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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 05 april 2019

‘Completely Exonerated’

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Something is rattling the president and causing his behavior to become even more erratic than his default mode of mental instability warrants.  This week he cut all financial aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, against the advice of experts who argued that it will bring only more asylum seekers to the southern border.  Subsequently he threatened to close that entire border, in spite of the serious damage that would do to the US economy, and he complained that Puerto Rico, a US territory but referred to as ‘that country’ by a White House spokesperson, had received far too much aid after Hurricane Maria, according to Trump $91 billion while the real number is $11 billion.   In a speech at a fundraiser the president said that he loved Germany because his father was born there, apparently no longer aware of the fact that Fred Trump was born in the Bronx, and in a Q&A with the White House press corps he tried to talk about the ‘origins’ of the Mueller investigation, but twice misspoke and referred to the ‘oranges’ of the probe, making even the most long-faced correspondents chuckle and getting multiple replays on the political talk shows.

There were plenty of reasons for the president to be discombobulated: Attorney General William Barr’s refusal to make the full, unredacted Mueller report available to Congress is beginning to look more and more like a white-wash and forced the House Judiciary Committee to authorize its chairman to subpoena the report.  And while Trump was also back-peddling on his generous promise that the whole report would be made public members of Mueller’s team indirectly informed the New York Times that Barr had failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry, which were more troubling for Trump than the AG had indicated.  It was the first time tension between Barr and the Special Counsel’s office was aired publicly, and if the Justice Department and the White House were trying to pull off the mother of all cover-ups by letting the narrative that the president had been completely exonerated take hold before more damaging information would become available they have failed already, because only 29% of the population, even less than Trump’s 33% base, believes in his innocence, 40% does not, and 31% still doesn’t know what to think.

Adding to the president’s discomfort was the information from a whistle blower in the White House Personnel Security Office that at least 25 staffers – Jared Kushner among them – received security clearances that were initially denied because of concerns about potential blackmail, foreign influence, conflicts of interest, questionable or criminal conduct, financial issues and drug abuse.  The House Oversight Committee authorized a subpoena for Carl Kline, the official who had played a key role in reversing security clearance decisions.

To make a bad week even worse for Trump the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee asked the IRS to release the president’s tax returns for the last six years to him by April 10^th.  By law the committee is entitled to this information but it is to be expected that a subpoena and then a lengthy court battle will follow the request, drawing Treasury Secretary Mnuchin into a fight with the House.  Trump meanwhile insists that his returns are still under audit.

Unexpectedly the president announced that he would not develop a health care plan before November 2020, making it the number one election issue, and today he travels to California to unveil a plaque with his name on it on a new section of the wall.  The construction of that section was approved by Obama, whose name should therefore have been on that plaque.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 04 april 2019

Programmamakers in wording

Ik vond een aantal oude mappen, die in één doos zaten. Mappen met gegevens van stagiaires. Het waren er 72. 
Bij vrijwel al die mensen heb ik nog beeld. Ik was bijna altijd eindredacteur van programma’s en dan vielen die stagiaires direct of indirect onder mij.

      Er was zeer veel belangstelling voor stageplaatsen bij de VPRO. We hadden het maar voor het uitkiezen.
Natuurlijk studenten van de diverse journalistieke opleidingen (HBO & Universitair) , maar er was ook interesse uit allerlei andere studierichtingen.
       De meeste stagiaires kwamen voor drie maanden, maar er waren ook zogeheten snuffelstages, die vaak niet langer dan een week duurden.
Er zaten vaak goede studenten tussen. Mensen die ik nog regelmatig in kranten tegen kom, op de radio hoor of op de televisie zie.
        Maar de meesten zijn uit ''mijn'' zicht verdwenen. 

Niet altijd liep zo’n stage goed af.
      Er zaten soms studenten tussen zonder enige aanleg voor dit vak.
Over zo’n geval schreef ik -het was 1986- eens een stukje in de VPRO-Gids.

En voor de jongeren onder ons:
      Het Gebouw was een radioprogramma van de VPRO, dat van oktober 1984 tot oktober 1993 iedere vrijdag van ‘s ochtends zeven tot ‘s middags half vijf werd uitgezonden. En een telex-boodschap was een zeer ouderwets soort E-mail.

 Eerder geplaatst september 2012)

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 29 maart 2019

The Mueller Mess

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Immediately after Attorney General Barr’s four page letter with conclusions from the Mueller report became available Trump started lying about it, claiming that he had been ‘completely exonerated.’  In fact, the letter said that no criminal conspiracy had been established, but that the Special Counsel had not been able to exonerate the president with regards to obstruction of justice.  In Mueller’s  place Barr decided to exonerate Trump, which is not surprising since the Attorney General got his job because of his conviction, expressed in an unsolicited memo last summer, that Mueller could not investigate the president for obstruction of justice, a peculiar opinion because both Nixon and Clinton were accused of obstruction of justice in impeachment procedures.  Considering that the Special Counsel was installed to prevent political appointees from making such calls Barr was way out of line, and his curveball made observers question the rest of his reporting to Congress.  We’ll have to wait at least weeks for the lengthy report that 82% of Americans want to see to become public, and as for the counter-intelligence origins of the probe we may never know how deeply compromised Trump is.

