integrity

Perhaps The Best Baseball Ethics Story Ever: The Chris Sale Uniform Freak-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

White Sox uniforms

Last night, incomplete fragments of news came through the baseball media that Chicago White Sox pitching ace Chris Sale had been pulled from his scheduled start against the Tigers. Was he about to be traded? No, we learned that there had been a “non-physical” altercation with someone in the White Sox front office. Huh? What did that mean?

It turned out that the truth was stranger than any speculation. Sale, we learned, had refused to wear a retro White Sox uniform during a “Turn Back The Clock” promotion that nigh, and to ensure that he wouldn’t have to, he cut up all the vintage uniforms, using a scissors and a knife, while the rest of the team was taking batting practice.

As soon as I heard this, I told my wife,”I bet I know exactly which uniforms the team was supposed to wear.” I was right: the White Sox promotion involved giving out free facsimile 1976 uniform jerseys to the first 15,000 game attendees, with the team wearing the infamous fashion abortion perpetrated on baseball by puckish former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, the same iconoclast who sent a midget up to bat in a real game.

Here are those uniforms, almost unanimously agreed-upon by all critics as the silliest baseball garb ever to appear on a Major League player (that’s Veeck in the middle; the ones on the left are the uniforms in question):

1976-white-sox-uniforms_mtqjliw57ekb1e3fkjxj4grkj

It is recorded that the players and the fans hated the 1976 uniforms, which were quickly discarded, especially the version with the shorts, which only appeared in one game. No wonder Sale was upset.

Now to the ethics issues: Continue reading →

Observations On The Leaked DNC E-mails

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments
"Thanks for all your good work for me, Debbie! And thank the rest of the DNC staff too!"

“Thanks for all your good work for me, Debbie! And thank the rest of the DNC staff too!”

1. In case you missed it—and there were a lot of people trying to make sure you did—the illegal hacking organization Wikileaks released nearly 20,000 stolen e-mails from the Democratic National Committee. It is, by any estimation, a scandal, and potentially a devastating one. You can read various takes on it from Heat Street, BuzzFeed, NPR, The Daily Beast, CNN, BizPac Review, Business Insider, The New York Observer, Fox News Insider, Associated Press, The Daily Caller, Mediaite, and the Associated Press. Among other things, the e-mails show that the Democratic National Committee was actively colluding to undermine Bernie Sanders and ensure that Hillary Clinton won the race to become the Democratic nominee. That means that the Democratic Party, while holding itself out as running a fair nomination process to be determined by primaries and voters while the party played neutral referee, was in fact cheating. It was fixing the competition. It lied to Democratic voters and the nation.

I think that’s a big deal.

2. Objective observers and commentators knew this was the orientation of the DNC long before the leaks, of course. It was obvious, or should have been, that the fix was in. The party tried to make sure that no real competition for Clinton emerged to challenge her for the nomination, despite her obvious weaknesses as a candidate and her self-evident corruption. All that Hillary had to overcome were a Star Wars cantina of token opposition: Sanders, an elderly socialist crackpot; Jim Webb,  a conservative, sort-of-Democrat maverick with even less charm than Hillary; Martin O’Malley, a lightweight former governor with no policy positions that varied significantly from Clinton’s, and whatever the heck ex-Republican Lincoln Chafee was supposed to be.  Even against this motley crew, Hillary  might well have lost in a fair contest, just as she did to an unproven, inexperienced junior Senator from Illinois in 2008.  But Clintons don’t do “fair,” and the DNC was willing to  serve as her accomplice. Thus the party appointed Hillary-supporting “superdelegates,” including Hillary’s husband and many former Clinton appointees and previous enablers. Thus they held as many debates as possible on weekends and opposite major sporting events, so as few undecided people as possible would be exposed to the inevitable Clinton gaffes, lies, and awkward public persona.

