Tag: ethics

Raphael Warnock Slapped With Ethics Complaint for Living in Free $1 Million Luxury Home

When it comes to the lavish $1 million Atlanta home where Sen. Raphael Warnock has lived rent-free since 2023, the Georgia Democrat can’t expect to have his cake and eat it too, an ethics watchdog alleged in a complaint filed Monday.

Warnock’s lavish DeKalb County home came equipped with a plethora of luxury accommodations, including a 100-bottle wine fridge, a bluetooth-enabled cooking range, and remote-controlled privacy curtains. The senator hasn’t paid a penny out of his own pocket to live there because the church where he serves as a part-time pastor is footing the bill, the Washington Free Beacon reported. It’s a great deal for Warnock, but it may violate Senate ethics rules that limit how much lawmakers can accept from outside employment, the ethics watchdog Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) alleged in a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee.

“This is a matter of plain common sense,” FACT executive director Kendra Arnold said in the complaint. “It is difficult to fathom [how] any citizen could look at this situation (a U.S. Senator being a part-time employee of an organization that happens to buy him a million-dollar house to live in for free after he was elected to Congress, and after which he sells his own house) and not think something potentially very wrong is afoot.”

In her complaint, Arnold said Warnock’s free luxury housing arrangement likely violates the Ethics in Government Act, which could carry a range of sanctions for the Georgia Democrat including public reprimand, fines, or censure. She said Senate ethics rules only allow for Warnock’s free housing deal if it’s customary for Ebenezer Baptist Church to provide free luxury homes to its part-time pastors and if it’s something the church provided to Warnock independently from his position as a senator.

Those requirements “have not been met,” Arnold said in her complaint, noting that the value of Warnock’s housing benefit appears to far exceed the part-time nature of his work with the church.

“Especially given the limited amount of time Senator Warnock has for outside employment and the $31,815.12 annual salary he receives from the church in addition to the housing, it appears clear that the housing is excessive and unreasonable for the services he is actually performing,” Arnold wrote.

Arnold’s belief that Warnock’s housing benefit is excessive is shared by Dr. Albert Paul Brinson, a former associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was ordained at Ebenezer Baptist Church by the civil rights icon in 1965. Brinson said during an interview with a local activist in March that King “would have never endorsed” church funds being used to facilitate luxury living for its pastor. Brinson said Ebenezer Baptist Church’s housing allowance was designed to provide modest accommodations for its pastors.

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Gaetz Ethics Inquiry Takes Dubious Turn

Amid the hurly-burly of presidential dropouts, attempted presidential assassinations, and novel presidential conventions, the gears of Washington grind on. 

A sideline moment of the winding last week in Wisconsin was a direct confrontation between Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his pet aversion, the former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. 

“What night are you speaking?” Gaetz quizzed McCarthy. “Are you speaking tonight?” 

“If you took that stage, you would get booed off of it,” he added. “You would get booed off the stage.” In a game-after interview with CNN, McCarthy shot back: “[Gaetz] looks very unhinged.” 

The representative from Florida’s First District, of course, led the successful charge last autumn to defenestrate the then-speaker. Gaetz alleged a panoply of heresies—spending issues, foreign policy, etc—where McCarthy was said to be deficient in comparison to alternatives. 

Gaetz eventually backed now-Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). 

McCarthy, as of late, has said the story is simpler. The Californian wouldn’t stop a House Ethics Committee investigation into years-old allegations against Gaetz (allegations for which he was never charged). But from the outside looking in, McCarthy’s side of the story would seem no clean tale of moral probity. 

Far from being above the fray, McCarthy in private life has initiated a “revenge tour” of sorts, attempting to primary his former foes in Congress. 

Perhaps most prominently, Charleston-area Congresswoman Nancy Mace—a former McCarthy acolyte turned ally of Gaetz et al.—survived a primary challenge in June. “I want to send him back to the rock he’s living under right now. He’s not part of America.… I hope I drive Kevin McCarthy crazy,” Mace told the Times.

Now the primary effort of the hardliners and the ethics investigation against Gaetz have apparently merged. 

Congressman David Joyce (R-OH) is a member of the House Ethics Committee, which is probing Gaetz. The American Conservative found financial disclosures that reveal Rep. Joyce’s campaign and his leadership PAC donated a combined $7,000 to Gaetz’s primary challenger, Aaron Dimmock.  

