An ideal new job for NBC’s Brian Williams & others’ ethical challenges

1) Why not get Brian Williams a job as a fact checker for The New Yorker? The magazine is famous for its zealous fact checkers. Williams will have had plenty of experience in sorting out truth from fiction, whatever the outcome of NBC’s investigation into his apparently inaccurate statements over the years as both reporter and anchor.

2) Amid the recent controversy over the New England Patriots’ deflated footballs, Governor LePage called the Patriots ethically challenged. The proverbial pot calling the kettle black. Who writes his material?

3) Mitt Romney’s recent decision not to seek the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential nomination came not long after his assertion that he would focus his next presidential campaign on reducing poverty in America. At the same time, as detailed in the Boston Globe of  January 28, 2015, Mitt was having built  not one but two multimillion-dollar homes, in on the Pacific Ocean and the other outside Salt Lake City.   Mitt also owns a slopeside ski chalet in Park City, Utah, and a vacation home in New Hampshire.  Maybe Mitt’s notion of reducing poverty actually referred to the sale of his longtime mansion sold in June 2014.  (To be sure, he purchased it in 2010 for nearly $900,000 and sold it for $1.2 million.)

4) Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, once again seeking the Republican presidential nomination, argues that sexual orientation is a matter of choice, not of genetics or culture or parts of both. It is, he claims, the equivalent of choosing to drink alcohol or to use profanity.  Does “choice” also apply to Governor Huckabee’s  pardon  of dangerous criminals against the wishes of state  parole officials several years ago?  Thanks to this  holier than thou would-be President, four police officers were shot dead in 2009 near Tacoma, Washington, by that criminal as they sat at a restaurant, without a chance to defend themselves. Just a matter of “choice,” eh?