open forums

Open Forum on a Crazy, Rainy Friday…

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Thanks to my observant sister, who told me my head should be exploding due to the IRS settlement scandal when many sources, blogs and pundits hadn’t even covered it yet, I was able to get some commentary out even ahead of my legal ethicists listserv, which, predictably since they pounce on Trump whatever he does, REALLY pounced yesterday.

On the bad side, my head hasn’t stopped exploding yet, and the whole house is a mess. And I haven’t even been able to seriously consider the gravamen of the New York Times joining Margery Taylor Greene in condemning Trump’s helping to jettison a GOP Congressman who couldn’t bring himself to condemn anti-Semitism.

On my Facebook page, a smart, Trump Deranged Jewish lawyer friend who called for everyone to vote for the illegal and dishonest “restore fairness” Virginia gerrymandering referendum, bemoaned the end of CBS radio and called it smoking gun proof that CBS was now working for MAGA. Yes, CBS radio’s demise is Trump’s fault. He even included a weepy reference to Edward R. Murrow. News radio is, like the US Postal Service, bow ties, landlines and the Sears catalogue, outdated, anachronistic and disposable, having once served a great purpose. You know, like the Model T.

Yes, it’s crazy out there. Use the Open Forum to start fixing it,

Friday Open Forum, Confused Edition…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Dana expresses my state of disorientation on several fronts, such as…

  • The Strait of Hormuz. The President says the U.S. doesn’t need an open Strait of Hormuz, but the rest of the world does. (For example, we have this headline: “Strait of Hormuz closure causes Diet Coke shortage in India.”) So why is the useless-as-usual United Nations sitting this out? I guess to ask the question is to answer it. The same applies to NATO, as far as I’m concerned. I’m increasingly drawn to Trump’s position that the U.S. funds most of NATO and it is not too much to ask for members to back up the U.S. in an international matter of national importance, like the war against Iran. I guess they have too many Muslims to pander to and they hate Jews too much. Good to know, and to Hell with the ingrates.
  • The Federalist claims that as with the abortion decision, the SCOTUS pro-progressive distaff bloc intentionally “slow-walked” another Alito-written opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, which threw a metaphorical monkey wrench into Democrats’ race-based gerrymandering.  I wrote posted on the Dobbs stunt here. But the logic in “After The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway’s new book exposed the dangerous delay of Dobbs, the liberal justices appear to have stalled again” makes no sense. Even though the article praises Justice Kagan, the Slow-Walking Justice, for her political chops, the delay of Callais has hurt the Democrats, leaving them little time come up with ways to maneuver around the decision. The reason Virginia’s high court striking down the dishonest referendum seeking to “restore fairness” by virtually ending the Congressional representation of conservative Virginians was so devastating is that the clock has almost run out.

I also don’t understand the last three posts attracting readers but almost no comments: Update on “Dog-Rapegate”: Israel Is Suing the Times , Ethics Dunce: D.C. Bar Senior Assistant Disciplinary Counsel Jack Metzler and Comment of the Day: “What Exactly Are California’s ‘Values’? Can Anybody Explain?, especially the one about the D.C. Bar.

Anyway, moving on: it’s Friday, and I need your contributions. Contribute!

Friday Open Forum, God Save The King Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

As usual, a tour of the U.S. by a major head of state is causing a news stir and ethics issues. Perhaps nothing will ever top the uproar over Nikita Khrushchev’s visit during the Kennedy administration, when Nikita wanted to go to Disneyland and Walt wouldn’t let him in. President Trump has been on good behavior with King Charles and didn’t even slam the monarch on Truth Social after Charles delivered a number of subtle shots at Trump during his speech before Congress.

What is it about the royal family that makes so many Americans go all weak in the knees? My father strenuously objected to it, saying more than 50 years ago that the U.S. public should treat Great Britain’s kings, queens, princes and princes as what they are: embarrassing relics of a feudal system that we rejected and that should have died out in the 18th Century. He said he wouldn’t cross the road we lived on (Brunswick Road, Arlington—it had a “dead end” sign on each end) to greet any of them.

Dad would have probably approved of Mayor Mamdani’s brush off regarding King Charles, as when asked what he would say to the king if the two spoke, answered, “I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.” That’s one of the crowns jewels.