For his part, Gaetz told TAC: “It is no surprise to see Mr. Joyce, a stock-trading member of the ethics committee, funding my opponent. The ethics committee was hand picked by McCarthy and they will do his bidding in elections and in their witch hunt coming after me.” 

There is evidence here of a $2,000 transaction from Friends of Dave Joyce (his campaign committee) and then $5,000 from Defending American Values Everywhere PAC (DAVE PAC)—his leadership committee.

What comes next is unclear. 

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Further Ethical Concerns on a Recent Self-Amplifying RNA Vaccine Study

I called for the ongoing study to be ceased given the mass safety signal pointed out by The McCullough Foundation.

Today, I outline further ethical flaws:

  1. Informed Consent:
  • Participants must be fully informed about the novel nature of srRNA technology, including potential unknown long-term effects. Ensuring that informed consent is genuinely informed is critical.
  • Detailed information about the potential risks and benefits, including those observed in preclinical and early-phase clinical trials, should be provided.
  • Since the long-term risks are unknown, this seems impossible.
  1. Conflict of Interest:
  • The authors are employees of Replicate Bioscience Inc., which raises concerns about bias. The review should disclose how the conflict of interest was managed.
  • Independent oversight or review by third-party experts who do not stand to benefit financially from the vaccine should be conducted.
  1. Safety Monitoring:
  • Continuous monitoring for adverse effects is essential, especially given the novel nature of srRNA vectors.
  • Clear protocols for reporting and managing adverse events, including long-term follow-up, and plans to mitigate the ill-health effects of AEs and SAEs, must be transparent and outlined up-front.
  1. Methodological Issues

Cause of Death Determination:

  • Accurate determination of causes of death in clinical trials is crucial. There should be a standardized protocol for post-mortem analysis to ascertain whether deaths are related to the vaccine or underlying conditions. Doctors working for the company determining that the vaccine was not the cause of death is insufficient: it’s a novel vaccine: how do they know they are not confusing deaths from COVID19 with deaths from vaccines? PCR is known to be fraught with errors in this context. How do they know that the vaccine does not interact with COVID19 infection and increase mortality?
  • Independent medical reviews of cause-of-death determinations can mitigate bias.

Manufacturing Quality:

  • The article mentions impurities from poor manufacturing that lead to systemic inflammatory responses. To minimize such risks, strict quality control measures and validation processes should be in place.
  • Detailed documentation and transparency regarding manufacturing practices are essential to ensure reproducibility and safety.

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Harvard’s Disgraced Former President Claudine Gay to Teach ‘Reading and Research’ Ethics Class, Collecting $900,000 Salary

The disgraced former president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, will return to teaching this fall, less than a year after her dramatic resignation.

Gay will reportedly teach a ‘Reading and Research’ ethics class as part of her commitments to the university which entitle her to a staggering $900,000 a year salary.

Back in January, Gay was forced to resign from her position after researchers found dozens of examples of plagiarism within her academic work. She was also the subject of significant criticism after refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jew from various Harvard students.

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Pelosi, AOC, Other House Dems Hit with Ethics Complaint – Accused of ‘Repeatedly’ Misusing Funds

An ethics watchdog has filed an ethics complaint against 10 Democratic lawmakers, claiming that they are using public resources for partisan political purposes.

The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust said the Democrats “repeatedly” used official resources for political gain, according to a news release on its website, naming Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi of California, Cori Bush of Missouri, Jamaal Bowman of New York, Sean Casten of Illinois, Greg Casar of Texas, Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida, Ted Lieu of California, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ritchie Torres of New York.

Although Democratic Rep. Ayanna Presley of Massachusetts was not mentioned in the release, exhibits of her allegedly using official resources for political gain were included in the examples filed with the complaint.

“The law at issue is simple,” the release said, noting that government resources cannot be used for “campaign or political purposes.”

The release said that “official House photographs and video, government buildings, a Member’s official website and social media accounts, and anything created by government employees” are considered off-limits.

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The E In EPA Certainly Isn’t For ‘Ethics’

If President Biden is serious about finding a renewable energy source, he should look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA’s door revolves fast enough to power the nation for decades, with the rate of spin exceeded only by the attempts to provide cover over possible ethics missteps.

Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has developed an extensive file of probable ethics violations by senior EPA officials. Many of these violations appear to occur because the EPA has ignored or sidestepped rules governing “the revolving door” between government and the private sector, though they certainly don’t stop there. As our Ethics Waiver Report demonstrated, the Biden Administration has perfected the practice of recruiting appointees from the universe of aligned environmental activist groups, state agencies, and universities. The inevitable conflicts of interest are buried under a blizzard of ethics waivers and then, after putting in enough time to learn the federal ropes, some go back to more lucrative and senior positions outside.

For example, Casey Katims joined EPA from Washington State where he worked for Governor Jay Inslee, who helped create the U.S. Climate Alliance (USCA). As EPA’s deputy associate administrator for intergovernmental relations, Katims kept extremely close relations with USCA and eventually left EPA to join it as executive director.

Melissa Hoffer departed the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office to become acting General Counsel at EPA, where she was given a waiver to participate in 37 pending matters involving Massachusetts. When she left the EPA, she ignored her obligation to timely advise the ethics office of negotiations to rejoin Massachusetts government as its first-ever “Climate Czar.” That failure is likely a violation of the Stock Act (a criminal statute) – inexcusable for a senior lawyer with Hoffer’s experience and responsibilities. It was made worse by the career agency ethics official, Justina Fugh, designated to enforce the rules. Sadly, this is far from the only incident in which Ms. Fugh appears to have played a central role in moving the goalposts to thwart violations from landing on senior officials.

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The Supreme Court ‘Ethics’ Scandal Is The New Russia-Collusion Hoax

Senate Democrats are advancing a doomed Supreme Court “ethics” bill that would withhold $10 million in funding from Chief Justice John Roberts until the Supreme Court has “put into effect a code” for all justices.

The Senate doesn’t have the power to dictate how the Supreme Court conducts its business — any more than SCOTUS has the power to prescribe rules for the Senate. They know it. Then again, the effort to intimidate and delegitimize the court is meant to corrode constitutional governance, so perhaps the bill makes a certain amount of perverse sense.

Of course, turning to the likes of Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin for ethical guidance is much like seeking truth from Adam Schiff. And much like the Russia-collusion hoax, the effort to destroy the Supreme Court is a highly coordinated partisan scheme.

First, anti-court left-wing activist groups cook up some ethics “scandals.” These accusations are then laundered by complicit or credulous leftist media outlets for public consumption. Then, the bogus scoops are held up by partisans as proof of alleged wrongdoing. Everyone, other than perhaps the most gullible partisan hysteric, understands what’s happening.

Each week another ethics “scandal” emerges, one dumber than the next. The stories are divvied out among numerous outlets to saturate the news and create a perception of widespread wrongdoing. Some, such as ProPublica, are paid by pack-the-court groups. Others, such as Politico, Slate, and The New York Times, do it for free.

A recent Guardian hit piece on Clarence Thomas, for example, offers a good example of how all this works. The justice, the paper excitedly reports, received “seven payments” through Venmo accounts in November and December 2019 from lawyers who had once clerked for the justice. Though the amounts were not disclosed — one strongly suspects the minuscule sums would make the story even more preposterous — The Guardian explains that “the purpose of each payment is listed as either ‘Christmas party’, ‘Thomas Christmas Party’, ‘CT Christmas Party’ or ‘CT Xmas party.’”

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The Four Pillars of Medical Ethics Were Destroyed in the Covid Response

Much like a Bill of Rights, a principal function of any Code of Ethics is to set limits, to check the inevitable lust for power, the libido dominandi, that human beings tend to demonstrate when they obtain authority and status over others, regardless of the context.

Though it may be difficult to believe in the aftermath of COVID, the medical profession does possess a Code of Ethics. The four fundamental concepts of Medical Ethics – its 4 Pillars – are Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice.

Autonomy, Beneficence, Non-maleficence, and Justice

These ethical concepts are thoroughly established in the profession of medicine. I learned them as a medical student, much as a young Catholic learns the Apostle’s Creed. As a medical professor, I taught them to my students, and I made sure my students knew them. I believed then (and still do) that physicians must know the ethical tenets of their profession, because if they do not know them, they cannot follow them.

These ethical concepts are indeed well-established, but they are more than that. They are also valid, legitimate, and sound. They are based on historical lessons, learned the hard way from past abuses foisted upon unsuspecting and defenseless patients by governments, health care systems, corporations, and doctors. Those painful, shameful lessons arose not only from the actions of rogue states like Nazi Germany, but also from our own United States: witness Project MK-Ultra and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

The 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics protect patients from abuse. They also allow physicians the moral framework to follow their consciences and exercise their individual judgment – provided, of course, that physicians possess the character to do so. However, like human decency itself, the 4 Pillars were completely disregarded by those in authority during COVID.