It is not surprising that Mueller didn’t conclude that there had been an organized conspiracy with the Russians, because the Trump campaign from the beginning of the probe looked like the Keystone Cops of collusion, and the Russians, who are great at hacking but not at conspiring, probably didn’t want to get too chummy with  a bundle of amateurs they didn’t need to interfere with the US elections.  Instead of continuing to be delighted with Barr’s version of Mueller’s main findings Trump got into a vicious rage, and subsequently accused his Democratic opponents of treason, asked the TV networks no longer to invite his critics on their shows, announced an investigation of the investigators, and eventually blamed the probe on Obama.  Maybe to give it to his predecessor one more time, the next day the president decided to no longer defend Obamacare in court but instead to ask for it to be totally dismantled, against the advice of his AG, his Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Minority Leader of the Republicans in the House.  At least the latter understands that without a replacement that Republicans have not been able to develop since 2010 this is a suicidal move.

Other than his need to undo everything Obama has achieved there is ample speculation about Trump’s motives here.  Some observers think that he cannot do without a fight, and that because he considers the Mueller fight over he has moved on to the next one.  According to others Trump feels invincible and believes that he can now do anything, including taking coverage away from 20 million poor Americans, scrapping protections for pre-existing conditions and taking young adults off their parents’ insurance.

Trump’s latest attack on Obamacare is a godsent for the Democrats, who were divided between those who wanted to strengthen Obamacare and those who wanted ‘Medicare for All’ immediately, and who are now united in the first position.  Since the legal fight about Obamacare will stretch well into 2020 it will be the most important election issue, and since the Democrats control the House they are in charge of health care legislation.

In spite of Trump’s trumpeting that ‘the Russia Hoax’ is over, according to recent polling 56% of Americans don’t believe that Trump has been exonerated, and his approval rating is stuck at 41.6%.  In Michigan, a state Trump desperately needs in 2020 where he held a rally last nigh, only 31% of the voters would re-elect him.  The man is not really winning.

 
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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 25 maart 2019

John McCain Is Dead

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

And somebody should tell Donald Trump that.  Over the last weekend the president launched a full out Twitter attack on the late senator, starting with criticizing his grades at the Naval Academy, then blaming him for having provided the Steele dossier to the FBI to affect the result of the 2016 presidential election, and finally saying that McCain had told the White House he would support the repeal of Obamacare before casting the deciding vote to uphold it.  The latter two statements were verifiable lies.  McCain gave the dossier to the FBI after the election because he felt obliged to do so, and he had been signaling that he might oppose the repeal for some time.  Disparaging a war hero who died seven months ago was a new sub-human low for Trump, but the Twitter storm didn’t end there.  Subsequently he denounced General Motors for planning to close its Lordstown, Ohio plant, Saturday Night Live that ‘should be investigated’ for making fun of him, FOX News for suspending Judge Jeanine Pirro after her questioning a Muslim congresswoman’s patriotism, Robert Mueller, and later in the week George Conway, Kellyanne’s husband.

The president was obviously scared, first of Mueller’s upcoming report and then probably even more of the Southern District of New York’s investigation.  He doesn’t know what they have on him, but he knows what he did, and that is apparently enough to get him into panic mode.  In a Q&A on the White House lawn Trump observed that nobody elected Mueller, while he had ‘the greatest election victory ever.’ He lied that he had turned down Mueller as a candidate to run the FBI, while Mueller had not been interested and only visited the White House as a courtesy, and he mentioned a ‘nasty business dispute’ he had had with Mueller, which was about the membership fee of one of his golf courses that Mueller considered too high.  Trump fears that Mueller may de-legitimize his presidency, but even more frightening must be the recent disclosure of a search warrant by the SDNY concerning the campaign finance law violations for which Michael Cohen will go to jail.  The document has eighteen completely redacted pages with information about ongoing investigations that can only be into Trump and Don Jr., who might be indicted soon.

As for indicting Trump the Department of Justice is facing a dilemma.  Per one of its policies a sitting president cannot be indicted, but if Mueller would prove that Trump committed crimes to get into the Oval Office, it is questionable if he is entitled to its protections.  Additionally, if someone is not indicted information about that person is always withheld, but if the only reason why Trump is not indicted is that he is the president, all information about his criminal behavior should be made available to Congress so that it can consider impeachment, which is a political penalty.

Almost as bizarre as the president’s attack on McCain was his Twitter altercation with George Conway, a prominent conservative lawyer who had posted a document identifying the symptoms of Trump’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Trump consistently called him ‘Mr. Kellyanne Conway,’ in an obvious attempt at emasculation, and referred to Conway as a ‘spouse from hell’ and a ‘stone cold loser,’ for not getting a job at the Justice Department that Conway himself had turned down.

Friday afternoon Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr, who had to decide how much of it will be made public.  On Sunday Barr informed Congress that the Special  Counsel had concluded that the president had not committed the crime of conspiring with the Russians, but that the report also doesn’t exonerate him with regards to obstruction of justice.  There are no new indictments.

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