diligence

Ethics Quiz: Rank The Unethical Politicians!

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Three pols

For your first Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the New Year:

Consider these unethical politicians from Florida, Texas and California…

Unethical Politician A:

California State Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles)

Ethics Failures:

Competence, Responsibility, Diligence

Explaining his proposed legislation SB808, dealing with “ghost guns” (that is, home-made weapons) at the California Capitol in Sacramento last week, de Leon held up such a firearm and said, “This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”

This is genuine anti-gun gibberish that could not possibly be uttered with a straight face by anyone even slightly familiar with guns. There is no such thing as a “30-caliber clip;” he is referring to a 30-round magazine. (There is also no such thing as a “30 magazine clip.) “Caliber” refers the measurement of the width of a bullet or the internal diameter of a gun barrel, not what the magazine will hold. And the average rate of fire for a semi-automatic rifle, which is what he was holding, is about 120 rounds per minute, not 3,600 rounds per minute.

Why are legislators who don’t care enough about guns to educate themselves about what they are, how they work and what they are capable of doing, submitting legislation about guns? Because they just know guns are dangerous, and in their infantile, knee-jerk reasoning, that’s all they have to know. The rest is fakery: the legislator is pretending that he has sufficient expertise to be credible on the issue, when he is too lazy and arrogant to do the minimum study necessary to render him qualified to vote on gun regulations, much less author them.  This is the equivalent of a legislator who thinks babies are delivered by storks proposing abortion laws. Continue reading →

The Republicans Devolve

/ Jack Marshall / 79 Comments

devolutionWhether your party is becoming more ignorant, or whether ignorant people are increasingly drawn to your party, the conclusions to be drawn when over 50% of those who identify as members also proudly admit that they have a 19th Century understanding of the universe cannot be called encouraging. Thus the Pew Research Center’s just released data showing that only 43% of Republicans understand and accept evolution is bad news for that party, and indeed for the nation as a whole.

Democrats have nothing to be proud of, as just two thirds (67%) of them told Pew that they believe in evolution, but at least the members of that party are getting smarter: the last poll, in 2009, showed 64% had absorbed the conclusions of Charles Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould. Republicans, in contrast, have gone backwards, dropping from 54% to the current, pathetic figure. For the American public as a whole, the takeaway is that a full 33% are incompetent at life, for that is what complete confusion about and misunderstanding of the world around us means in practical terms. Continue reading →

What Do You Do With The Drunken Judge? Media Distortion And Judge Gisele Pollack

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Broward County (Florida) Judge Gisele Pollack, a recovering alcoholic, showed all the signs of suffering a relapse during her session on the bench two weeks ago, when she abruptly ended the day’s proceedings after an hour and a half that featured the judge slurring her words and acting erratically. She presides over misdemeanor drug court, a program she established shortly after being elected as a county judge.  Her program offenders to have their charges dismissed and their drug records erased after six months of treatment.

After staying away from work for a day, Judge Pollack returned to the bench in the late afternoon, and presided over a courtroom packed with about a hundred drug offenders, along with  their friends and their families. The event marked the completion of rehab for dozens of offenders and the dismissal of their misdemeanor marijuana charges.“You’ve got to remain vigilant,” she told the graduates, emphasizing that they had to work hard to avoid relapses that would  place them back in front of her, and perhaps in jail.

After court, she acknowledged her own health crisis and announced that she was going into an outpatient rehab program. An attorney retained by the judge in the wake of her conduct attributed her relapse to personal issues, telling reporters that she has  “had some severe personal tragedy in her life. Her mother recently passed away, and they were very close. It’s been really devastating for her.” Apparently her son is also suffering from a serious illness. Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, a longtime friend, told reporters, 

“If this causes the people to not have faith and not have trust in what goes on in that drug courtroom, then she will have to step aside,’ he said. ‘My hope is is people will wrap their ever-loving arms around Judge Pollack just as she has wrapped her arms around thousands of people.”