Meanwhile, there is much to talk about in the Wide, Wide World of Ethics. So talk, already…

Friday Open Forum, “Hail, Hail, the Morons Are All Here!” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Question: How does anyone who purports to support the Democratic Party not feel like an idiot these days? Observe:

Now, what Ramses witnessed in “The Ten Commandments”—burning hail…THAT might have been evidence of global warming…

This woman, arguably made stupid by progressive indoctrination and propaganda though she might have been born that way, is still arguably more astute than “The View’s” resident lawyer, Sunny Hostin, who claimed that earthquakes and eclipses were also evidence of climate change.

There’s a lot of crazy ethics stuff going on this week. Analyze it for us. Me, I’m going to bang my head against a wall for a while…

Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Facts don’t matter, history doesn’t matter, logic doesn’t matter. All that matters to “these people”—I say “these people” because I don’t want to be associated with them in any way—is to mislead and confuse dimwits and know-nothings into not trusting the President and his administration regardless of the policy or decision.

Lincoln fired five generals leading the Army of the Potomac, one of them twice (McClellan), before finding the one he needed to win the Civil War. As a Marine veteran of of combat said succinctly when I told him about the Atlantic’s nonsense, “During a war is when firing generals is most important.”

But I digress. Write about any of the gazillions of ethics issues out there.

I have to watch Opening Day at Fenway Park now…

Friday the 13th Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

Here’s how my day started: I had one thing that I just absolutely had to accomplish, just one—get my inspection sticker updated. That means, for me, since I now have no one to help with such annoying tasks, getting to the service station I have used for 40 years before they open at 8 am and making sure my car is first in line. Then I have to kill 45 minutes at a coffee shop while they do the inspection, get a call when they are done, walk over to the place, pay, pick up my car and drive home, a less than ten minute drive. To make sure I was first in line, I set the alarm clock that has served me well for 20 years to ring at 7:10 am. That would give me time to wake up, ablute, and get to the station by 7:45.

The alarm rang at 5:35 am. I had set the clock correctly: it just malfunctioned. It’s old, and picked today to break down. Half asleep, I got my super-duper, newest model Apple smart-phone, which I have never once used as an alarm clock, unlike its predecessor. To my horror, the alarm-setting controls were completely different from the earlier model, and absurdly complicated. (This made them better, see.) Half- awake, I tried to puzzle out the device’s twists and turns, which involved two screens, a dial-a-time, a pick-a-sound, volume, a damn check mark, and shifting little buttons to indicate a 7: 10 am wake up alarm. The thing had said “no alarm” and now it didn’t say “no alarm,” which I, fool that I am, assumed meant “alarm.” It didn’t, though I have yet to figure out why. I woke up in a panic at 7:55 am.

I threw on some pants, grabbed my wallet and keys and ran out the door, only to see Spuds looking needy standing behind me. So I hooked him up to his leash to let him relieve himself, which he took his own sweet time doing. Deposited my dog, who promptly went upstairs to take over my bed, ran to the car, sped to the station, and arriving at 8:05 am, found two cars ahead of me, meaning instead of 45 minutes stuck in a shopping and restaurant area, I would be stuck for over two hours, which I can’t afford.

So my inspection sticker is still expired, I got only about 5 hours sleep, I still don’t know how to use my smartphone, and I’m considering either beating my face in with a brick or getting a Jason Voorhees hockey mask and a machete as a prelude to a murder spree.

Amaze me with your ethics eloquence, on the off chance I’m still around to read it.

Friday Rainy Day Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments

I used to complain about how much of Northern Virginia winters were spent in the rain, but the deluge overnight here, which is going to restart any minute, could not be more welcome. My neighborhood has been iced-over for weeks, with snow on the ground longer than any time during my decades long residence. (Naturally, this is just more evidence of climate change and global warming, “experts” say, and they know best.) The warm rain is ending that, meaning that walking my over-enthusiastic dog, Spuds, will no longer be life-threatening…at least not as life threatening.

I have too many things I want to write about, and as always, I am hoping to find some guest posts (as in “you write about it so I don’t have to” posts) here today when the dust settles. Olympics ethics stories will be especially welcome, because I refuse to watch the hypocritical spectacle or read about it unless someone sends me a tip. I am very tempted, however, to write about Elaine Gu, the all-American super-star skier who competes representing China in this Winter Olympics. According to the Wall Street Journal, Gu and Zhu Yi, a fellow American-born figure skater who now competes for China, were paid a combined $6.6 million by the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau in 2025 for “striving for excellent results in qualifying for the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics.” In all, the two were reportedly paid nearly $14 million over the past three years. The payments were revealed when the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau budget was posted online with the names of Gu and Zhu. Their names have since been scrubbed from the public report.”

