Jack Abramoff’s Fall from Disgrace In 2005, Jack Abramoff was the most influential lobbyist in our nation’s capital. He then suffered a fall from grace and today, with an amazing trifecta, may have cemented his reputation as the most infamous lobbyist of all time. First, Abramoff’s corrupt actions as the most powerful lobbyist in America in the late 1990s and […] View
A Failure of Moral Imagination Thousands of Americans have been shocked over the past few days as they watched a video of a white woman near Torrance, California as she targeted a racist rant at a young woman of Filipino ancestry: Get the f*** out of this world, get the f*** out of this state and go back to whatever […] View
Black Lives Matter: “I don’t think we get another chance to fix this” These are trying and emotional times, which is to be expected after we have all seen videos of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdering an unarmed black man, George Floyd, over the course of nine minutes right in front of our eyes. If this tragic event does not open all our eyes to the evils […] View
“Working the System” – Euphemisms Inflict Collateral Damage on Integrity Operation Varsity Blues is just about in our rearview mirror. Most of the 56 people indicted in this college admissions scandal have pled guilty. Yesterday (May 21, 2020), the highest profile defendants, actress Lori Loughlin (“Aunt Becky” of the TV series Full House) and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, changed their not guilty pleas, […] View
Can COVID-19 Help Us Be More Ethical? There is so much bad news caused by the pandemic these days—infections, deaths, depression (mental and economic)—that many of us find ourselves hunting for every little bit of good news. In a recent blog post, attorney Jeffrey Kaplan found a silver lining in all our quarantining and social distancing by suggesting that working from home […] View
COVID-19’s Moral Harm On April 27, 2020, we learned that Dr. Lorna Breen, head of the ER at a New York City hospital, committed suicide after fighting on the front lines in the coronavirus battle. Just two days earlier, John Mondello, a Bronx EMT, also took his own life after witnessing the human tragedies that seem ubiquitous on […] View
The Dangerous Moral Superiority of Physical Distancers Many people spent Easter weekend worshiping in the Church of Anthony Fauci. These “Faucians” did not attend any actual services at physical places of worship, because their sacraments include self-quarantine and physical distancing rather than communion, wearing face masks and gloves rather than hijabs or yarmulkes, and baptizing delivered packages in disinfectant rather than new […] View
Moral Injury As with so many of our blog posts, this one is prompted by a recent book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. This highly-regarded book is about the troubles (and more) in Northern Ireland. The detailed descriptions of the violent struggles and political battles between […] View
Astros: Sign-stealing Is Still Stealing In 2017, the Houston Astros brought great pride to the State of Texas by winning the World Series. It was especially satisfying, as a rags-to-riches tale. In 2011, 2012, and 2013, the Astros were the worst team in baseball. By 2015, however, the ‘Stros were in the Major League Baseball (MLB) playoffs, and won it […] View
Naked and Ashamed We ordered Krista K. Thomason’s book, Naked. You can imagine our disappointment when it arrived and was not the coffee table book we’d envisioned. OK, that was the lame joke we were thinking about beginning this blog with until we realized that some people might take offense and we would be ashamed that we had […] View