Friday Open Forum, But First I Have To Get THIS Out…

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Nobody else has to write about this asshole here—it is an open forum, after all—but I want to get my ethics call on the announcement that CBS is canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” out of the way lest it fester and turn into a fatal brain tumor.

That ethics call is “GOOD! It’s about damn time!” Never mind that I don’t find Colbert funny and never have; my opinion of his smug style of humor is irrelevant. But he has been for more than a decade a divisive force in American culture, exacerbating political divisions and intolerance, misleading people foolish enough to take his partisan talking points as fact, and one of many Axis of Unethical Conduct allies who have been deliberately ripping at the connective tissue that holds the nation together. He’s an ethics villain.

Naturally, the Axis is upset and, as usual, lying. “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump — a deal that looks like bribery,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on social media from her tee-pee. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” It was cancelled because CBS decided that a an expensive late night TV show with pretty miserable ratings that was dedicated to insulting and denigrating half of the country was probably not a smart investment, and was never an ethical one. Warren, a lawyer, former professor and U.S. Senator apparently doesn’t even know what “bribe” means. No, come to think of it, she’s just calculating that enough citizens don’t know what the word means to mislead them.

Continue reading →

Another Bonkers Question To “Social Q’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Who are these people?

A mere summary won’t do the full craziness of this question to the NYT’s manners advice column full justice, so here’s the whole, ugly thing:

My husband’s brother, mid-60s, has always been single. Before his parents died, he lived with them. While attending a violent political rally that my husband and I opposed early in the pandemic, he contracted Covid, then infected his mother and behaved irresponsibly in managing her care. She died soon after. We have had no real relationship with him in years. Still, he emails suggestions of gifts he would like for birthdays and Christmas. We send them, and he responds with thank-you notes. When he asks what we would like, we respond that we don’t want any gifts. He sends them anyway, and we donate them to charity. We do not acknowledge them, which we normally would do. Recently, he expressed a desire for acknowledgment of his gifts. How should we handle this?

I’m not going to read columnist Phillip Galanes’s answer to this one because I declared him an irredeemable woke bigot quite a while ago. I’m insulted that he thinks any reader worthy of human association would be interested in such a family’s pathology. Shunning a family member is an extreme move that had better be justifiable; shunning him without letting him know he’s being shunned is not just cruel, it’s weird.

Considerations:

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“As far as the accusations that we’re biased, I’d stand up and say, ‘Please show me a story that concerns you.’”

The infuriatingly dishonest, smug and biased Katherine Maher, head of NPR, on CNN yesterday.

Social media and others, like Senator John Kennedy and Instapundit, are going wild picking obvious examples. Hell, I have a lot of them; here’s one you may have forgotten (I had).

If Congress doesn’t finally strip public funding from NPR and PBS, there is no reason to trust those people to do anything. The Democrats love them because they are permanent propaganda mouthpieces for their party, but what’s the Republicans’ excuse?

Goodbye, Connie…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Connie Francis just died. I guess I just feel that attention should be paid.

She had a tragic life off the stage and out of the recording studio. Her Old Country father ended her romance with the man she believed was the love of her life; she was raped; she had serious emotional traumas. But I felt she was the greatest of all female pop singers, country singers, rock singers—hell, the woman could just sing. And that sob in her voice! I confess, every time I hear “Where the Boys Are” or its sequel, “Follow the Boys,” I get a pang.

I would have loved to hear Connie and Linda Ronstadt in their primes have a sing-off.

Neil Sedaka is quoted today in the Times as observing, “What struck me was the purity of the voice, the emotion, the perfect pitch and intonation, It was clear, concise, beautiful. When she sang ballads, they just soared.”

They just soared. Connie Francis never found love: her two marriages were to manipulative jerks, and both ended in less than a year. Like so many great artists, her own life was often miserable but her art made life a little better for millions, including me.

Connie Francis could sing in many languages, but none suited her style better than Italian: her real name was Concetta Franconero, and she grew up in Newark’s Italian section. I first heard that version of “Where the Boys Are” this year, on Pat Boone’s Fifties radio show. Wow.

Goodbye Connie, and thanks.

You were loved!

[And as a curtain call, “Follow the Boys…”]

Will the Unethical Appeals To Emotion Rationalizing Illegal Immigration Never Cease?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The metaphorically tear-flecked column in the Times screams, “We Will Regret Not Standing Up to This Venomous Cruelty.” [Gift link here!]

You know what the “venomous cruelty” is? Sending people who are in the U.S. illegally back to where they never should have left in the first place.

The author is Linda Greenhouse, a dyed-through-and through progressive who warps students at Yale Law School. She’s a legal journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize once, the Times tells us, not that this should mean anything after the Post and Times won awards for their false coverage of the Russian Collusion non-story and after “The 1619 Project’s” fake historian was rewarded for that political fantasy.

Greenhouse isn’t stupid, or at least shouldn’t be, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale University, Yale Law School, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Yet here she is, writing things like

Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Crowds on Demand” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This used to be a monthly feature on the old, now defunct, Ethics Scoreboard. I haven’t done many here: the last one was—let’s see—appeared in December 2024! Yet the fake demonstration site “Crowds on Demand” is an easy choice. It’s business is lying by proxy.

