idiots

Worst Dinner Guests Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

If you are invited to dinner with these two, be sure to bring popcorn and a camera.

Jeremie Calo and Tiffani Lynn Barganier decided to have sex on top of their table  at Paddy Murphy’s, an Orlando, Florida restaurant. The fact that many families were there trying to eat didn’t faze them a bit, apparently. The manager  summoned the police after he “was notified by several patrons that a couple was having sex on a table in view of minor children,” according to an Orlando Police Department report.

You can read the report here, at The Smoking Gun.

If anyone has any theories how two adults could be raised in a civilized country and think this is responsible, respectful, tolerable behavior, please pass them on.  My assumption is that anyone with this little respect for others and civilized norms is dangerous, and certainly not trustworthy. Outside of a purveyor of live sex shows in Vegas, what sane employer would hire either of these creatures?

The question of most import is whether they are just outrageous outliers with no greater significance, or whether public manners are in the process of reaching depths we never thought possible?

_______________________________

Facts and Graphic: The Smoking Gun

Ken Blackwell’s Obamaphone Smear: Yes, Ohio, A Black Man CAN Make Racist Ad

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Proving that a black man can do anything a white man can, like making a racist anti-Obama ad!

There are three things wrong with Ken Blackwell’s anti-Obama attack ad, courtesy of the Tea Party Victory Fund, which the former Cincinnati mayor and former Ohio Secretary of State leads:

1. It focuses on the Obamaphone, which is not an Obama give-away program, but an old program that has always offered free cell phones to the poor under certain conditions. Thus it is misleading and dishonest.

2. It stars the “Obamaphone Lady,” one of the ignorant and embarrassing Obama supporters captured on video by James O’Keefe clones to stereotype Obama supporters as fools. Yes, she’s a particularly appalling idiot. Both parties have plenty of them, however, and using any idiot to mock the candidate he or she supports is the epitome of cheap-shot, unethical politics. In this regard, the ad, like the video, is unfair and irresponsible.

3. The particular idiot chosen for this exercise is black, used to criticize a black President, whose strongest support comes from the black community. As a result, the ad is racist and offensive. Continue reading →

Just Stop It—You’re Embarrassing Yourselves

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh yeah? Well this guy is a ROMNEY supporter!

As evidence grows that the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention may have been practicing law in Massachusetts—the state she seeks to represent in the U.S. Senate—without proper legal authorization, the description of the matter in the mainstream media, to the extent that it is mentioned at all, is that “the conservative blogosphere” is making the accusation. This ritual drives me to distraction, as readers of Ethics Alarms know. But if conservatives want to be given more respect when they uncover a legitimate story that the biased media will try to ignore or bury, they have to stop indulging themselves in utter garbage like this. Continue reading →

The Akin Affair: A Brief Note on Being Fair To Idiots

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

A Baby Fairy (from the Todd Akin collection)

Todd Akin, as I discussed in the recent post, is too dumb to serve in high elected office, and his refusal (at least so far) to give up his nomination for the U.S. Senate after proving it marks him as unethical as well.

Nonetheless, an astounding number of pundits, Democrats and social media users are making fools of themselves and missing the fish in the barrel by concentrating their fire on Akin’s use of the phrase “legitimate rape.” Many of them apparently never read his quote, and really think the poor, silly man said that rape could be “legitimate”, as in “legal, just, valid or proper,” which is what the word really means. He didn’t say that, and he didn’t mean that. He obviously didn’t mean that, and it is unfair and misleading to condemn him on the basis of what he didn’t say.

Here is his quote again, speaking of women getting pregnant after being raped: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)…Plus Some Clarifications

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Apparently Prissy told Todd Akin’s family all about the Baby Faries…

To clarify, Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in opposition to Sen. Claire McCaskill, is not an Ethics Dunce because he said, in a recent TV interview, this, in response to whether it should be illegal for a woman impregnated by a rapist to get an abortion:

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

No, that statement just proves that he’s an idiot. Continue reading →

Joe Biden’s Ethics Catch-22

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

OK, we get it: he’s an idiot. But why is he Vice-President?