2. There should be little sympathy for indignant Democrats who are shocked—-shocked!—that the leaked emails show that the DNC was trying to sabotage Sanders and push Clinton over the finish line. Hillary cheats. Everyone knows that. Everyone knew that  before she announced her candidacy. She was cheating all along, just like she was lying about her State Department e-mails all along, and continues to lie about her Goldman Sachs speeches. Knowing all that, with an obligation to his conveniently adopted party and his principles to try to stop a manifestly unfit woman from gaining power, Bernie Sanders still refused to attack Clinton where she is least fit to be President: her character. All the pieces were there. If the Wikileaks leaks were necessary for Sanders and his supporters to figure out that they were the marks in a rigged  game, they are too gullible and pathetic to be involved in politics. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Prelude: Intent, Gross Negligence, And ‘Extremely Careless’”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

eyes closed driving

Long-time commenter (and blogger) Glenn Logan has authored not one but three COTD-worthy posts of late. I have chosen his commentary on the gross negligence/extremely careless distinction for the honor, but any of them would have been worthy choices. You can find the others in the threads here and here.

Before I get to Glenn, I want to point out that a recent and ridiculous news story illustrated the difficulty of the gross negligence/extreme carelessness distinction perfectly:

A North Florida woman is saying her prayers after running her car into a home — after saying her prayers.

The 28-year-old woman was driving in the tiny town of Mary Esther, located west of Fort Walton Beach in the Florida Panhandle. Deputies from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office say the driver told them she was praying and had her eyes closed before the incident took place.

According to NWFDailyNews.com, authorities say she ran a stop sign, going through an intersection and into the yard of a home. The driver tried to back out, but her car got stuck in sand and dirt around the home. No one was hurt inside the home and the driver was taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation. She was cited for reckless driving with property damage.

Gross negligence would be praying, driving, and closing her eyes knowing well that it endangered others, and doing it anyway. Extremely careless would be praying, driving, and closing her eyes assuming that no harm would come of it, perhaps because God would be driving the car. “Reckless,” however, may cover both.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Prelude: Intent, Gross Negligence, And ‘Extremely Careless’”: Continue reading →

Two Critical Integrity Questions For African-Americans, University Administrators, Democrats, Civil Rights Advocates, Progressives And Social Justice Warriors

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Seperate-but-Equal

First question: 

Are you prepared to rationalize this?

From the Wisconsin State Journal:

UW-Madison’s Multicultural Student Center separated attendees by race to discuss a violent week of news that stirred debates about racism and law enforcement, prompting criticism from conservative news outlets that the arrangement amounted to segregation.

Campus officials said the decision to hold separate meetings Monday for white and minority students, faculty and staff was made to ensure people of color had a place to discuss their concerns, and said the rules were not meant to exclude participants.

“No one was turned away from any session,” UW-Madison spokeswoman Meredith McGlone said in a statement.

A post that has since been deleted from the Multicultural Student Center’s Facebook page described the meetings as a place where students and UW employees could emotionally process the prior week, which included fatal police shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana, followed by the targeted killing of five police officers in Dallas.

Two of the meetings were for white students and UW employees, according to the post, while two meetings were for people of color.

The Daily Caller, a national conservative news site, wrote about the meetings Monday night, posting a story that included a historic photo of a segregated waiting room sign. The site Right Wisconsin also wrote about the meetings.

McGlone said participants wanted “a space to express feelings without the fear of being judged.”

“Our students of color often find such spaces hard to come by,” McGlone said. “It is a best practice in student affairs to allow quiet and reflective space for those who request it.”

Still, McGlone said, the intent behind the different meetings “could have been communicated more clearly to avoid any impression of exclusion.”

McGlone did not respond to a followup question asking whether the Multicultural Student Center would use a similar structure for meetings in the future…

Here is a handy link to the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List, so those of you choosing to try to justify this have all the necessary arguments in one convenient place..

The second question:

If you are not prepared to rationalize it, do you have the courage and integrity to condemn it?

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote—But Not Necessarily ETHICAL Quote!—Of The Month: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

i-was-wrong

“On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them. Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”

—- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, officially apologizing for making remarks sharply critical of Donald Trump last week, including suggesting (in jest) that if her were elected President, she might “move to New Zealand.”