The demolition of these core principles was deliberate. It originated at the highest levels of COVID policymaking, which itself had been effectively converted from a public health initiative to a national security/military operation in the United States in March 2020, producing the concomitant shift in ethical standards one would expect from such a change. As we examine the machinations leading to the demise of each of the 4 Pillars of Medical Ethics during COVID, we will define each of these four fundamental tenets, and then discuss how each was abused.

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Smollett Testifies CNN’s Lemon Warned Him Police Were Suspicious Over Alleged FAKE Racist Attack

Days after CNN fired Chris Cuomo for abusing his position to help feed information to his sex pest accused brother, it appears that another host, Don Lemon, could become the centre of another journalistic ethics scandal.

Reports indicate that Lemon was pinpointed by Empire star Jussie Smollett who claimed in court that he received texts from the CNN host warning him that police believed Smollett had faked his own attack in February 2019.

Smollett was indicted by a grand jury for staging a racist violent attack on himself and blaming it on Trump supporters.

Witnesses inside the courtroom revealed the details of the testimony.

The Daily Mail reports that the details about Lemon were stricken from the record, writing “Testifying in court on Monday, Smollett, 39, claimed he had been in contact with CNN’s Don Lemon during the early stages of the CPD investigation.”

The report adds that “In a remark that was presented and then struck from the record, he said things began to seem off when he received a text message from Lemon claiming the Chicago police had reached out to him to say they didn’t believe Smollett. “

Don Lemon discussed the case Monday night on his show with CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez (he who uttered the infamous line “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”) but both failed to mention that Lemon’s own name had been brought up by Smollett during the hearing.

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How Unethical Were the Prosecutors Trying to Put Kyle Rittenhouse in Prison? Let Us Count the Ways…

Let’s go over just a few of the things these weasels did to Kyle Rittenhouse.

District Attorney Michael Gravely chose to bring a case against someone with a clear-cut case of self-defense. Voters should do something about that guy in the next election.

Gravely’s hand-picked attack dogs, Binger and Kraus, lied throughout the process and never resisted and revised the charges to reflect new information uncovered in their case.

The case was overcharged. Even Daily Caller reporter Ritchie McGinnis, who appeared to be hiding behind a car when Rittenhouse shot Joseph Rosenbaum to preserve his life, thought reckless endangerment charges on his behalf were uncalled for.

Defense attorney Mark Richards told reporters after the verdict that putting on the Khindri brothers, the owners of Car Source, was a lie to the world — and they knew it — so that Binger could further the fiction that Rittenhouse and his buddies were never asked to come and protect the buildings that night. PJ Media’s Megan Fox does a total takedown of this outrage. We were on to them the whole time.

Kyle Rittenhouse lived in the area. He was not a “chaos tourist” or “vigilante.” He was a good kid who came to help his, yes his, community. Rittenhouse worked in Kenosha. His dad lived in Kenosha. His friends lived in Kenosha. He lived 17 minutes away in a border town in Illinois. More than half the people who work in Washington, D.C. don’t live there. Let’s ban them, those damned chaos tourists.

The gun used in the shootings was purchased with Rittenhouse’s money by a good friend, Dominick Black, who kept the gun in his dad’s gun safe in Kenosha with the plan to sell it to Rittenhouse when he turned 18. That young man is on trial in Kenosha for procuring that gun. He testified that if he helped the prosecution he might get a better deal from Thomas Binger in his case. Do tell.

The gun was legal. Prosecutors kept up the farce that it was not legal for more than a year until the last possible moment — before the jury got the case. That lie launched a thousand Leftist conspiracy theories. It needn’t have. They could have read the law and learned the truth. Looking at you, Bill de Blasio, you big tub of goo, and Jerry Nadler.

Thomas Binger and Jim Kraus withheld witnesses from the night in question. They lied. LIED — about the name of the man who provided drone video of the shooting of Joseph Rosenbaum. They knew who it was the whole time and then lied straightfacedly to the judge saying, “Gee, your honor we had no idea.” Of course, we later found out that the man’s name was on the witness list the whole time.

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