Speaking to a large crowd in Virginia estimated to be about 40% African-American, Vice-President Joe Biden proclaimed that “Romney wants to, he said in the first 100 days, he’s gonna let the big banks again write their own rules — unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

Telling an audience of blacks that the other Presidential candidate and his party plans to put them back in chains is unequivocally dirty campaigning, race-baiting, divisive, and uncivil, the precise kind of campaigning that Barack Obama swore that he would deliver us from in 2008. Now the Obama campaign, as well as his Administration, has embraced divisiveness as a primary strategy, and outrageous scaremongering with a racial bite is also consistent with the current principle-free attack mode by the Democrats, which has included accusing Mitt Romney of being a felon, a tax-evader and a murderer.

Yet the media line on the Biden speech is that “Republicans” have screamed foul. A Vice-President of the United States, running for re-election with an African-American President, telling black Americans that the opposition plans to put them back in chains? Why are just Republicans screaming foul? Why isn’t every decent Democrat, progressive, reporter, pundit and member of the public screaming foul? Is this really what they all consider appropriate, honest, respectful and civil campaigning for the highest offices in the land, by one of the occupants of those offices? Continue reading →

Megan Merkel, Road Fick

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This isn’t really Megan, just how I prefer to think of her…

We haven’t had a bona fide fick sighting at Ethics Alarms for a while, so welcome to Megan Merkel. A fick, you will recall, coined in honor of Michigan lottery winner/shameless food stamp recipient Leroy Fick, is someone who engages in outrageously unethical conduct and is defiant about it, an individual so ethically deficient that he or she can’t bring themselves to regret or show proper contrition for conduct that is undeniably wrong.

Ms. Merkel, 23, was arrested after her participation in this drama:

According to police, she was driving drunk at 7: 45 AM, northbound on Route 250 in Penfield, a suburb of Rochester, NY, alongside her recently-paroled boyfriend, 22-year-old Mark Scerbo. Scerbo, an idiot, was driving his motorcycle next to Merkel’s car and repeatedly passing it to do wheelies. He lost control of one of them, and hit Heather Boyum, a teacher and mother of two children, who was riding her bike on the shoulder. The impact threw the 40-year-old woman under the wheels of Merkel’s car, causing fatal injuries.  Merkel left the scene and was arrested for DWI.

But wait, there’s more! Continue reading →

Memo To Ray Dolin: Being Dishonest, Irresponsible and Stupid Is No Way To Promote Kindness, You Boob.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A simple Ethics Dunce just doesn’t do Ray Dolin justice.

Yes, I guess you’re kind, Ray—kind of an idiot.

You may have read the initial story. Ray was hiking across America to promote a personal memoir called “Kindness in America,” when, Ray told police,  he was the victim of a drive-by shooting in Montana, leaving him with a bleeding bullet wound in the upper arm. “How horrible and ironic!” the press exclaimed. “What a sad indication of the cruelty in the nation. Imagine–shot while promoting kindness!”

Except that it turns out that Ray shot himself. You see, his promotional hike wasn’t getting the attention he expected, so he thought a random and ironic attack would be just what was needed to give his book publicity a shot in the arm! Har!!!

(I’m sorry.)

The problem was that his description of his drive-by attacker resulted in an arrest of an innocent driver, and when police pressed Ray on the details of the shooting as he lay recuperating in his hospital room, he finally had to admit that the whole thing was a hoax. I suppose one can be kind and be a liar too, but eventually the unethical trait undermines the ethical one. For example, the woman who stopped to help Dolin after he shot himself was being kind, and he he thanked her by making her a pawn in his self-enriching deception. That’s not very kind.

On balance, I would say that Ray Dolin needs to bone up on some of the subtleties of ethics, including the virtue of kindness and the importance of honesty, before he’s qualified to write a book about it. I guess you could say that he jumped the gun. Har!

I’m sorry again.

But what a moron. 