What’s going on here? I think it’s pretty obvious: a recovering alcoholic in a critical position of public trust suffered a relapse, as alcoholics are wont to do. If one is an alcoholic, this is a symptom of a very persistent, pernicious and incurable disease that kills many Americans every year, does horrific damage to families, businesses, governments and the economy, and that is incurable. Being an alcoholic is not an ethical violation for a judge or a lawyer, nor is having a relapse. Allowing that relapse to affect the competent performance of one’s duties, however, is an ethical violation that calls into question a legal professional’s ability to do her job. It could trigger professional sanctions; it certainly should trigger an official inquiry. A Florida judge appearing drunk on the bench, just once, is still a massive ethical breach. It arguably violates the first five Canons of Judicial Ethics a Florida judge is bound to follow… Continue reading →

Bizarro World Ethics At Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Bizarro

We will pass with little notice or comment the weird exploits of Eldo Kim, the 20-year-old Harvard University sophomore accused of emailing a bomb threat that cleared out Harvard Yard this week during exams, apparently because be wasn’t ready for his. How completely devoid of ethics does one have to be to do something like this? And how dumb! He undermines the efforts of all his fellow students who are prepared for their exams, causes fear and panic on campus, causes disruption, inconvenience and expense to the university, and all because he either didn’t study sufficiently or wasn’t prepared to fake his way through an exam like most students, all while risking arrest, trial and conviction for a serious crime that will harm his future prospects far more than any poor exam performance might. Today we learned that Kim was a psychology major studying partisan taunting. He was worried about passing an exam in partisan taunting?

Adding to the strangeness, a controversy erupted this week when veteran Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield expressed his outrage that a recent study had revealed that the most common grade given to Harvard students is A, a practice, he says (and correctly so) that penalizes genuinely outstanding students and allows slackers to slide through Old Ivy without breaking a sweat. Jeff Neal, the hapless Harvard spokesman assigned the job of spinning this revelation, confirmed the accuracy of the Mansfield’s claim, and said, maybe without giggling: Continue reading →

The Obligation To Know Something About What You Are Writing About

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Believe it or not, this isn't the most ridiculous feature of the Slate essay it comes from.

Believe it or not, this isn’t the most ridiculous feature of the Slate essay it comes from.

I am constantly being reminded of an old Bob and Ray skit (no, I can’t find it online) they did on late night TV where Bob played an interviewer of a longshoreman (Ray) who had just published a thousand page history of the U.S. that was riddled with errors. “Here, for example,” the increasingly perplexed interviewer sputtered, “you say that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1943 in Bailey’s Mistake, Maine!” Because the internet permits anyone to publish authoritative-sounding nonsense and lies without penalty, that skit seems less and less absurd with each passing day.

Even the content of supposedly legitimate, respected on-line sources cannot be relied upon , because 1) the job of “editor” appears to be obsolete, and 2) if there is an editor, he may be an ignoramus too. For example, a day after after the World Health Organization released a stunning report announcing that citizens of Greece were intentionally giving themselves AIDS so they could get health benefits, it retracted the statement, saying, through  a spokesman, “There is no evidence of people in Greece or anywhere else in Europe deliberately infecting themselves.” What happened? It was an editing error. Oh, well then… wait, what? And nobody other than the editor read the ridiculous release before falsely accusing an entire country of breeding idiots?

This brings us to this “correction” that appeared yesterday on Slate….you know, that sophisticated, erudite, eclectic online cultural  commentary magazine:

“Correction, Dec. 10, 2013: This article originally misidentified penguins as mammals. They are birds.” Continue reading →

Lessons From The Defenders Of The Wise-Ass “A”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Back at the beginning of the month, some obscure corners of the web were buzzing over the picture of a purported student exam that ranked an “A..Nice job!” despite the student’s smug punt at the end. Here it is…the section in the square is the section of the student’s answer that provoked widespread indignation at the grade. I first saw it in a post titled: “Some teachers don’t even care any more”:

funny-test-A-grade-teacher-kid-school

To be fair, there are many and diverse possible interpretations of this evidence, and not enough context to choose among them. It could be a hoax, for example. The teacher may indeed have skimmed the answer, and not read the paragraph in question. The student’s answer may have already covered the topic sufficiently to justify an “A” (in the teacher’s judgment), and the teacher may have decided to ignore the non sequitur, stream of consciousness ending.

