Local attorney Scott Kuck serves on Aberdeen’s Board of Ethics (hey! there’s something I didn’t know we had!). Kuck models his ethical behavior with this social media endorsement of Donald Trump (and I apologize for the unedited vulgarity, but I want Kuck to make this point in his exact words):
I’ll keep Kuck’s preferred mode of public political discourse in mind if I ever have the pleasure of bringing a complaint before a local ethics board that includes a man who will ignore the obvious ethical failings of America’s highest elected official.
Whoa…….
Wow, I get it that folks have differing opinions on things, but whoa.
This guy is serving on Aberdeen’s Board of Ethics (and is an attorney), and doesn’t even have the smarts to use his inside voice?
Whoa
And is it worse that he is so easily persuaded by the propaganda that is being forced upon him?
Triple whoa
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trumps-ireland-golf-course-3-6-million-846009/
Drumpf and his Ireland golf course violated Drumpf’s own ethics pledge about not promoting Drumpf or properties while he is in office. They basically posted commercial type vids promoting the golf course and Drumpf.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/mitch-mcconnells-buddies-showered-with-grant-money-and-special-treatment-thanks-to-wife-elaine-chao/
Illegal pork barrel spending from the one man in America holding over 100 Dem passed congressional bills hostage.
NYT has an article explaining how McCTurtle’s wife, Sec of Transportation Chao, might be the most corrupt cabinet member in an administration more corrupt than any ever seen in South Dakota.
Unfortunately, the NYT piece sits behind a paywall.
I’m wondering about an SEC complaint about trump’s manipulation of the stock market. In particular was this last Mexico scam that lowered the market and then raised it. This is like currency manipulation but worse as people’s pensions are in the mix. This helps to prove that the fart man and republicans, are goosing the market for their own billionaire boys clubs.
#MSDGA? This is how we are making ‘Merika Great and, now SD, one dolt at a time? Confusing times when each person is allowed their own “reality.”
Trump has gone over the 10,000 mark with the lies he has told the public. That seems like occasion for great admiration among his supporters. Especially those want to rid the country of liberty, equality, and justice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/10/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/?utm_term=.da9751e61353
Omg. USD Lawyer. Whaddyah ecpect? Education isn’t everything.
…while the American people have never been more highly educated, only the wealthiest have seen large gains in real wages. From 1979 to 2017, as the average real annual wages of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 156 percent (and the top .01 percent’s wages rose by a stunning 343 percent), the purchasing power of the average American’s paycheck did not increase.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/education-isnt-enough/590611/
Where is the link to the original posting? Was this on a public social media platform? Was/Is the post public?
Ahh, I found it. Always good to read these things in context.
https://www.facebook.com/brooks.briscoe/posts/10215788460600777
Mr. Kuck’s comment sounds like what passes for ethical language in the GOP/SDGOP of the 21st century.
I wonder how he’d sound if he weren’t so SDGOP ethical?
Better not to engage fools, life is to short. No doubt, if confronted with the post at an ethics meeting, he would deny posting it.
Kuck, ethics appointee sqwacks Trump is workin for the country. Pfsst
New York Times reported on Thursday that the estranged daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the GOP operative who had “achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering,” had discovered some hard drives. Those hard drives—left in storage when Thomas died last year—revealed that Hofeller played a central role in the Trump administration’s decision to push for the citizenship question on the census. … a 2015 study found on the GOP operative’s hard drives suggested that it would do the opposite: “Adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.””
Kuck’s Facebook blabber about immigration, blacks, hispanics and women’s employment aside, “Wilbur Ross told Congress that he included the question at the behest of the Department of Justice. But Ross’s own emails later revealed it to be the other way around—the Commerce Secretary was pushing for the citizenship questions nearly a year before DOJ took it up. It was Ross and his allies in Commerce that directed the Department of Justice on the question. The administration also argued before the Supreme Court that the citizenship question would help protect Hispanic voters;
But, Hofeller’s emails reveal that the citizenship question was designed to disenfranchise them…even if it doesn’t influence the outcome in Commerce, the trove from Hofeller’s storage locker is still crucial evidence in the case against racist gerrymandering and other efforts aimed at explicitly reducing minority representation and participation. And in the case against Republican lies used in those efforts’ defense. When the GOP rails about “election integrity” and “voter fraud,” what they’re really talking about is suppressing votes—the absurd, process-driven arguments used to defend gerrymandered districts in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan, notwithstanding.”
