Rep. Marino just got bumped to second place. Here is the Republican Montana state rep (also bar owner) Alan Hale—no relation, presumably, to the actor who played the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island,’ or his almost identical and more versatile, father, Alan Hale, Sr., who played Little John to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood in the MGM classic film—extolling the virtues of drunk driving.
No, seriously.
I was flying this week, and the security procedures were smoother than ever. Now I am certain that my molestation at check points last year was unethical, and have sufficient evidence to conclude that it was based on government incompetence and willful disregard for my comfort, dignity, and rights. I am also wondering, more than ever, if the ardent, supposedly liberal defenders of the indefensible feel-up pat-downs have learned anything about the dangers of blind government obeisance and partisan loyalty. I hope so.
The saga so far: Continue reading
The secret to acing your SATs? Know your Kardashians!
After all the anger, debate and controversy in the Sixties over affirmative action and the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, with the case finally being made to the public’s satisfaction that including test questions based on cultural references likely to be unfamiliar to African-Americans or lower-income students (such as, famously, questions about yachting) negatively affected their test scores, wouldn’t you think that it would have been thoroughly understood by the people who make up the SAT scores that questions with a cultural bias were inherently unfair and incompetent questions?
Here is the prompt for the essay question in the SAT test given to high school students across the country last week : Continue reading
We should be ashamed of ourselves.
I have complained, more than once, about the naked greed and obvious incompetence displayed by the airlines charging $25 or more to passengers who check luggage. The results of this reverse incentive are that people carry on too many, and too large bags, boarding takes longer, and flights are delayed. Passengers talk about the idiocy of the policy all the time. So do the airline attendants. Anyone can see how dumb the policy is. The smart approach would be to charge for anything carried on other than a handbag or briefcase, and make checked luggage free. Boarding would be faster and there wouldn’t be passengers using the sneaky (but effective!) trick of carrying a piece of luggage through security only to check it at the gate at no charge when the airline personnel makes the routine plea for passengers to free up luggage bin space by doing so. Continue reading
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Decide which of these stories from today’s newswires show more unethical conduct.
First, the Mom:
Tampa mother Ronda Holder was at her wit’s end trying to get her son, James Mond III, 15, to take school seriously. Neither she nor this father finished high school, and she told reporters she wasn’t going to let her son end up begging for spare change. She said they have offered James help, asked to see his homework, grounded him, lectured him and taken away his cell phone. Still he fails. “He’d tell us, ‘That school doesn’t give homework’ or ‘That teacher has a problem with me,’ ” Mond Jr. said. James did poorly in math, poorly in history, and when his latest report card showed an F in physical education, his mother felt it was the final straw.
So, naturally, she forced her son to stand near an East Tampa street corner for nearly four hours on a Wednesday afternoon, wearing a large sign around his neck with the message:
“I did 4 questions on my FCAT and said I wasn’t going to do it … GPA 1.22 … honk if I need education.” Continue reading
“(CLARIFICATION: Palin did not, in fact, say this. It was a tongue-in-cheek link to an article that was intended as a joke.)”
—Time Magazine, dishonestly claiming one act of unethical journalistic conduct to cover for a worse one.
Maybe I owe blogger TBogg an apology. I thought only left-wing Palin-haters could be so disoriented by ideological fervor that they could believe the satirical story claiming that the former Alaska governor had told Sean Hannity that Christina Aguilera should be banished for botching the lyrics of the National Anthem. But no: Us Weekly, the celebrity gossip magazine, and Time Magazine (!!!) both fell for the same spoof. Us, at least, had the integrity to admit that it had made a mistake and to apologize. Time, disgracefully, issued the above dodge, claiming that a fabled news magazine suddenly decided to start printing “tongue-in-cheek” fake stories that portray national political figures as fools. Continue reading
When should compassion, empathy, and caring outweigh diligence and duty? I’d say this is an example. Too bad the Las Vegas Police Department doesn’t see it that way.
13-year-old girl Takara Davis is in an induced coma to help her recover from being hit by a car. She was walking home and apparently was jaywalking when the accident occurred. Takara was issued a jaywalking citation, but since she had bleeding on the brain and was unconscious, a police officer made a special trip to the hospital to hand it to her mother. “She has got to go to court on March 6th,” Takara’s mom told reporters. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms has not yet completed its annual Best and Worst of Ethics lists for 2010, but I’ll hand out this title right now. The persecution of student Ashley Smithwick, 17, of Sanford, N.C., has all the elements that make no-tolerance enforcement of school rules ethically offensive: a lack of common sense, absence of proportion, dismissal of empathy, rejection of fairness and justice, disregard for the welfare of an innocent child, and most of all, incompetent, cowardly, utterly stupid school administrators.
Yes, I think we have a winner. Continue reading
It’s one thing for Fox to post misleading headlines on its website and for Fox hosts to slander an international philanthropist but now its game show ethics have crashed and burned. An ethicist can only stand so much, dammit!
In the very first episode of the latest Fox effort to attract a prime time audience without adding anything of value to the culture or American thought—a combination quiz and gambling show called “Million Dollar Drop”—a couple bet $800,000 that they knew whether Post-It notes or the Sony Walkman was “sold in stores” first. As the audience held its collective,breath, rooting for Gabe Okoye and his girlfriend, Brittany Mayti to win big money in advance of their approaching wedding, game show host Kevin Pollack revealed that they were—awwwww!— wrong. The Walkman hit the stores first. Shortly thereafter, the couple lost the rest of their money (the show “gives” its constestants a million dollars that they have to risk on a series of questions) and went home poorer and dumber. Why dumber? Because the show’s researchers had arrived at the wrong answer, not Okoye and Mayti. Post-Its were sold first, though only regionally. Continue reading
John Avlon’s dubious conversion from the author of a best-selling book labeling politicians who disagreed with John Avlon as “wingnuts” to a “No Labels” champion reminded me that he was one of many commentators to draw great significance from a Harris poll last spring that revealed what he called “scary” beliefs held by Republicans. There were several such polls this year about Republicans, conservatives and Tea Partiers; expressing alarm at how ignorant right-leaning Americans are became something of a media fad. For a news media largely dominated by reporters, producers and editors desperate to stave off the erosion of support for Barack Obama, the polls were perfect ammunition: they were genuinely newsworthy; reporting them undermined the credibility of those “scary” Tea Party rallies; they created an opportunity for the news media to bolster its own credibility by explaining why, for instance, the President was not the Anti-Christ, and perhaps best of all, it reinforced the conviction of the majority of newsmedia reporters who self-identify as liberals that they belong to the smart side.
Perhaps it isn’t so strange, then, that only a few news outlets and even fewer commentators chose to feature the results of a recent Harris poll showing that 40% of the U.S. public thinks that Karl Marx’s signature phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” originates from one of the America’s founding documents. Continue reading
