Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck

EA Ends Ann Althouse’s Suspension With An Ethics Quote of the Week!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

A little more than a month ago, Ethics Alarms put Ann Althouse’s quirky but frequently provocative blog on suspension as a source here for engaging excessively in her trademark “fiercely” detached commentary (‘Yes, what X did was insidious and undermines national comity but what really interests me in the word he misused…’)to an obnoxious degree. I now return her to good standing by recognizing the last sentence in a post about how Democrats are blaming the Bidens’ for their current ill fortunes as an Ethics Alarms Ethics Quote of the Week, to wit:

“The Democratic Party has itself to blame for forcing Biden on the country in 2020 and for everything that happened down the line.”

Bingo!

Truer words could not be spoken. Since its November defeat, the party has attempted to blame everyone and everything but its own series of atrocious policies, totalitarian tactics, undemocratic cover-ups, spectacular dishonesty and incompetent decisions. Biden, as has become increasingly apparent as the truth is slowly uncovered regarding just how far from being in charge during his White House tenure Joe really was, is one of the least blameworthy. He didn’t nominate himself, after all, nor was he likely fully aware of how disabled he really was becoming as his four years dragged on. Biden was never seriously regarded as Presidential material when he had all of his marbles, but his Machiavellian party nominated him to run in 2020 anyway, not because there was a chance in the world that he would be an effective President, but because he was the most likely candidate to beat Trump, especially when a pandemic made it possible for Joe’s diminishing abilities to be hidden.

True, Biden chose the ridiculous Kamala Harris as his DEI VP, but again, Democrats didn’t have to nominate her as their 2024 Presidential candidate, just as the party didn’t have to become shills for open borders, out-of-control debt, race-based hiring, crippled law enforcement, social media censorship, politicized law enforcement, transmania and climate change hysteria.

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Observations on a Jobs Graph

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That provocative graph above is brought to you by Apollo Global Management.

It purports to reveal what proportion of new jobs added each year since 2016 were in the private and public sectors. I have no way of telling whether the numbers are accurate, whether the manner of presenting them is fair, and whether Apollo has an agenda in presenting them this way. I guess that’s the first ethics observation. It is now impossible to trust news accounts, statistics, analysis, surveys, studies and data, no matter where it comes from. We can add this to the fact that photographs, films, recordings and videos are also untrustworthy.

But here are some more observations on the off chance that the numbers are correct and can be trusted:

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KABOOM! My Head Just Exploded! Biden’s Executive Orders Used an Autopen???

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wait, what? An Executive Order can be legal and go into effect without a President actually signing it? A so-called “autopen signature” counts? EVEN WHEN THE PRESIDENT MAY NOT BE CAPABLE OF KNOWING WHAT HE’S “SIGNING”?

A Heritage Foundation investigation has discovered that the majority of official documents signed by President Joe Biden used the same autopen signature. The Oversight Project, which is an initiative within the conservative Heritage Foundation that investigates the government, announced, “We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his Presidency. All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year. Here is the autopen signature,” the group said, attaching photo examples like these:

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UPDATE to “Can Anyone Think of an Innocent, Ethical Explanation For USAID’s Giving $8.1 Million to Politico? Because I Can’t”: It’s Even Worse Than That…

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

At this point, my head is metaphorically spinning as new revelations about the money-laundering, journalism-bribery and astounding abuse of U.S. taxpayer funds just under a single bloated, unaccountable, Democratic ideologue-infested agency are coming out left and right, from credible sources and marginal ones, as the crumbling Axis denies, obfuscates, screams, threatens, and throws up dust. I confess: I don’t have the time or the skills to gather all of the information, vet it, and explain it. That’s not my job, either. I resent the fact—actually “resent” is not a strong enough word—that our most prominent journalists who should be informing the public regarding the USAID/Politico scandal are doing anything but.

