Eugene Deguadio, a Loudoun County, Va. lawmaker, told his 100,00 followers in the conservative nonprofit Public Advocate of the United States that the airport feel-up pat-downs (of which Ethics Alarms readers know I am so fond) are really meant to complete a Transportation Security-assisted “homosexual agenda.” “That means the next TSA official that gives you an enhanced pat-down could be a practicing homosexual secretly getting pleasure from your submission,” he wrote to the group, which he leads in his spare time. Continue reading
responsibility
Ethics Quiz: Amazon, Project Gutenberg, and Montgomery Burns
Amazon is taking public domain texts from a free site, and selling the books for profit to Kindle users.
Question: Is this ethical or unethical? Continue reading
TARP Ethics Dilemmas: A Guide For Advocates and Critics
Surprise! The TARP bailout of October 2008 seems to have turned out remarkably well. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which was and still is attacked by conservatives and Tea Party critics as a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street giants who should have been allowed to fail, is now anticipated to eventually only cost the federal government about $25 billion, according to the Government Accounting Office.
When a policy that is widely criticized as wrong-headed in principle actually works, it presents ethical problems for both advocates and critics alike.
A few helpful tips: Continue reading
The Democrats, Earmarks, and the Transparency Dodge
The arguments for continuing the irresponsible and frequently corrupt earmark process are misguided at best, and dishonest at worst. Mostly they are dishonest, Senators and House members graft appropriations in the millions for local projects that are never weighed, prioritized or evaluated in the voting process, killing budget restraint by a thousand cuts. They are also used as legislative currency, as two elected officials trade one irresponsible expenditure for a dubious state project for another.
Earmarks are an invitation to corruption, as they often are the result of thinly veiled quid pro quo arrangements. The device makes the American taxpayer the underwriter of expenditures that often have no greater purpose than to grease the skid for re-election for one more fiscally irresponsible politician. For decades, U.S. Presidents have complained about them; most since Ronald Reagan argued for the Constitutionally problematic line-item veto to combat them. Now, spurred by the recent voter revolt over out-of-control spending, the Republican Caucus in the Senate has voted to ban earmarks. The full Senate, however, with eight Republicans joining with the earmark-happy Democrats, voted down a proposed moratorium. Continue reading
Ethics Dunce: Buffalo Bills Wide Receiver Steve Johnson
Buffalo Bills wide receiver Steve Johnson dropped what would have been a game-winning touchdown pass in Sunday’s game against the Steelers, who eventually won. Rather than accepting responsibility and accountability for his failure, Johnson took to Twitter to blame…God.
His tweet shouted in indignation…
“I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!! AND THIS IS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW??? I’LL NEVER FORGET THIS!!!! EVER!!! THX THO…” Continue reading
Heeding the Christmas Season Ethics Alarms
Yes, it has come to this. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas season is a pre-unethical condition, getting worse every year. (Pre-unethical conditions are situations that experience teaches us deserve early ethics alarms, since the stage is set for habitual bad conduct.) The financial stresses on the public and the business community in 2010 will only fuel the creeping tendency to ignore the moral and ethical values that are supposed to underlie the winter holidays—charity, gratitude, generosity, kindness, love, forgiveness, peace and hope—for the non-ethical considerations that traditionally battle them for supremacy: avarice, selfishness, greed, self-pity, and cynicism. Combine this with the ideological and political polarization in today’s America and the deterioration of mutual respect and civility, and the days approaching Christmas are likely to become an ethical nightmare…unless we work collectively to stop that from happening. Continue reading
Self-Restraint in Congress: Great Idea, Little Hope
Is Congress capable of exercising discipline and self-restraint? It will have to, in everything from avoiding partisan bickering and pay-back to cutting dispensable programs with loud constituencies, if the government is to have any chance of reducing the deficit and putting the nation back on the road to fiscal responsibility. We can hope, but the signs are not encouraging.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the incoming G.O.P majority is going to try to take the symbolic step of banning honorific proclamations, on the theory that Congress passing hundreds of bills each session saluting the American pickle industry, noting the retirement of Georgia Tech’s rugby coach, or lauding the memory of actress Delores Del Rio wastes time that needs to be spent doing the real work of governing. Continue reading
Ethics and Freeing the Unjustly Convicted: A Utilitarian Controversy in Illinois
Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess and his student reporters have been carrying out a heroic and aggressive project aimed at rescuing innocent residents of Illinois’s death row. It was Protess’s Medill Innocence Project that played a major role in influencing former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s decision to halt all executions. Now, however, the Innocence Project’s methods are now under attack by its own university and Cook County prosecutors, who say the students crossed legal and ethical lines while investigating a decades-old murder.
Prosecutors claim that some of Protess’s students used surreptitious taping in an investigation, secretly recording a suspect in violation of Illinois law. Continue reading
The Kardashian Kard Saga: Proof That We Are Doomed?
In “Terminator II,” there is a scene in which young John Connor–desperately trying, along with his mother and the android killing machine sent from the future to protect the boy, to prevent the apocalyptic future that waits for him—sees young children gleefully pretending to murder each other with toy guns. “We’re not going to make it, are we?” he asks the Terminator. “People, I mean.” The fact that a bank has chosen the Trashy Kardashian Sisters to promote a credit card aimed at teenagers prompts approximately the same sense of futility. At a time of crisis in which our culture that desperately needs to encourage responsible fiscal conduct led by financial institutions we can trust, this is what we get.
We’re doomed. Continue reading
Sarah Palin Blows the Whistle On A Classic Media Bias Trick
After Sarah Palin, during a televised interview, said North Korea when she meant South Korea (me, I always mix up North and South Carolina)—an obvious slip of the tongue, since she had correctly identified our ally among the Koreas previously in the same interview, multiple media reports decided the gaffe was newsworthy, or at least another opportunity to show the American public that the former Alaska governor is, as they believe, an idiot. Palin, who is nothing if not feisty, took to the New Media with a Facebook post pointing out that equally egregious flubs out of the mouth of President Obama had been ignored, and listed some of them, including the time Obama raised the number of states to 57, momentarily confusing them with ketchup. Continue reading
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