open forums

Friday Open Forum: Try To Be More Astute Than The Washington Post (It Won’t Be Difficult)

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Before turning the stage over to all of you (on Fridays “all” is hyperbole), I have to let you gawk at this, smoking gun evidence 1) of why I stopped getting the Post delivered to my front lawn; 2) that bias makes you stupid, and by “you” I mean especially Trump-Deranged Washington Post pundits; and 3) that the mainstream media thinks Americans are morons. Note the giggly, lowest common denominator tone of this piece of junk.

This is a gift article from me, meaning you don’t have to pay for it like I do. Its title is “How in the world is Trump’s trial not hurting him?” How in the world can even Washington Post Trump-hating columnists ask such a stupid question?

Well, you can muse on that mystery if you choose. I have a Serbian/Canadian podcast on conflicts of interest to do, and no, I’m not joking.

Early Friday Open Forum on Thursday!

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Gah! I have a Zoom legal ethics program om professionalism to teach in about 30 minutes and overslept, so you’ll have to hold down Fort Ethics until I can get a post up around noon. Sorry!

Revolutionary Open Forum, Friday, April 19, 2024

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“On the 18th of April in ’75…Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.” I was going to post all of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (the first substantial poem I ever memorized) yesterday, but, as usual, stuff happened. That means today is the 19th of April, a date banged into the heads of children living in Arlington, Massachusetts like me, the anniversary of the ugly little battle that took place just up Massachusetts Avenue a bit on Lexington Green, that officially started the Revolutionary War.

700 British troops were marching on a mission to capture traitors/patriots John Hancock and Samuel Adams and seize a rebel arsenal when they were blocked by 77 Minutemen under Captain John Parker. British Major John Pitcairn ordered ragtag army to disperse, but the proverbial shot rang out, everybody started firing their muskets, and a few minutes later eight Colonists were dead or dying and ten more were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but at around 7 am the same fateful day, the Redcoats got what was coming to them a little further up the road, at Concord Bridge.

One subsidiary benefit of memorizing “Paul Revere’s Ride” is that I’ll never forget that famous day and year, or the day after it. I wonder how many of today’s public school-educated children, even those in neighboring Arlington, know the significance of April 19. Heck, I wonder if it will be mentioned in the mainstream media’s blathering today at all. It would be a good day for the President of the United States to use his “bully pulpit” for something positive and remind everyone, but no, these days that platform is reserved to call half the nation fascists.

I digress, however. Celebrate the beginnings of America by taking about ethics, for this is the only nation in the world that was created to embody ethical principles and to model ethical values.

That battle rages on.

‘Thank God It’s the Friday Open Forum!’ (TGITFO)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Yikes. Once again, the Ethics Alarms attic is chaos, and I am waaaay behind in covering important ethics stories, breaking ethics stories and developments in recent ethics stories I did get around to. Yesterday, for example, we learned that LA Dodger two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani’s good friend and interpreter stole 16 million bucks from the player to cover his illegal gambling problem, not “just” four million.

I’m hoping the Wisdom of Crowds can help clear the metaphorical decks today.

Friday Open Forum: I’m a Moron, and You’ll Do Better

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Life competence lesson learned: Always bring your cell phone.

Resisting “progress” on principle is a self-defeating and futile exercise, not to mention stupid. I find the cultural influences of smart phones particularly, cell phones generally, toxic, deplorable and obvious, as I have noted periodically here before. Thus I only use the thing when I have to, eschewing doing business on it, keeping my email account off of it, and restricting its use to online research and actual phone calls and texts. (I have never used the camera). The remote guidance system has been useful several times too, and would have saved me an ordeal last night. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t take my phone to a performance by the Georgetown Gilbert and Sullivan Society, still producing shows after 51 years (which is how long ago I founded the group as a defiant first year law student), because I detest hearing phones sound during theatrical performances, especially mine.

Everything was going swimmingly by the end of the evening: the oroduction of the musical “Cinderella,” was really good, the student talent was exhilerating, boding well for the group’s future, the audience was large and enthusiastic, and it was nice to have positive thoughts about the Law Center for a change. Then, a bit fatigued at 11:15 pm, I took the wrong exit on the way home (on a route I have navigated literally hundreds of times without incident) and ended up completely lost in the bowels of D.C.

Trust me, you don’t want to be in the bowels of D.C.

Even using the Capitol as a visual guide, it took me 45 extra minutes to find my way home, by which time I was furious at myself, hoarse from screaming epithets at the stop lights ( must have hit 20 of them), and worried about Spuds, who had already been traumatized by Grace’s disappearance and who had never been alone so long since we adopted him.

