The Daily Caller

Stop Making Me Defend Katy Perry!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Pop singing star Katy Perry has one of the longer and less complimentary Ethics Alarms dossiers among overly-influential celebrity types. Let’s see: her last appearance was as an Ethics Dunce in 2023, when she freaked out on “American Idol” over the fact that a contestant had survived a school shooting. Katy screamed, “This is not OK!,” announced that the country had “fucking failed us” and that she was “scared too.” I wrote, in part,

“That’s fine, Katy. Now go along with these nice men in the white coats, and they will help you. This is just the latest example of how celebrities degrade both the level of civic discourse on important issues and the intellectual abilities of anyone foolish enough to take them seriously. I’m pretty sure that no one, literally no one, believes that mass shootings anywhere, not just in schools, are “OK;” Perry was seeking virtue-signaling points for stating the screamingly obvious. Moreover, I am 100% certain that Perry doesn’t have the tiniest clue about how the U.S. has “fucking failed us” because of this school shooting or any schools shooting. What do you want, Katy? Martial law? No Bill of Rights? Everyone stuck going to school via Zoom forever? And if Katy Perry is ‘scared too,’ she should hire better bodyguards.”

Now Katy is being attacked from the conservative side because of a trademark dispute she won in Australia. The Daily Caller wrote in an editorial that Perry had “successfully bullied a woman in court and won, marking another unfair victory by a pretentious celebrity.” The story: An Australian woman named Katie Perry launched a fashion label using her name. Katy Perry’s real name is Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, which the Daily Caller seem to think is significant. (It isn’t.) Perry also had a trademark for clothes using Katy Perry, and sued Katie for trademark infringement, not for, as Katie describes it, using her own birth name for her brand. Katie beat Katy in the initial round, but Katy filed an appeal and won. “Now the designer has lost everything she worked so hard to build,” sobs Tucker Carlson’s news and commentary site. “This is everything that’s wrong with Hollywood.”

No, this is everything wrong with conservative media. “An innocent person can no longer operate her long-time business with her own legal name. Fake Katy Perry for the win — seriously?” says the Caller.

Ugh. The Daily Caller chose to leave out some rather important details, I’m guessing because it’s open season on show biz celebrities now that Donald Trump’s win has them seeking exile, BlueSky, or rest homes. Among the relevant facts absent from the editorial:

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Back To The Justice Thomas Scandal: Do Conservatives Really Not Understand The Appearance of Impropriety Judicial Ethics Prohibition, Or Are They Just Choosing To Ignore It?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ugh.

From the Daily Caller:

Conservative legal scholars are calling attacks on Clarence Thomas for his alleged ethics violations hypocritical in light of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s financial disclosure as a nominee, which shows she omitted portions of her income on previous filings, including money from her husband’s consulting work.

These “conservative scholars” are partisan hacks.

Their argument is that because Jackson’s SCOTUS nominee disclosure papers filed in March 2022 “inadvertently omitted” income her spouse “periodically receives from consulting on medical malpractice cases” (which was disclosed on prior reports), there is a double standard applied to conservative justices. Utter garbage, and I suspect intentionally misleading. There would be no demands for Thomas’s resignation if all that was at issue was the failure to report some ambiguous gifts on his annual disclosure forms. SCOTUS justices have done this many times in the past: it is grounds for criticism and a necessary “Sorry, I won’t do that again” statement. The reason Thomas’s 20 years of unreported vacations with ultra-conservative billionaire real estate developer Harlan Crow is that it looks bad, to the public, to objective judicial ethicists, and to me.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, April 3, 2019: Morning Disillusionment And “Morning Joe”

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Good morning!