______________________________________

Pointer: Drudge

Facts: Billings Gazette

Graphic: Daily Telegraph

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Unappreciated Ethics Hero: Facebook? Oh, Yes!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Unlike more primitive methods of mind control, Facebook is painless!

I think perhaps we have not been giving Facebook its due, and now, as the social networking monster is still reeling from its botched IPO, is a good time to right that wrong. We’ve been looking so hard at Facebook’s privacy settings, dadta collection, layouts and pointless games that we’ve missed the most important feature of it—magic. Like Wonder Woman’s golden lasso, but  a really, really big one, Facebook magically persuades people to not only tell the truth about the rotten things they are doing (like going dancing or golfing after persuading an employer to pay them disability because they are permanently unable to work), will do (like planning, in advance of the hearing the evidence, to vote guilty on a jury) or did (we’re getting to that), but to tell it to millions of people, potentially, so that they get punished.  Facebook’s power to compel confessions causes users to post videos or photographs of themselves in the process of doing incriminating things, so they can be then used as evidence in court. You have to admit, this is a wonderful thing. I don’t know how Mark Zuckerberg and his pals figured out how to do it, or what book of spells they stumbled across at Harvard, but they have performed a boon for humanity, and we ought to stop giving them grief.

Take the case of Michael Ruse, a charming Brit standing trial, accused of helping a friend beat up his father using a baseball bat. Micheal’s trial was going well for him, until Facebook took over his mind, such as it is, and flooded it with virtue. Suddenly, he was sending out a the message to his friends—and everyone else, for it was a public message—that he thought he would “get away with it.” An anonymous observer of the post—it could have been Wonder Woman, come to think of it, or at least Linda Carter— printed it his incriminating words and brought them to the court’s attention.

Under the advice of his barrister, Ruse changed his plea to guilty. The judge was not impressed, telling Ruse, “You pleaded guilty part way through the trial only really because you were stupid enough to put on Facebook what amounted to a full confession.” Well, yes, but as usual, he’s not giving Facebook credit for its uncanny ability to compel the truth. (Ruse’s lawyer replied to the judge, “He needs help with regards to thinking skills.” Perhaps. )

Ruse was  sentenced to 46 weeks in jail, another example of justice through Facebook magic. But apparently Zuckerberg’s magic lasso isn’t finished with him yet, for after sentencing Ruse got back on his Facebook account and insulted the judge.

Thank you, Facebook!

________________________________________

Pointer: Fark

Facts: Gawker

Graphic: Mind Control Blog

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Memorial Day Ethics Dunce: MSNBC Host Chris Hayes

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

My hero.

Yesterday, the day before Memorial Day, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said this:

“Thinking today and observing Memorial Day, that’ll be happening tomorrow.  Just talked with Lt. Col. Steve Burke , who was a casualty officer with the Marines and had to tell people [inaudible].  Um, I, I, ah, back sorry, um, I think it’s interesting because I think it is very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words “heroes.” Um, and, ah, ah, why do I feel so comfortable  about the word “hero”?  I feel comfortable, ah, uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism: hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.”

   Well, yes, Chris, you’re wrong about quite a lot.

Chris was wrong, for example—as well as disingenuous—to say that “you don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen” and then come out with this insulting and fatuous gibberish that disrespect the memories of the fallen. And to do it on the very weekend when millions of families across the nation are honoring their fallen, or, in the case of my family, a father who braved combat in World War II, was wounded, decorated, and regarded his service in defense of his country the greatest achievement of his life.

Hayes was also wrong, as well as incompetent and unprofessional, to utter such a half-baked and incoherent opinion without having the respect to think it through carefully, express it articulately, and in general without meeting his obligations as a broadcaster to be worth listening to. If a commentator is going to make a statement that he knows will offend and upset grieving families, he should at least know what he wants to say and have the skill and courage to say it clearly. As it was, all he managed to do was to make a gratuitous slur against patriots who put their lives at risk because their nation asked them to, instead of taking morally craven positions from the security of a TV studio that only exists because of the sacrifices such heroes made. Continue reading →