Observations:

1. Supreme Court justices almost never apologize, and I only say “almost” because I can’t do enough research right now to safely say “never.” They don’t apologize because the don’t have to: they are, ethically, a law unto themselves, and accountable to nobody unless impeached and convicted. (Justice Samuel Chase, was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on March 12, 1804, on charges of arbitrary and oppressive conduct of trials; it was a purely political attack. He was, correctly, acquitted by the U.S. Senate on March 1, 1805.)

2. An apology was appropriate, however. Justice Ginsberg proved herself smarter, better, more ethical and more principled than the embarrassing, crypto-facsist “these are not ordinary times” crowd, including the folks at Salon and other left-wing blogs, this guy, and too many of my dear friends on Facebook, whose expressed opinions really are beginning to make me wonder if they will solemnly send me to a Lobotomy Man when I oppose President Clinton’s declaration of open borders, ban on fossil fuels, race and gender quota in all hiring and admissions to (free) colleges, and confiscation of 50% of my property to help pay for national health care including late-term abortion on demand and tax-payer funded recreational drugs.

3. She apologized because any fool could see that her comments did undermine trust in the institution of the Supreme Court, and that her critics were right. Some of my more misguided colleague in the legal ethics field opined that it was silly to think that Justices don’t have political opinions and biases, just as it is silly to think journalists do not, so why shouldn’t she exercise her First Amendment rights? This  lame notion was decisively rebutted by a lawyer whose name I wish I could reveal, except that his comments were on a private list. He wrote in part… Continue reading →

Donald Trump Candidacy Ethics Train Wreck Passenger List Update: Georgetown Law Prof. Paul Butler Scores A Perfect Rationalization #28

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
We're real sorry about this, but these are not ordinary times...

We’re really sorry about this, but these are not ordinary times…

The human ethics train wreck named Donald Trump is now in the process of exposing how thin the veneer of professionalism is for many alleged intellectuals, scholars and lawyers. On an e-mail list of most of the legal ethicists in the country, one of them posted this in reaction to Justice Ginsberg’s unethical and unjudicial shots at Donald Trump:

“I love RBG way too much to be critical of her in any way . Long may she live!”

This opne expression of willful denial, from not merely a lawyer, but an ethics specialist! It is the epitome of one of my father’s favorite quotes, “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” I responded to the list that it was the most depressing statement I had ever read from any of the list’s participants.

Paul Butler’s op-ed in the New York Times isn’t much better. The Georgetown Law Center professor defended Ginsberg’s indefensible comments by arguing that these times are special, and thus suspend the ethics principles that must govern judges if the judiciary is to engender any respect or trust at all. He writes:

“Normally Supreme Court justices should refrain from commenting on partisan politics. But these are not normal times. The question is whether a Supreme Court justice – in this case, the second woman on the court, a civil rights icon and pioneering feminist — has an obligation to remain silent when the country is at risk of being ruled by a man who has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a sexist and racist demagogue. The answer must be no.”

No, Professor, the answer must be “yes.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments
Justice Ginsberg, not giving a damn.

Justice Ginsberg, no longer giving a damn.

Add one more bit of evidence to the pro- side of the debate over whether there should be a limit to Supreme Court tenure. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 83 and a cancer survivor, has now apparently entered the “What the hell: I’m going to say what I feel like saying” period of her life. How nice for her. The problem is that there are some things an ethical Justice should not and cannot say.

In an Associated Press interview published last week, Ginsberg opined that a Trump Presidency was too awful to contemplate, saying that she presumed Hillary Clinton will be the next president, and that she didn’t ” want to think about that possibility” of Trump being elected instead. Talking to The New York Times, she said, “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president. For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”  Then, in a CNN interview, she got specific:

 “He is a faker…He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. … How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.”
Law professor Daniel W. Drezner, who teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University,  minces no words over at the Washington Post, nor should he. Like me, he agrees with Madam Justice on the substance of her remarks about, yechh, Donald Trump. Nonetheless, he writes, Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On FBI Director Comey’s Statement Regarding The Clinton Investigation

/ Jack Marshall / 132 Comments

James Comey

The transcript of FBI Director James Comey’s full remarks on the Clinton e-mail probe follow. I will highlight important sections in bold, and in some cases, bold and red. My  observations will follow.