Or perhaps the teacher was like my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Cosloy. (If you are out there reading this, Mr. C—thanks for the memories!) Mr. Cosloy was a terrific teacher who had a healthy dose of cynicism about the way school operated, as well as a well-developed sense of humor. He poked fun at the process all the time, and allowed his students to do the same as long as they also did the work he assigned and showed some progress toward mastering the subject. I felt comfortable writing asides and irreverent commentary on his tests, and on at least one occasion he wrote on one of them that my answers were only worth a B, but he had given me a B+ because I made him laugh twice. We don’t know what the relationship was between the student who allegedly wrote the test answer above and the teacher grading it. Heck, that teacher might have been Mr. Cosloy…

Thus, I was not going to write yet another “here’s more proof that our schools are going to hell” post, though our schools are indeed going to hell. What intrigued me about the episode were some of the comments about it, especially this one, from a Bridgemont Community and Technical College professor named Machelle Kindle: Continue reading →

“How Dare Universities Charge Such High Tuition?” KABOOM!* #1: Georgetown University Law Center

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
headexplode

Kaboom.

James Feinerman, the James M. Morita Professor of Asian Legal Studies at Georgetown University Law Center, who also serves as its associate dean for transnational programs, was hired by the U.S. government as an expert witness  to bolster the prosecution in a spying case, and apparently plagiarized a substantial potion of the report submitted to the court from <sigh–there goes that value of THAT degree> Wikipedia.The defense picked up on the uncited cribbing and the federal court is now examining whether the sources used by Wikipedia are reliable enough for his report to be accorded any validity. The Government, meanwhile, represented by assistant U.S. attorneys Peter Axelrod and John Hemann, is stuck with making desperate “ahumunahumuna” sounds like Ralph Kramden used to do on “The Honeymooners” when he was caught looking stupid and spouting lame arguments in court filings about how Feinerman “utilized language from Wikipedia as a concise English-language summary of his opinions on certain topics.”

Riiiight. Continue reading →

NOW Do You Agree That Congress Should Read Bills Before It Passes Them?

/ Jack Marshall / 65 Comments

runaway-train

The Obamacare meltdown should not be cause for joy anywhere, although I can understand why the Republicans are giddy and conservative pundits are searching for ways to say “Didn’t I tell you?” in unobnoxious ways. There are no obnoxious ways. There is no worse feeling than knowing that a leader, a movement or a cause that you fervently believed in and defended against doubts and criticism was not worthy of your trust. For the politically and socially committed, comparing this experience to losing a loved one is no exaggeration. Are you in the habit of pointing at your neighbor and shouting, “Haha, your mother died! I told you she looked sick!”? Mocking and razzing the Democrats or progressives in your life is not much better.

We all, however, share responsibility for running this republic, and lessons must be learned. Back in 2010, I wrote of the process whereby the Affordable Care Act was passed…

“…Once the bills began to emerge, though, things got worse. They were far too long and convoluted to read and understand; this was incompetent and irresponsible. None of the Senators or Representatives (or the President himself) who advocated the bills in the most emphatic terms had read them, which is a breach of diligence, and many frequently made statements in public that misstated the provisions of the bill, sometimes egregiously. Not reading a technical bill on a well-understood or narrow matter and still voting for it may be common (though, I would argue, outrageous), but doing so with a massively expensive and complex bill affecting the life of every American is irresponsible and an abuse of power. This has continued. Politicians who the public should be able to trust are still making assertions of fact that are not facts they have independently confirmed, and they are insufficiently familiar with the details to either make fair arguments or inform the public.