Thus the thread on the post yesterday introducing the topic includes among the most recent of its 60 comments (as of this moment), a sincere reader offering this: “I just spent some time today since this hit the news on the USASPENDING site and confirmed Politico only received two awards, one for 20 thousand, the other for 24 thousand dollars from the USAID. So it does appear your post is wrong.”  No, what’s wrong is that the actual expenditures have been disguised, hidden, mis-labled, and been examined through so many disparate sources that it is impossible for even well-intentioned readers to answer the question, “What’s going on here?” The Axis propaganda media news site Mediate made the same claim as the commenter, quoting Politico’s management that the “subscription” support was as pure as the driven snow. As with the other “usual suspects” like CNN’s hack media ethics watchdog Brain Stelter, the current strategy is to pretend this is much ado about nothing. Stelter’s defense: Why isn’t DOGE going after waste in misspent funds in the Defense Department?

Who can you trust? Apparently nobody. And that’s dangerous and frightening. AND I have no idea what to do about it.

I would have once expected the Columbia Journalism Review to be a source that might give definitive intelligence on this matter. Here, after hundreds of words attacking Trump, Musk, and DOGE, it tells us,

$268 million [of the now frozen USAID funds] was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries…

Including ours? “Independent” journalism being funded by a U.S. agency with a political agenda is an oxymoron anywhere. What would U.S. pundits say if it learned that, say, Russia, Ukraine or Israel was sending funds to the New York Post or some of its reporters to encourage them to be “independent”?

Most of the revelations about the USAID-Politico connection have come from social media, requiring a click obsession to track the sources down, with the main reporting on the developments coming from sources like this New Jersey publication, which wrote yesterday in part,

Documents revealed that from 2024, under the Biden administration, Politico received approximately $9.6 million in funding over just over a year. This funding was distributed across various branches of the organization, though the exact purposes of these funds have not been publicly detailed by Politico or the government agencies involved….Political analysts and media watchdogs have been quick to comment on the implications of such funding. “The revelation of government funding to media outlets like Politico raises serious questions about editorial independence and the potential for conflicts of interest,” said media critic David Smith.  “[I]t’s a stark reminder of how governmental financial support can influence, or at least be perceived to influence, journalism.”

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Can Anyone Think of an Innocent, Ethical Explanation For USAID’s Giving $8.1 Million to Politico? Because I Can’t…..

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

The howls of indignation over Trump and Marco Rubio pausing USAID grants rather than “gradually” examining all of the agency’s expenditures over time are particularly disingenuous. Such a stall will only mean that more taxpayer money will go out the metaphorical door for wasteful, ideological projects like what red-pilled former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi calls its “colossal library of crazy-ass contracts.” He cites the $39 million for “Gender Equality in Water, Power, and Transportation,” “Recognizing the Third Gender in Bangladesh,” “Ukrainian Resilience Through Fashion,” a “TransFormation Salon” and a pre-Taliban plan to help “Afghan Women Enter the Financial Sector,” but there are others that Elon Musk opening the ledgers on “the Matterhorn of suck that is USAID” (Taibbi again) have revealed.

Above we see the screen shot revealing that USAID gave over $8 million in grants during fiscal year 2024 to Politico, the online Axis news and punditry site. Politico is almost always critical of Trump, conservatives and Republicans and just as consistently a vocal ally of the “resistance,” Democrats and progressive policies and advocates.

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The Hegseth Confirmation, and Great Moments in Ethics Estoppel: The Concern That New DOD Sec. Hegseth Won’t Be Ready “24-7”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I probably wouldn’t have voted for Pete Hegseth to be Trump’s DOD Secretary; certainly not until he answered a lot of crucial questions he never was asked. He should have been grilled about the extent of his management, oversight and negotiation experience, but the Democrats, because they have no principles, decided to use the Kavanaugh strategy to slime him (because that worked so well the first time).

Hegseth is easily the worst of Trump’s major appointments, and the fact that he was confirmed last night (by the narrowest margin possible) demonstrates that the terror expressed by the Trump Deranged that unlike last time around, the Republicans in Congress are inclined to help their party’s President achieve his goals rather than obstruct them is justified. (To that, my reaction is “Tough. You have nobody but your own party to blame, along with people like you who enabled and supported an arrogant, incompetent, corrupt, untrustworthy, and increasingly totalitarianism-embracing government.”)