“Crowds on Demand is your home for impactful advocacy campaigns, demonstrations, PR stunts, crowds for hire and corporate events. Services available nationwide,” we are told. Ah. Impactful advocacy campaigns that don’t have as many advocates as they pretend to have. Terrific.

“Are you looking to create a buzz anywhere in the United States? At Crowds on Demand, we provide our clients with impactful advocacy campaigns and events. We are best known for organizing passionate demonstrations, rallies, flash-mobs, corporate PR events, and light-hearted events such as paparazzi, brand ambassadors, and PR stunts. We also have virtual capabilities including letter-writing, social proof, and phone-banking campaigns. We can create turn-key advocacy groups complete with qualified passionate leaders to staff them all on relatively short notice.”

All lies. And when your mob for hire starts a riot, “Crowds on Demand” will send in fake National Guard members in to beat them up and get sympathy for your group! OK, I made that up. But it wouldn’t surprise me. “Crowds on Demand came under fire from supporters of President Donald Trump for allegedly supplying paid protesters for the anti-ICE and “No Kings” protests that cropped up across the nation,” I am reading. More recently, the company’s CEO claimed he was offered $20 million to recruit people to participate in the planned anti-Trump protests set to take place tomorrow. Adam Swart, CEO of Crowds on Demand, told the host that organizers of the planned “Good Trouble Lives On” protests scheduled for Thursday tried to hire his company to bolster the size of the demonstration. His reason was that he didn’t think the protests would be effective, and it would make his company look bad.

But you see, the company is bad, whether it promotes that fraudulent demonstration or another one.

The New York Times Really and Truly Published This…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…to which the total and irrefutable rebuttal is…

Observations:

  • Incredible.
  • If someone believes this, then they are by definition too inattentive, ill-informed, dishonest of stupid to have what they write published in the New York Times.
  • Not only does bias make you stupid, it makes you willing to display to the whole world how biased and stupid you are.
  • Why would anyone trust the Times after this, or any paper that published such an undeniable attempt to erase not just history, but recent history?
  • The headline is pure gaslighting. A reader who hasn’t had her brain wiped like in “Paycheck” will think, “Wait…did I imagine the entire campaign against Trump for at least two years before the election being based on his being a fascist, Hitler II? I must have…the Times says that Trump vilifying political opponents is unique and unprecedented.
  • How long does the mainstream media think it can keep doing this before virtually no one takes them seriously at all?

Major League Baseball Asks What This “Integrity” Is That We Speak Of…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Even though the stupid All Star Home Run Derby was the night before, last night’s Major League Baseball All Star Game, which was allegedly baseball at its best, was decided by another home run derby, this one called a “swing-off.” The game’s nine innings ended in a tie, see, after an unprecedented comeback by the American League, which had trailing by six runs with just three innings to go against the National League’s best pitchers. This set up the game for a thrilling finish, like, say, Carlton Fisk hitting the ball out in the 12th inning of Game Six of the 1975 World Series, but no.

The 95th All-Star Game in Atlanta was settled by a “home run swing-off” to settle the tie. Worse still, the game’s MVP award was given to Kyle Schwarber of the National League, based on how he performed in the “swing-off” (I can’t believe I’m writing this), not in the part of the night known as “a baseball game.”

By the time Rob Manfred, the Worst Baseball Commissioner Ever Not Named Bud Selig , is through making up rules and gimmicks, baseball fields will have fun obstacles—you, know, gnome heads, water hazards and little twisty chutes?—like in miniature golf. He wants to make the game entertaining for people who are bored by baseball….you know, like him.

All of this is because the mega-millionaire players stopped wanting to actually play hard in the iconic exhibition game—might get injured, lose a big contact—and managers were pressured into not playing to win but rather treating the game like an elementary school Halloween parade, where every kid in costume gets a moment in the metaphorical sun (the games aren’t played in the daytime anymore, like they were when kids could watch their favorite players). So pitchers never pitch more than an inning, maybe two for the starters, and players all get an at-bat, but that means that if the game ends in a tie, one or both teams will have no players left. Behold! The stupid “swing-off,” which is even less baseball than the “zombie runner” gimmick used to break ties in the regular season. It had never been used before.

Continue reading →

I Guess It’s Nice That NBC Is So Open About Its Bias, Loyalties and Motives Now…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Anyone: give me a benign explanation for this tweet from NBC News today…

Any takers?

The least damning explanations for this would be that whoever is running the NBC News X account is an idiot. But who hired him? Who trained him?

To state the obvious, the fact that the head of the Biden autopen investigation used an autopen is not newsworthy, ironic, or hypocritical. First, there is no evidence that Comer didn’t fully control the procedure. Second, he’s not President. Third, a subpoena does not confer a benefit on anyone. Fourth, there are no allegations of other serious usurpations of Comer’s power and position. Fifth, there is no indication that Comer is suffering from crippling dementia.

The tweet is an extraordinary example of really, really desperate whataboutism. It would be embarrassing f it came from a hyper-partisan junior House member. For such partisan spin to come from a major news organization is nauseating.