“Since nobody could read the bill, this allowed the President and his allies to make general arguments that were often half-truths devised to mislead the public or avoid raising sensitive subjects. President made many “promises” about what would and would not be in the bill, knowing that they were promises he might well not be able or willing to keep. Indeed, the bill now being voted on fails to fulfill many of those pledges.  Important policy trade-offs that might erode support were not discussed, or misrepresented.”

This isn’t a partisan point, you know. I am sure that Republicans don’t read bills before voting for them either, but the practice is unconscionable, professional negligence and reckless, and if nothing else good comes out of this miserable blot on democracy, if the public finally demand that its law-makers read, understand and be candid about the laws they make, then something of value may lie beneath the rubble. Continue reading →

I Regret Being Obligated To Say It, But I Told You So…

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments
You might want to get to know these guys, Mr. President: you are probably going to spend a lot of time with them in the history books.

You might want to get to know these guys, Mr. President: you are probably going to spend a lot of time with them in the history books.

(I have wrestled to the floor past urges to write a post like this, but this time, I think I have to.)

In May, I concluded a post about the “scandal trifecta” with this:

“Four years of hyperpartisan, arrogant, irresponsible, rudder-less and badly managed government have had the predictable result, and I will be stunned if we have yet seen the worst of it.”

I was not stunned, unfortunately. And we may see worse yet. We probably will.

May 2013 was far from the first time I noted the apparent vacuum of leadership in the Oval Office. Two years earlier, when the Administration was breaching security to take credit for Bin Laden’s death, I wrote, “To hell with “Hope and Change”…I’ll settle for responsibility and competence.” Of course, we have gotten neither, nor did I expect a different result even then. I didn’t expect a different result in January of 2009, to be frank. Oh, I hoped, as I think almost everyone but Rush Limbaugh and Mitch McConnell did, that Obama would prove adept at the job he had the audacity to seek.  Some Presidents with leadership credentials almost as thin as Obama’s have turned themselves into competent executives, though I suspect that those successes had the self-awareness and humility to know that they had some learning to do, as Obama does not. They also did not have a chorus of sycophants in the media and the public telling them how magical they were. It was quickly obvious, however, that President Obama’s concept of leadership was (and is) to give speeches, raise campaign funds, appoint loyalists, and sit back while they do the best job they can until they royally screw up, then express surprise and disappointment and let the same people have another crack at it.

And lie, of course. Can’t forget that. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: “Face the Nation” Host Bob Shieffer

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“The nation was plunged into shock. Nothing like this had ever happened.”

—“Face the Nation” host Bob Shieffer, looking forward to the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and describing the aftermath of the murder in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Wait…what???

Hey Bob...do any of these guys ring a bell?

Hey Bob…do any of these guys ring a bell?

As it is, younger generations have a tendency to assume that what is happening now is unprecedented, that every crisis is the worst crisis, that what they are experiencing is unique. The remedy to this self-centered, ignorant and crippling cognitive malady is education, resulting in perspective. Unfortunately, the schools are doing increasingly little to provide useful historical context, and our leaders find it useful to exploit the low-information voter (worker, driver, patient, parent, student) for its own devices.

That leaves the field of journalism. Journalists, however, do not generally go into the arena of describing the present because of any particular respect or appreciation for the past, so their ability to convey perspective is usually limited as well. Fortunately, there are still older, veteran, experienced pros like Bob Shieffer,  76 years young, who…who…who appears to be as irresponsibly ignorant of basic American history as the college goofs Jay Leno makes look silly on his “Jay Walking” segments. How is this possible?

What could Shieffer possibly mean by saying of JFK’s assassination that “Nothing like this had ever happened” that is not flagrantly misleading, careless, ignorant and wrong? For those of you as bad off as Bob, there had been three previous Presidential assassinations before JFK, and all of them were big deals. Lincoln’s was a bigger deal than Kennedy’s in fact, because the U.S. had barely finished a war, and Lincoln’s assassination caused legitimate fears that it was part of a second Southern assault. Let’s see…maybe we can give Bob the benefit of the doubt and find an explanation for his statement that doesn’t involve having to shop for rest homes: Continue reading →