Since this is an ethics blog, I guess I’ll have to confess that it’s really a lousy morning, since I was up until 1 AM watching the Red Sox lose to Oakland 1-0…

1. From the “Why do I bother?” Files. I’ve been complaining (too much, but it makes me feel better) about the precipitous fall in Ethics Alarms traffic  since the Trump Deranged fled the objective discussions here and Facebook decided to make it impossible to post anything I write. Yesterday, I returned to the periodic theme of teachers facing termination when their naked forms pop up on the web, including the controversial photo in question. Because of that post, and not any of the important Ethics Alarms commentary over the past 12 months that were significant and useful, the blog  had its highest traffic total in more than a year. None of the visitors had anything to say or constructive to offer, of course.

This is undoubtedly why Tucker Carlson’s website routinely includes tabloid style cheesecake features, like—let’s see what it is today—Ah! “Celebrate Amanda Bynes’ Birthday With Her Hottest Looks”! Bynes is a fallen ex-child and teen star who has been out of show-business for years because of emotional illness and drug problems.

Stay classy, Tucker.

2.  How constant political correctness immersion rots even superior brains: A case study. One of the smartest, sharpest, BS intolerant people I have ever known or ever will know just posted this approvingly on Facebook:

I am  depressed. These directives from a Montgomery County, MD sponsored community groups are largely idiotic, and like all word policing, efforts at thought and language control. My friend is a parent of two teens, but I would expect  her, of all people, to send them the lesson that they should never capitulate to this kind of sinister conditioning, which is what it is: “The Collective will tell you what you can and cannot say without sanction! Await further instructions.” Almost all of these are awkward, meaningless distinctions of the ” ‘colored people’ BAD, ‘people of color’ GOOD” variety. Continue reading →

When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Virginia Cankerworm Bill (and a Poll)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

At this point it is superfluous to name Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran an Ethics Dunce. That’s obvious, both from extreme her pro-late term abortion position, and her disingenuous, cowardly back-tracking once her callous and unethical views went viral on YouTube. This, however, requires not merely malfunctioning ethics alarms but dead political survival alarms, melted human decency alarms, and rusted-solid “How can I look at myself in the mirror?” alarms.

The same day, January 9, that Tran introduced “House Bill No. 2491 — Abortion; eliminate certain requirements,” she introduced House Bill No. 2495 – Fall cankerworm; spraying prohibited during certain months.”

No, the bills aren’t really related, except symbolically. Tran’s abortion bill aims to strip virtually all legal protections for the unborn in Virginia. Tran’s other bill adds protections for caterpillars, though the objective of the bill isn’t really the welfare of the bugs. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition is ugly and to some, telling. To full-throttle abortion advocates like Tran, unborn children might as well be worms, except that they don’t object to restrictions on worm-killing. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 2/13/18: You Can’t Get Much More Ethics Issues Variety Than This!

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2hLvqKe0V8

Good Morning!

[Mickey is really playing that piano. Boy he was amazing…]

1 A Russian Jumbo!  And it worked! In Russia, Irina Kudinova was charged with mocking the Church after she  posted a photograph that prosecutors alleged was obscene and thus constituted the “deliberate desecration of a religious object” and “insulting the feelings of believers.”   Gee, I can’t imagine why anyone would think THAT..Here’s the photo:

The judge ruled that it was merely a photo of an Easter cake and nothing more. Elephant? What elephant? Or maybe “What elephant phallus?” would be more accurate. Kudinova was awarded 20,000 rubles in a court action for false accusations.

Few cases better illustrate the principle that in Bizarro World attempts at ethical acts become unethical. The problem is that Russia has laws that discourage free speech. In order to undermine an unethical law, the judge in this case made a ruling that is obviously contrary to reality, and what anyone can see with their own eyes. If judges can ignore evidence and deny reality to protect citizens from an unjust law, then they can do the same to unjustly punish citizens who break no laws at all.

I’m happy for Kudinova, but the Russian judge is a well-intentioned ethics dunce. His solution does as much damage as good.

2. “Thanks, Mom and Dad…and bite me.” The parents of GOP Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson each gave $2,700, the maximum allowed, to the primary campaign of the Democrat their son is challenging, Senator Tammy Baldwin. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 11/2/2017: Goodbye Baseball, Hello Incompetence, And Isn’t It Nice Of Twitter Look Out For Us?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Good Morning, Everybody!