Nice. Gu is revolting, and it also proves how far the Olympic have come from their original roots of extolling amateur athletic competition. Gu still is paid by some American corporations to be their sponsors. They are also revolting. Gu’s betrayal of her own nation raises the ethical issue of dual citizenship. She’s a great walking, talking, greedy, ethically-inert example of why we shouldn’t allow it.

But don’t get me started. You get started…

Friday Open Forum: Hey, Help Me Out Here, Will You? Please?

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

One of the few reasons I was worried about Donald Trump getting a second term rather than the United States ending up with that incompetent babbling, DEI Doom Machine Kamala Harris in the White House was that I knew with absolute certainty that his second four years in the White House would be exhausting on the ethics front, making it both impossible and absurdly time-consuming to cover the ethics landscape adequately. That has come to pass even more horribly than I dreaded. Trump does stuff (as Presidents are supposed to do) but often does it sloppily or defiantly; he trolls, he jokes, he behaves like a the kid in “The Twilight Zone Movie” who acquires the power of a god; the Axis of Unethical Conduct goes nuts, the Democrats lie, the polls are faked, the news media spits Trump-Hate propaganda, unethical judges throw monkey wrenches into the works, businesses pander, ethics train wrecks pop up everywhere, socialists, communists and idiots demonstrate…

I feel like Newman feels about the U.S. Mail in the “Seinfeld” clip above.

If EA were going to have the impact and thoroughness it needs to have (five commenters are not enough), it would have to be a multi-contributor site like Instapundit, Powerline, Victory Girls or Legal Insurrection, or I would have to be retired like Althouse or work only a few hours a day like Prof. Turley. But the latter options are impossible (forever, for reasons largely, but not entirely, beyond my control) and I have tried to build the former without success.

The brilliant Mrs. Q opted out quickly because of other priorities. Curmie, who brought a different perspective to his carefully curated posts, went Trump Deranged and quit without so much as a “thanks,” a “Bye!” or a “Good luck!” I have a standing offer to one of EA’s dependable contrarians, who has chosen to ignore it. (This is one reason I bristle when someone calls the blog an “echo chamber.”)

Talk about the mail “coming and coming”! I already have several topics on the runway, and this morning I saw about a dozen others that need ethical analysis that know I will not have time to provide, as well as some issues I’ve already discussed continuing to throb. For example, all of the morning shows and the news were concentrating most of their time on the disappearance of the “Today Show’s” hosts’s mother, which is, literally, trivia compared to other developments, like, say, emerging evidence indicating that a member of Congress—a Democrat, of course—may have ties to terrorist organizations. But.. but…a talking head celebrity’s mother is missing!

Also on the Ethics Alarms radar…

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Pre-Blizzard Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This weekend will be a good time to work on those guest posts you’ve been meaning to write for Ethics Alarms while you’re snowed in. Or, if you don’t live in the storm zone, or are not snow-phobic like everyone in the D.C. area but me, it will still a good time to work on those guest posts you’ve been meaning to write for Ethics Alarms.

I have to go to a funeral of a good friend at Arlington this morning, and don’t know when I’ll return. It’s a bad day for that, as I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, but as Yogi Berra sagely said, “You gotta go to your friends’ funerals. If you don’t go to theirs, they won’t come to yours.”

One more note on the previous post: while drinking my first cup of coffee, I saw the Two Guys on the Couch with a Blonde in the Middle on Fox News talking about one reporter at the Australian Open who was asking the American tennis players, “How does it feel representing the United States right now?’ If the athlete answered with an obviously pre-set, “I am always proud to represent my country,” the guy pressed on with, “I mean, you know, considering everything that’s happening,” fishing for an anti-Trump statement.

The Blonde in the Middle made the right point: it’s too bad one of the tennis pros wasn’t prepared to answer, “Oh, you mean Trump’s first year? Yeah, wasn’t that awesome? He finally got rid of public funding for NPR and PBS, the Education Department is toast, so maybe our kids will be educated instead of indoctrinated, inflation is down, the White House really needed a ballroom, we’re getting illegals off the streets, and even the tariffs are working!”

OK, gotta go. I’m going to visit Mom and Dad while I’m at the cemetery. It’s been a while.