And, if she ever said that the current U.S. President asked her to destroy the VOA, the current U.S. President will throw her under the bus just like he did with the recently departed head of DHS.
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Kari Lake previews her plans for Voice of America in the next Administration.
- Thread starter Bill Betten
- Start date
And, if she ever said that the current U.S. President asked her to destroy the VOA, the current U.S. President will throw her under the bus just like he did with the recently departed head of DHS.
Aa I recall, her TV career was already fizzling out. She was a lightning rod for controversy and a pain in the ass to work with, people disliked her, and even FOX (her employer) had no desire to move her up to FOX News. Still, she spent a lot of time and effort trying to parlay her notoriety into something bigger than being a Phoenix news anchor.
The final straw was when she was on a supposed health-related leave of absence, only to be spotted networking at a big conservative convention in Florida. That's when her bosses finally decided enough is enough. Since then, she's been trying to brown-nose her way into Trump's inner circle. But, as many others have discovered, sucking up to Trump typically only goes one way. He rarely shows gratitude. And Lake was far too useless to employ in any kind of meaningful capacity. So, after excessive pandering, and to just get her out of the way, she was stashed at VOA.
What it really shows is how far down the list VOA is. An ideolog can completely destroy something in the government, disrupt thousands of lives, and no one notices until a judge rules that it was all illegal. There are lots of other places where the same thing is happening.
Not sure where Lake will end up next. The Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas is already taken.
Her current title is "special advisor" since her "acting CEO" role was removed.
Special advisor doesn't require senate confirmation. So she can basically get paid for doing nothing.
We would have been better off if she had gotten paid and done nothing.
Minister of Information for Agents of SHIELD, or something like that. Or, in other words, exile.
However, that was exactly why she was appointed. The closure of the VOA came as part of Trump's early efforts where he enlisted Musk to cut waste in the government. VOA was considered waste, and Lake was appointed "to do herself out of a job" by closing it down.
While you are correct about the President's public announcements, the fact of the matter is that the VOA (never mind last week's court ruling) is gone and Mrs. Lake is still part of this administration, though nobody is quite sure what her job actually is.
Go back to post #1 in this thread. In it, Lake talks about her goals for VOA. She also said this:
The judge says she was appointed improperly. She needed to get Senate approval. She didn't. She knew that before she took the job. The president doesn't decide what agencies to shut. That's up to congress. Given that congress has continued to fund VOA (even though its staff has been fired) says that congress doesn't agree with Musk or the president. They could have handled it the way they did CPB. They didn't, and that's why this situation exists.
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You know, we have a word for the type of political leader who can create or eliminate government agencies at his personal whim, without needing the approval of democratically elected representatives...
There are many things governments do, right down to contracts for multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers, that are done legally without the approval of elected legislators.
The term "legislators" means that those folks make laws. They don't enforce them, they don't administer the country.
In the case of many government actions and operations, such can be terminated by individual departments, often under each department's administrative law system.
As an example, licenses for stations are not granted by elected officials. They are granted under FCC rules. If there is disagreement, the situation goes before an FCC administrative law judge in an FCC court hearing.
That's why there's three branches of government. The judges decide if the administrators are following the law. In this case, they ruled against.
She's bought a condo in Davenport Iowa, and I'm seeing reports or speculations she may be trying to run for either US Senate or US House seat.
I do hope they all pile on and simply say, 'she hasn't lived here for decades, so why should we want her.'
I do hope they all pile on and simply say, 'she hasn't lived here for decades, so why should we want her.'
There's people like her there...and where she's originally from.
'There's no place like home.'
I've been hearing they're really pissed when the GOP got the bill passed to take public money to pay for school vouchers.
Only for them to discover, the price for the private school was more than the voucher, so they got screwed.
We'll see how this goes, they did have Tom Harkin from 1985 - 2015, they might put a Dem back in...
She might not even run or even get past the primary.
What you say is, in the U.S., only partially true and may be less so as I write this. The U.S. Constitution does give the legislative branch the power of the purse, meaning that if that branch doesn't like something that the executive branch is doing (i.e. building fighter jets as in the example cited), it can withhold money for that specific item in its annual budget. While I am aware that the current head of the Office of Management and Budget is suing to try to overturn this, I don't believe that even the current U.S. Supreme Court is willing to completely overturn this provision written directly in the U.S. Constitution.
Regarding the granting of radio station licenses, the FCC and its rules would have not been there were it not for the Radio Act of 1927 (creating, if memory serves, the Federal Radio Bureau) and the Communications Act of 1934 that created the FCC and set its boundaries. Put another way, all rules from the executive branch must be supported by existing laws created by Congress and signed by the President; otherwise, the third branch, the U.S. court system, would throw out those regulations as overreach.
With regard to the last phrase of the first sentence of my first paragraph, keep in mind that in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed how agencies could create regulations and said that most regulations not written specifically into the laws could be challenged in Federal court and that a Federal judge would then have to approve the challenged regulation before it could go into effect.
VOA is by no means only or even primarily on shortwave.