The dirty words don’t bother me. The name-calling is juvenile, but we’ve come to expect it from Republicans. What’s most troubling is the delusion: (1) “…Hate Trump is all they have….” (2) “…he is working for the country and not for himself….” (3) “…the economy is doing fantastic….” (4)”…the stock market is still doing well….”
I certainly hate Trump. He’s contemptible, and deserving of all the hate that comes his way. But I have a lot of issues that I have major disagreements with, and those are what motivate me more than hate.
Mr. Bone Spurs “works” at his job about 4 hours per day. He doesn’t read much, if any, background material on any of the complicated issues he is responsible to manage. His major activity is ceremonial, talking on the phone to sycophants, typing out tweets to his lapdog followers, and traveling to campaign events, his golf courses and resorts, for which taxpayers foot the bill. Basically all that vacation time is him working for himself and taxpayers paying him to do so.
The economy is doing fantastic, if you are one of the 1 percent. Otherwise, not so much. Yeah, the Obama recovery continued, and jobs have maintained the Obama climb. Trump deserves some credit for not totally destroying the economy that Obama set on the right course. But remember, Trump’s goal was to have 4 percent real growth or higher. He’s gotten nowhere near that number, and is, in fact, get lower growth than Obama did. The stock market kept increasing after Obama left office, but at a slower rate under Trump. The last year has seen only 3.8% growth in stock value, barely beating inflation. The ag economy is set for a depression and record bankruptcies due to Trump’s war on agriculture.
Kuck makes a point that immigration is “out of control.” Yes, it is, but so is climate change, and that is what is driving most the Honduran immigration. Trump has done nothing to address the real causes of the Central American immigration. He even had a deal for his stupid wall, but he caved to the real purveyors of hate. The righty haters and name-callers are so dumb and incompetent, they threw away the wall!!!
See, Dana, there’s the thing: Republicans like Al Novstrup complain about people like Stace Nelson and me being mean and nasty and not obeying his noble precept of “Be nice to everyone” and thus concludes for his base that people like us who issue stern critiques of certain elected officials aren’t fit for office. Yet here in Aberdeen, conservatives like Scott Kuck spout their political gut impulses (we shouldn’t call his statements “ideas,” because Kuck isn’t thinking; he’s just regurgitating certain manly sounding snatches of national-level propaganda) in far cruder and ill-developed terms than I usually do and get to keep their positions on public boards which, in holding elected officials to high ethical standards, ought themselves to be held to the highest standards.
But you’ll never see me on the Aberdeen Board of Ethics, exerting my education and analysis of complex ethical issues. No. You’ll get Scott Kuck, who f-bombs and clown-posses the people he doesn’t like so he can noise-distract from the failings of the Manhattan bully on whom he hangs his self-esteem.
Looks as if Scott created a free-fire zone on himself. Fire away. Consider daylight carpet bombing. His self-exposed, alleged behavior may open a case against the city attorney for complicitly endorsing these positions of the city ethics committee by silently standing by.
http://www.statebarofsouthdakota.com/page/lawyer-discipline
“If you want to get the mob, get their attorneys.” Mitch McDeere in the Firm
I can imagine a number of the bloggers who comment here that would make a really good fit on this Aberdeen board, if they ever chose to move back to South Dakota and settle in the Land of Super 8 and Storybookland.
There are “ethics,” and there are “alternate ethics.”
One adheres, generally, to a “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” practice that may or may not be enforced by law.
Kuck’s–and many, many others’, adheres, generally, to no code of ethics ever published.