(Goodbye, baseball…)

1 The 2017 World Series ended last night, with the Houston Astros winning a hard-fought and exciting seven game battle over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Otto Von Bismarck famously observed that providence seemed to be looking out for the welfare of drunkards, fools, and the United States of America, and Major League Baseball should be added to Otto’s list. With the NFL simultaneously alienating civilized fans who don’t like seeing their heroes crippled for their entertainment, and more bloodthirsty fans who don’t want their entertainment polluted by half-baked political protests, baseball, whose ancient status as “The National Pastime” had been mocked as wishful thinking, entered the Fall at its best, and showed TV audiences a wild, passionate game featuring diverse and likeable players who seemed genuinely proud and privileged to be Americans.

Now comes the long, bleak winter…

2. From one of my smart, informed, anti-Trump obsessed progressive Facebook friends:

“So… we can talk about visa regulations right after an immigrant kills people, but we can’t talk about rational restrictions on guns when someone uses a gun to kill people?”

Rushing to take political advantage of a tragedy, as President Trump did by immediately using the terrorist attack in New York to push for his immigration reforms is, indeed, exactly as reprehensible whether it is done by Democrats or Republicans. A tactic sure looks uglier when it’s done to oppose your interests than when its done to advance them, isn’t it? (By the way, my friend, restrictions on immigration are not prohibited by the Constitution; “rational restrictions on guns,” aka “incremental elimination of the Second Amendment,” because it is now clear that this is the goal, is.)

3. A few hours after Trump’s Cabinet meeting, CNN’s Jim Acosta  asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Why did the president call the U.S. justice system a joke and a laughingstock?”

“That’s not what he said,” Sanders replied. “He said that process has people calling us a joke and a laughingstock.”

In fact, the President had indeed said at the meeting, “We need quick justice and we need strong justice — much quicker and much stronger than we have right now — because what we have right now is a joke, and it’s a laughingstock.”

Observations: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “In Which We Visit The Daily Caller To See….”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Businessmen fighting

Inspired by one of my periodic visits to the ethical, verbal and analytical wasteland of the comment section of major web news aggregators and political commentary sites, longtime Ethics Alarms participant and curmudgeonly philospher luckyesteeyoreman was moved to write a digression on what he calls the 5-la culture, a topic my dad was referring to when he said, “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.”

Confirmation bias is human problem, not a partisan one, but it is disturbing to see that partisan warfare has produced a dominent mindset where confirmation bias is regarded as an asset rather than a weakness. It is a weakness, you know.

Here is luckyesteeyoreman‘s Comment of the Day on the post, In Which We Visit The Daily Caller To See How Civil Discourse Is Proceeding On The Conservative Website…

It seems clear that large parts of public discourse in American society have been largely hijacked by diverse cults of non-thinking – but committed – self-righteously indulgent exhibitionists of what I call a culture of la-la-la-la-la, or “5-la culture.”

All of us reading here are probably very familiar with this – but where it started and how it became so popular, I don’t know. Picture: a person with their mind closed on a matter (usually, presumably), intent on blocking-out the entire world, firmly pressing the palms of his hands against his ears, elbows jutting out to their respective sides, rejecting any and all external input while making “counter-noise,” namely: “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!!”

That little “5-la” gesture says so much with so little. It is such a convenient crutch for worshiping irrationality and anarchy, and so lazily. Ethically, it perpetrates, proliferates, and perpetuates much harm most insidiously.

Continue reading →

In Which We Visit The Daily Caller To See How Civil Discourse Is Proceeding On The Conservative Website…

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

zombie bar fight

Well…not too well, actually.