No, I do not have a good sense of direction (an understatement), and I have never been able to see street signs clearly at night. Obviously my phone’s GPS would have saved me time and terror.

I’m a moron.

Now please start discussing ethics while I continue to flagellate myself…

Open Forum, Good Riddance March Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’ll post that clip of the wonderful John Belushi at his inspired best every year, if I can remember to to.

Stupid drugs…

But I digress….fascinate me!

Friday Forum: What SHALL We Talk About Today?

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Something cheery, hopeful and encouraging? That would be nice.

A note regarding the mostly inconsequential happenings at the SOTU last night (It was interesting that Justice Thomas decided not to come, given that he is hardly in a position to want to draw attention to himself): this was the first post I put up after finding my wife’s lifeless body, and we had discussed the cynical idiocy of the concept, which Grace found gobsmacking. Last night Biden said “Hold my beer!” and announced that he has ordered the U.S. military to construct a temporary port in Gaza to facilitate hundreds of trucks of aid into the region each day….while the U.S. gives support to Israel’s war effort, which is what necessitates the aid. If last week’s Gaza-supporting actions were responsible and incompetent, and they were, what should we call this?

Conservative wag Stephen Green‘s answer: we should call it “desperately trying to keep Michigan’s electoral votes,” since there are so many Muslims and Hamas-supporters there.

Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

My sister, a rational liberal except on the topics of Donald Trump and Wuhan masks, now ends every phone conversation we have as it drifts into current affairs by exclaiming “Everything’s going to Hell! I can’t stand it!” and hanging up.

Speaking of damnation, did anyone take the time to watch the hearing yesterday (continuing today) on the Fani Willis conflict of interest allegations? Nothing happened that would justify an ethics post, although the episode again demonstrated that we have no news media organizations that can be trust to convey objectively any event with partisan implications.

Then there’s this from NBC: “Aides and allies close to former President Trump have discussed the former president giving the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address…two of the sources said that Trump himself has discussed it, but both said he is leaning against the high-profile gig.” 

Why wouldn’t the GOP do that, and why in the world would Trump not want to? Normally, nobody pays much attention to the rebuttals, because, among other things, they aren’t rebuttals but rather per-determined speeches usually delivered by blah elected officials. A Trump response would be boffo political theater, especially since in another month Joe might be reciting nursery rhymes.

But these are the things going through my fevered brain right now.

Write about any ethics topic running through yours.

Popcorn-Popping Friday Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

The theme today is going to be the fun of watching Democrats, the news media, and your Trump-Deranged friends (and mine) freak out, spin themselves dizzy, and go whataboutism bat-crazy after yesterday’s one-two punch combination to Joe Biden’s hopes of staying in the White House. Almost lost in the stunning indictment of Biden’s mental state and the prospect of a genuine and justified invocation of the 25th Amendment’s disability clause was the fact that the report probably doomed the prosecution of Trump for mishandling classified documents.

I almost dedicated this installment of the Friday Open Forum to “The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz (“Ha ha!”) I have no sympathy for Biden’s enablers, allies, paid liars, puppeteers, party or family. None. Zilch. They deserve to be mocked mercilessly, as does everyone who voted for a President who was so obviously in the twilight of senility at least as far back as 2019.

The assessment of Biden’s DOJ’s special counsel and Biden’s disastrous public address trying to debunk it arrived late enough yesterday that reeling pundits had an excuse not to write about their humiliation immediately, but Paul Krugman, the NYT’s shamelessly biased Nobel Prize-winning hack, dived right in:

“When the news broke about the special counsel’s hit job — his snide, unwarranted, obviously politically motivated slurs about President Biden’s memory — I found myself thinking about my mother. What year did she die? It turned out that I didn’t know offhand; I knew that it was after I moved from Princeton to CUNY, because I was regularly commuting out to New Jersey to see her, but before the pandemic. I actually had to look into my records to confirm that she died in 2017.

I’ll bet that many readers are similarly vague about the dates of major life events. You remember the circumstances, but not necessarily the precise year. And whatever you think of me, I’m pretty sure I don’t write or sound like an old man. The idea that Biden’s difficulty in pinning down the year of his son’s death shows his incapacity — in the middle of the Gaza crisis! — is disgusting.

As it happens, I had an hour-long off-the-record meeting with Biden in August. I can’t talk about the content, but I can assure you that he’s perfectly lucid, with a good grasp of events. And outside that personal experience, on several occasions when I thought he was making a serious misjudgment — like his handling of the debt ceiling crisis — he was right and I was wrong.

And my God, consider his opponent….

Glorious.

You can write about any ethics issue you want, as always. But pop that popcorn….