open forums

Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I fear my call for assistance on Ethics Alarms this day doesn’t quite have the weight, significance, urgency or eloquence of William Barrett Travis’s immortal entreaty made on February 24, 1836, but it’s the best I’ve got…

Open Forum! (Whew, That Was A Close One…)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I’ve been running back and forth to the hospital, fielding phone calls, dealing with a dog with some kind of digestive issue, and looking at some of the damnedest ethics stories I’ve ever seen ( like this: “UFO shot down by $400K US missile may have been a $12 hobby balloon: report”), so I came within a hair of forgetting to open today’s Friday Open Forum.

Not knowing it was Friday didn’t help.

These have been excellent lately. Keep it up!

Friday Open Forum If You Have The Stomach For It…

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I have to confess, this past week has me feeling overwhelmed. There may have been other weeks where the mendacity, corruption and hypocrisy were more apparent, and the prospects for a healthy nation and an ethical culture seemed dimmer, but I must have repressed those memories.

Yesterday, fraudulent GOP House member George Santos said that he had “led an honest life,” Joe Biden excused the latest discovery of classified documents in his garage by saying the garage was “locked,” and three more Virginia high schools admitted that they had withheld notice of National Merit Scholarship awards from students. The school superintendent, who is an DEI consultant and who pledged to seek “equal outcomes” for all students, swears these were independent, unrelated “mistakes.” All made by six high schools in her state. Coincidentally.

Give me hope today.

First Open Forum Of 2023!

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Here is as good a place as any to note, since Ethics Alarms is also concerned with leadership as a sub-category to ethics, that Kevin McCarthy’s only ethical course at this point is to withdraw from the Speaker of the House race. It is clear that he cannot lead Republicans in the House, and the compromises and concessions he will need to make to get the support of the 20-plus member faction that opposes him would cripple his leadership as well as his party. Now it’s just selfishness, obstinacy and ego that has him holding on. None of those are ethical reasons to inflict yet another weak GOP Speaker on the nation.

McCarthy’s allies should also recognize this and 1) shut up or 2) move on. One, of course, is Donald Trump who can’t shut up, but who should be completely irrelevant to the Speaker battle. Another is Sean Hannity. It’s depressing that such a dim-wattage Fox News pundit as Hannity has the influence he does, and he proved his Peter Principle creds again in an argument on the air with conservative House member and anti-McCarthy leader Lauren Boebert. Sean apparently thought he had a “gotcha!” by calling Boebert on her statement that McCarthy should just give it up because he didn’t have the votes to win the Speakership. “But he has over 200 votes, and your group has just 20!” Hannity replied. “Shouldn’t you be the ones who give up?”

Uh, it’s like a filibuster, Sean, you dummy. Or a veto. The 20 don’t represent an alternative to McCarthy; they don’t have to elect a candidate to win. Their purpose is to block his ascension to the job, and they have enough votes to do it.

And this guy was advising President Trump…..

Anyway, you talk about what you want. I just needed to get that out. As Jimmy Durante would say, “It showed up on my last X-ray as a safety pin!”

Pre-Christmas Ethics Forum: Tell It!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Admittedly, Ethics Alarms is more of a little hill than a mountain, but solid ethical analysis has a way of traveling.

Besides, I’m trying…