This morning I decided to surf between MSNBC and CNN to hear the screams of the Axis propagandists who hang out there [Oh NOOO! ICE is really arresting illegals! Oh NOOO! Trump is making villains like Anthony Fauci pay for their own security details! Oh NOOO! Trump is killing DEI!] When they weren’t screaming about all of that, they were indignant that someone was now leading the Pentagon who could not be trusted to be ready for a crisis phone call every hour of the day, 365 days a year. These assorted partisan hacks and the Democratic party “contributors” who joined in their self-righteous lament are ethically estopped from making that complaint about Hegseth.

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The Prospective Pardons Are Legal But Unethical and Dangerous [Updated Twice]

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

When Ethics Alarms decided what had been a close competition between Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden for “Worst President Ever,” I honestly thought all of the evidence was in. There were only eight days to go, after all; it had finally been made sufficiently clear that our so-called President was on his way to becoming a zucchini, and worse, had been transitioning for years under the protection of an Axis cover-up. But then came Biden’s endorsement of censorship and the most unethical exit speech in U.S. Presidential history, followed by Biden’s embarrassing announcement that he was ruling the 28th Amendment ratified when it was not. Today, I woke up to the news that Biden had issued prospective pardons to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who betrayed his country with unauthorized contact with China; Dr. Fauci, the perjuring, lying, Deep State hack who was significantly responsible for the disastrous response to the Wuhan virus, Trump Deranged former Representative Liz Cheney and all the other members of the Pelosi-rigged House committee that dragged out and manipulated a partisan investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.

The close call now is whether this last official act by Biden is the worst of the batch. It may well be.

To chase the metaphorical elephant out of the room, prospective pardons are legal, constitutional, and probably irreversible. Presidents have issued general pardons applying to groups of people involving many offenses yet to be proven, and many times. There have been at least thirty amnesties before puppet Joe entered the White House: Presidents Lincoln and Andrew Johnson issued them during and after the Civil War to benefit Confederates, and Jimmy Carter issued a mass pardon for Vietnam war draft dodgers. My favorite was President Madison’s 1815 pardon of pirate Jean Lafitte and his crew, who joined Andy Jackson’s American forces at the Battle of New Orleans. Madison’s grateful proclamation covered all who assisted in the defense of Louisiana in the battle (that occurred after the War of 1812 had ended), granting “a full and free pardon of all offenses committed in violation of any act or acts of the Congress of the said United States touching the revenue, trade, and navigation thereof or touching the intercourse and commerce of the United States with foreign nations at any time before the 8th day of January, in the present year 1815, by any person or persons whomsoever being inhabitants of New Orleans and adjacent country, or being inhabitants of the said island of Barrataria and the places adjacent . . .”

The fact that this vague and general sweeping Presidential pardon was issued by James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, makes it about as irrefutable a precedent as one could ask for. And thus the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the pardon power “extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency or after conviction and judgment.”

Nonetheless, just because one can do something (or get away with it) doesn’t mean it is ethical, prudent, responsible or right. Biden’s pardons for alleged crimes never investigated or proven to individuals holding his favor stretches the existing precedents to the breaking point, or perhaps gagging point is a more apt description. After all, Jean Lafitte was a pirate; the Confederate soldiers fought against their country, and the draft-dodgers were, you know, draft dodgers. Even Richard Nixon, pardoned by President Ford in what may be the nearest thing to a precedent for Biden’s pardons today, was a President of the United States whose potential indictable crimes had only been uncovered in the course of a House impeachment inquiry. At that point, the precedent could have been limited by those not insignificant details. Then came Biden’s Once and Future pardon of his black sheep son for crimes he had been convicted of committing and anything else he might have done yet undiscovered, just in case darling Hunter has been a serial killer when he wasn’t high. Today’s pardons take us to the end of the slippery slope.