Good morning. I’m here to give you an update on the FBI’s investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

This will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.

I want to start by thanking the FBI employees who did remarkable work in this case. Once you have a better sense of how much we have done, you will understand why I am so grateful and proud of their efforts.

So, first, what we have done:

The investigation began as a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General in connection with Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server during her time as Secretary of State. The referral focused on whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system.

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

Consistent with our counterintelligence responsibilities, we have also investigated to determine whether there is evidence of computer intrusion in connection with the personal e-mail server by any foreign power, or other hostile actors.

I have so far used the singular term, “e-mail server,” in describing the referral that began our investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that. Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together — to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work — has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.

For example, when one of Secretary Clinton’s original personal servers was decommissioned in 2013, the e-mail software was removed. Doing that didn’t remove the e-mail content, but it was like removing the frame from a huge finished jigsaw puzzle and dumping the pieces on the floor. The effect was that millions of e-mail fragments end up unsorted in the server’s unused — or “slack”— space. We searched through all of it to see what was there, and what parts of the puzzle could be put back together.

FBI investigators have also read all of the approximately 30,000 e-mails provided by Secretary Clinton to the State Department in December 2014. Where an e-mail was assessed as possibly containing classified information, the FBI referred the e-mail to any U.S. government agency that was a likely “owner” of information in the e-mail, so that agency could make a determination as to whether the e-mail contained classified information at the time it was sent or received, or whether there was reason to classify the e-mail now, even if its content was not classified at the time it was sent (that is the process sometimes referred to as “up-classifying”).

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

Continue reading →

More Fourth Of July Ethics: PBS Deceives Its Audience, And Calls It A “Patriotic Thing To Do”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

a-capitol-fourth-concert-fireworks03

I hate writing posts like this. I hate the fact that the culture’s appreciation of the importance of integrity, honesty and transparency has declined so much during the Obama Administration that I have to write posts like this.

PBS’s annual coverage of the nation’s Capital’s Independence Day celebration from U.S. Capitol was handicapped by the overcast and drizzly weather in the area.  At the point in the show where the National Symphony Orchestra plays the 1812 Overture’s finale while a spectacular fireworks display explodes over the Capitol dome, someone in authority decided that the obscured fireworks  partially blocked by clouds weren’t good enough, so  a video compilation of previous years fireworks were interspersed with them without any disclosure.

To be clear, what happened was this: PBS intentionally deceived its audience, and presented old footage while representing what was on the screen as live.

Social media noticed immediately. “PBS Aired Old Fireworks Footage This Year. Did It Make A Difference?” asked various media commentators, in various forms. Gee, that’s a head-scratcher!  Huh. Tough one! Does it make a difference when a government-funded station deliberately sets out to deceive its viewers? Do lies matter? Is it okay for a broadcast of a live event to be secretly altered with film from a different time and event? Does it make a difference if the news media lies to the public?

Of course it makes a difference. It’s wrong. It’s a lie. It makes public trust impossible. What’s the difference between faking a moon landing and faking a fireworks display? Ethically, they are exactly the same, what we in the ethics field refer to as lies. Continue reading →

Observations On The Redacted Orlando Terrorist’s 911 Call Transcript Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Lynch white House

Polls show that as citizens consider the horrors of Clinton and Trump, Obama’s approval numbers are going up. This makes sense, of course: competence and virtue are relative. I haven’t seen a poll but it would not surprise me if, after almost 8 years of Obama, Jimmy Carter’s poll numbers have risen too, as well as Herbert Hoover’s and, across the pond, maybe even Neville Chamberlain’s.

Just so we don’t get carried away with nostalgia for an arrogant and incompetent leader as we anticipate his corrupt or unhinged successor, I feel obligated to use Bon Jovi’s “turn back time” device to return to last weekend, when Obama gave us perhaps the most damning evidence yet of how cynical, dishonest, contemptuous and inept his”transparent” leadership has become. Mea culpa: I passed over it last week in my concentration on the mad flare-up of anti-gun hysteria.