BUMMER! There should be no apostrophe after “others” in my previous post.
Some individual’s, I’m not sayin’ just people who wear hats like Leonard Cohens hat, are very touchy about the anus when it comes to those apostrophe’s.
“Fantastic” economy? So far Trump’s GDP growth hasn’t exceeded Obama’s https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/trumps-economic-policies-failed-to-deliver-promised-3percent-growth-in-2018.html “The stock market is still doing well?” So far it’s gone straight sideways since January 2018 and has grown 7+%, annualized, since Trump’s inauguration, which is actually lower than its long term average return https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/average-stock-market-return/ As to South Dakota’s economic gains since Trump came in, our 2018 GDP was less than half the United States’ as a whole, 1.3 vs. 2.9. What’s so “fantastic” about these results?
Quite a day. Kuck , then Rankin , and finally the G man/boy have taken civility and intelligent communications to new lows for this blog. G is smelling reliably like the lobbyist.
And they bestow JD degrees on caustic, uncivil, and obviously disreputable people like this? Not only is Trump worthy of loathing but so is this guy……. Ethics my eye.
Agreed, JW. Low class stuff, unworthy of the University of South Dakota.
Aberdeen has an ethics panel? I have lived here my entire life and I have never heard of such a group.
Learned something new today!
I disagree with what the guy was saying, but emphasizing your points with swear words doesn’t seem unethical to me. It might strike people wrong or make you sound ignorant, but he is basically saying the president’s methods have worked to better our country and he prefers a rough president who he thinks is effective over a p.c. president with communistic intent. The message is not unethical, he is just incorrect in his view of trump and comes across like somebody whose company would be impossible to enjoy.
Blew me away to, DR. I wonder: has this panel ever met and taken any action against any sort of unethical behavior?
Imagine if their first actual hearing were to discuss unethical behavior by one of their own members.
You know, Ryan, I do a fair share of swearing myself, especially around hammers and nails.
That said, there is a difference in the occasional well-placed usage of “BS!” and Kuck’s repeated and seemingly gratuitous use of foul language, not so much for emphasis or humor but as insult. Notice that in each instance of swearing in the above exceprt, Kuck is using swear words to denigrate people. He makes an assertion about his favored people, then, as if he can’t think of a really solid argument, just blows up into swearing to distract us (and maybe himself) from the absence of substance in his words:
Kuck claims Trump isn’t perfect but is better than Biden or Sanders. He has no details on that point, so he drops f-bombs on the people about whom he’s failing to make a point.
Kuck does a little better trying to cite evidence of a good economy, but he utterly misrepresents the historical record: for example, people were taxed far more during the Republican Eisenhower years, yet the economy did better then. But unable to come up with any example of proof that the Democratic agenda consists solely of imposing exorbitant taxes, Kuck falls into repeating the s-bomb, as if that gives his empty words substance.
A good speech teacher will tell you that deploying those vulgar devices is unethical rhetorical practice. Kuck doesn’t acknowledge the paucity of his argument. Kuck hides his paucity by using insulting language.
There is another aspect to resorting to foul language the way Kuck does. I generally avoid using foul language with people I’ve just met. Once I get to know people, I may use foul language a bit more freely, but even with my friends and family, I feel the need to show them respect by not filling their ears with f-this and f-that in every other sentence. Our words demonstrate our respect for the people with whom we are speaking. Failing to show respect is also an ethical failing.
I don’t want to go to a public meeting and hear Kuck using language like that above from any official dais. But my main ethical critique here is in my top line: Trumpists who excuse Donald Trump’s obvious ethical failings are in no position to serve on public boards that decide ethical matters.
Drumpf’s methods of improving America is taking credit for all the hard work of Obama and Dems the previous 8 years to save America’s ass from stoopid wingnut austerity measures that destroyed the economy.
If you wouldn’t accept someone modeling that behavior for your children, it’s probably unethical.
This is how trained professionals and ethicists speak:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-trump-robert-mueller_n_5d00f92be4b011df123dd4d3