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Two Unethical Books: One Not Fit For Toilet Paper But I Want A Crate of the Other

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

What appears to be a controlled experiment to determine “Just how stupid are members of the American public who can read?” the White House risibly claims that Joe Biden “plans to write a book after leaving office giving him an opportunity to try and shape the narrative around his presidency and the tumultuous weeks leading to his historic withdrawal from the 2024 race.” Axios, a card-carrying member of the progressive propaganda machine, writes as if this is credible, when everyone without a see-through head knows it is not. “If the book project comes to fruition, it will be a chance for Biden to lay out, in full, his views on what he accomplished and why he handled the 2024 cycle the way he did,” Axios says. No, it will be a chance for Biden’s spin team, puppeteers, pardoned son and wife to concoct a fantasy worthy of Frank L. Baum.

The Speaker of the House revealed this week in an interview with Free Press that Biden insisted to Speaker Mike Johnson that he never issued an order to freeze new liquid natural gas export permits. Biden had in fact signed it less than a month earlier. Johnson told podcaster Bari Weiss that he believes Biden “genuinely didn’t know what he had signed.” And that account is from January 2024!

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Ethics Alarms Wants To Thank President Biden For His Continuing Efforts To Confirm Its Verdict That He Is The Worst U.S. President Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

…as with today’s idiocy, that “statement” above.

The President has no say whatsoever in when proposed Constitutional amendment have been ratified (or not). He can express his approval of one, and lobby for it with legislators, but he cannot make a ruling that the [completely superfluous, virtue-signaling] Equal Rights Amendment has been properly ratified (it hasn’t been). He might as well put out a statement that Barry Bonds should be voted into the Hall of Fame, or that broccoli is good for you. This is the President whose party made failure to uphold “democratic norms” one of its main Big Lies against Donald Trump, and Biden’s Presidency has ignored more norms than any Presidency at least since FDR tried to be President For Life. (Come to think of it, he succeeded!)

Making this presumptuous and gratuitous endorsement even worse is the fact that everybody knows now that Biden is in no shape to declare anything of substance, especially a matter of constitutional law debate. This isn’t Biden talking, it is some phantom activist in the White House using Biden’s name and office to advance a personal agenda.

Since his historic, DEI VP was selected by his party’s oligarchs to run for President without any components of the modern nomination process (and I doubt that Harris would have even survived the old-fashioned “smoke-filled room”) Biden—-that is, his puppeteers—has set an all-time Presidential spite record by filling his final months with obstructions for Donald Trump, as well as leniency for murderers, civilian honors for despicable civilians, more unethical student loan waivers, obstacles to U.S. energy independence and climate change grandstanding. Then there was this week’s head-exploding call for censorship in his Orwellian farewell speech.

Meanwhile Ruy Texiera, a generally objective, fair, and honest analyst, is having none of the obsequious claims from the Axis that Biden, in addition to being a figurehead President, was somehow also a good one who will be vindicated by history. On his substack “The Liberal Patriot” he authors a much more exhaustive description of Biden’s failures than I did in selecting poor Joe as “The Worst President Ever,” as well as chronicles Biden’s betrayal of the voters who thought they were voting for a moderate in 2020. (They also thought they were voting for a cognitive functioning leader rather than a marionette.)

It’s a superb piece, and you should read it.

Even if Biden puts out a statement saying that you shouldn’t.

How Unprofessional and Incompetent Is Karine Jean-Pierre? THIS Unprofessional and Incompetent…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I was going to shut down EA for the day since the previous post was both depressing and exhausting, then I stumbled across this to which, as Mrs. Loman says at the end of “Death of a Salesman,” “Attention should be paid.”

A national security expert was prepared to brief reporters on the breaking news of a tentative Israel-Hamas cease-fire yesterday, but Biden Paid Liar Karine Jean-Pierre refused to allow him to take the mic, forcing reporters and the nation to wait an extra hour before hearing the details of the American hostages being released, including their names. National security adviser Jake Sullivan personally asked Jean-Pierre to permit his top spokesman, John Kirby, address reporters moments after Biden announced the deal. She refused because, insiders say, it was her final White House briefing and she regarded it as her “farewell party.”

A source in the White House told the New York Post, “She kinda marketed it as a celebration of her and her tenure and unfortunately that took precedence over huge breaking news — and we haven’t had this kind of news in this administration for a long time.”

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