Here is a representative segment of the comments on a recent post, describing Fox News’s Megyn Kelly admonishing Debbie Wasserman Schultz for demeaning Gov. Nicki Haley as being chosen by the GOP to respond to the State Of the Union message purely because she’s a woman.  Kelly suggested this was major glass-house stone-throwing, perhaps because the anointed candidate Debbie wants to run for President has little positive to offer but her lady parts, and, though Megyn was too polite to say so, the same goes for Debbie, who heads  DNC despite being a an inarticulate, dishonest dolt. Debbie, of course, retorted with gibberish, deflections and lies, her sole implements of communication. Little of this seemed to concern Daily Caller readers.

For as usual on The Daily Caller, The Daily Beast, Mediaite, Politico and so many others, here’s what the comment thread turned into after only five sort-of relevant-comments…

Ethics Dunce: Tucker Carlson (No, I Mean Seriously, This Guy Is Really, REALLY An Ethics Dunce!!!)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Oh NO!!! Tucker Carlson is trapped by a conflict of interest! I'm coming, Tucker...just hold on! I'M COMING!!!!

Oh NO!!! Tucker Carlson is trapped by a conflict of interest! I’m coming, Tucker…just hold on! I’M COMING!!!!

Tucker Carlson is the founder and publisher of the conservative commentary and news site, The Daily Caller. In this post, I recently discussed Carlson’s ethical obtuseness in pulling a column by a Daily Caller contributor because it criticized Fox News, where Carlson has a gig as a weekend host of the network’s embarrassing happy conservative talk morning news show. I wrote,

The conflicts of interest on display here, the insensitivity to them, and the lack of any pretense of journalistic fairness or integrity is staggering. Carlson has placed The Daily Caller in the same, discredited ethics no-man’s land of Media Matters, Move-on.org, the Daily Kos and other sites that blatantly distort the news and their commentary on it for specific, ideological and personal agendas, and a personal agenda is the most unethical and cynical conflict of all. Carlson likes his Fox paycheck, apparently. Well, then, his ethical obligation is to have an independent journalist edit his website. In the alternative, he needs to refuse to work for Fox unless the network agrees to allow him full reign to say and write what he believes on his website, and to allow others to do so as well.

Apparently Carlson doesn’t read Ethics Alarms—I am shocked and disappointed—and moreover, has the imagination and ethics problem-solving skills of a banana slug.  Mediaite reports that he was discussing his ethics problem with RealClearPolitics, and admitted that he was totally flummoxed about what to do, poor dear:

“I have two rules,” Carlson said, “One is you can’t criticize the families of the people who work here, and the other is you can’t go after Fox” because he works there. Sigh. “Yes, it’s a conflict, for sure…but I don’t know what to do about it.” Continue reading →

It Appears, And Not For The First Time, That Tucker Carlson And The Daily Caller Do Not Understand This Thing Called “Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson

Conservative blogger Mickey Kaus wrote a piece criticizing Fox News for not meeting its obligation (as Kaus sees it) to take on the role of media opposition on the issues of illegal immigration and amnesty, and instead, as Kaus told Politico, “filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism.”  (Kaus is wrong, but never mind) Kaus posted his commentary on the DC only to discover later that Daily Caller founder and editor Tucker Carlson had taken it down. Carlson’s explanation: “We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.'”

Indeed, Carlson, who co-founded The Daily Caller in 2010, is a conservative contributor to Fox News as well as the host of its weekend edition of “Fox & Friends,” on which he has been known to fall asleep on the air. Carlson told Kaus that the ‘no criticizing Fox News, ever’  policy was an unwaivable rule.

Kaus quit, as he should have.

The conflicts of interest on display here, the insensitivity to them, and the lack of any pretense of journalistic fairness or integrity is staggering. Carlson has placed The Daily Caller in the same, discredited ethics no-man’s land of Media Matters, Move-on.org, the Daily Kos and other sites that blatantly distort the news and their commentary on it for specific, ideological and personal agendas, and a personal agenda is the most unethical and cynical conflict of all. Carlson likes his Fox paycheck, apparently. Well, then, his ethical obligation is to have an independent journalist edit his website. In the alternative, he needs to refuse to work for Fox unless the network agrees to allow him full reign to say and write what he believes on his website, and to allow others to do so as well. Continue reading →