As all but the most denial prone Democrats will acknowledge, President Obama has gone to ridiculous and dangerous lengths to avoid formally citing radical Islam as a terror threat, because it requires acknowledging that a large (okay, large enough) component of the Muslim population abroad and maybe here as well wants to kill us. Truth is the enemy to liars, frauds, totalitarians and the deluded: take your pick here. Either way, for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to say of Omar Mateen in a press conference, as she did Tuesday, that “I cannot tell you definitively that we will ever narrow it down to one motivation. People often act out of more than one motivation,” is an insult. This is blatant equivocation. Yes, I’m sure Mateen may have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, and maybe there were some people among the hundred or so he shot that he didn’t like, but he was a Muslim, his father was an anti-American, pro-Taliban zealot, he had pledged himself to ISIS, he launched a one -man terrorist attack, and his religion persecutes gays. Gee, what could his motive have been? I’m stumped. Are you stumped? Loretta is stumped.

No, Loretta has been told to be officially stumped.

Just two days before her transparently dishonest statement (Maybe this was the kind of transparency Obama promised in 2008?), Lynch toured all five Sunday talking head shows (ABC, Fox, CBS, NBC, CNN) to lie about the transcripts of Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen’s calls. This is known at Ethics Alarms and elsewhere as “doing a Susan Rice.” [It’s fun to go back to that 2012 post and read the comments from the denial brigade, like now-self exiled far-left blogger Ampersand, who defended Rice and the administration. “For your statements to make sense,” Barry wrote, “we’d have to believe that US Intelligence had determined with certainty what had happened either while the attack was ongoing or within hours afterward, neither of which is true.” We now know both are true. Thus Hillary told her daughter shortly after the attack that it was an organized terrorist plan. Later, with the election in mind, the YouTube video cover-story was concocted, and Rice was dispatched to spread it.]

President Obama wanted to make the Orlando massacre about gun control rather than Islamic terrorism. His post attack speech did not mention ISIS or Islamic terrorism at all, but quickly pivoted into exploiting the tragedy to call for gun controls, knowing that his lap-dog, gun-hating allies in the mainstream media would let him get away with it. There was a problem, however: Mateen’s phone calls made it clear to anyone paying attention that this was an ISIS-related terrorist attack (not just an “act of terror”—the same equivocation used after Benghazi.)

Here were the redactions:

Mateen: “I pledge of allegiance to [omitted]. “I pledge allegiance to [omitted] may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of [omitted].”

The dumbest Wheel of Fortune contestant in the world could fill in those blanks, especially after many of the news reports.

Nevertheless, our Attorney General was willing to humiliate herself trying to justify the withholding of facts from the public, saying on ABC’s “This Week”: “What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda.” How lame is THAT? Not as lame as the excuse she gave the same day on CNN’s State of the Union,  where Lynch said:“The reason why we’re going to limit these transcripts is to avoid re-victimizing those people that went through this horror.” What? I’m sure that blatantly censoring information that the public has a right to know will make the victims’ families feel much better. How do the facts that our government thinks the public is made up of gullible idiots, that the President is in denial over Islamic terrorism, that the Attorney General is willing to lie repeatedly on national television and act as a political tool, and that the administration is as transparent as slate make the victims’ families feel? It sure scares the hell out of me.

Occasionally the news media declares, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, “There is some shit I won’t eat,” or at least eat and say “Yum-yum!,” so the censorship of the obvious was roundly mocked and condemned by both the media and Republican leadership. (Oddly, no Democrats stood up for transparency. Democrats: please explain, and explain why this is fine with you.)

So the Obama Administration and the Justice Department caved the next day,  and released a full, uncensored transcript of tMateen’s 911 call on the night of the massacre, and referred to the controversy over omissions in the document “an unnecessary distraction.” (And whose fault was that?)

Omar Mateen made the 50-second 911 call in which he claimed responsibility for the terror attack and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s leader at 2:35 a.m., about  a half hour into the June 12 murder spree. Now, with the blanks filled in, the transcript read…

“I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may God protect him [in Arabic], on behalf of the Islamic State.”

Continue reading →