instance: I bet most of my Facebook friends would agree with that tweet. It really is beyond unethical to pathological.

On the Damning Birthday Doodle….

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just woke up and feel like I’m going to barf. Almost certainly this is because I knew when I finally hit the sack last night that I was going to have to write about this new low in Axis “Get Trump!” shenanigans—oh, I’m sure there will be even lower ones to come—this morning.

You see, it seems that a long time ago, eventually-to-be-President Donald Trump wrote a bawdy birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein as part of Ghislaine Maxwell’s project to create a leather notebook filled with such cards from his friends. It seems that Trump cooperated with the project, which means that he had criminal sex with under-age girls. Or it means that he would have liked to have sex with under-aged girls. Or that he’s evil and needs to be destroyed by any means necessary, of which this smoking doodle evidence is one….but the Trump Deranged lunatics who are fulminating over this “scandal” already know that, or think they do, so again we find ourselves asking, “What’s going on here?“

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Citizen Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Bwaaahaha, perhaps you should have cut out the bias, bitches.”

—Citizen Free Press, on all the whining and breast-beating from public television and radio talent and execss over NPR and PBS finally losing taxpayer support.

Citizen Free Press is the successor to the Drudge Report as the go-to conservative news aggregator. It’s a bit too unprofessional for me most of the time, with links headlined “Nancy Pelosi should have shut her pie hole!” and such, but this time, its colloquialism hit the mark.

The arrogance of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been offensive for decades. It has been a hard left propaganda machine, the automatic foe of Republican Presidents and the reliable enabler of Democrats since anyone can remember. NPR’s Supreme Court commentator Nina Totenberg was a buddy of the late progressive SCOTUS Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a clear conflict of interest, but she didn’t care and neither did NPR: after all, the idea was to bash the conservative decisions anyway. Ken Burns disgracefully turned his documentary on the Jews and the Holocaust into a Trump-bashing screed, and PBS just nodded its metaphorical head in agreement. There are too many examples of both networks spinning reality to support Woke goals and narratives to tote up.

Continue reading →