[y66]

From Aruna Viswanatha and Dave Michaels at wSJ:

Quote

The Justice Department is examining whether lawmakers traded ahead of the market turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic based on confidential briefings they received, according to a person familiar with the matter.

As part of that inquiry, the FBI has reached out to Sen. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), said the person.

Mr. Burr—who sits on two committees that received detailed briefings on the growing epidemic, including one on Jan. 24—sold on Feb. 13 shares of companies worth as much as $1.7 million that he owns with his wife. That saved the couple at least $250,000 in losses based on what those stocks were worth at the close of trading on March 19, the Journal has reported.

The lawmaker has said he based those decisions on public information, including CNBC’s reports out of Asia at the time, and asked the Senate ethics panel to review his trading. An attorney for Mr. Burr, Alice Fisher, said Mr. Burr would cooperate in the Senate review “as well as any other appropriate inquiry.”

“Senator Burr welcomes a thorough review of the facts in this matter, which will establish that his actions were appropriate,” said Ms. Fisher, who ran the Justice Department’s criminal division in the George W. Bush Administration.

Mr. Burr was one of several members of Congress who sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock after lawmakers attended sensitive, closed-door briefings about the threat of the new disease—weeks before the outbreak sent the stock market plummeting.

Other senators who were actively trading before the spreading infectious disease caused the markets to fall were Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia, and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Journal previously reported. The husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, also sold stock before the market downturn.

Ms. Loeffler and Ms. Feinstein, who are both married to investment professionals, said they had been unaware of the trades because they are handled by advisers. Mr. Perdue said his portfolio is managed by an investment adviser who regularly makes dozens of trades and was buying as well as selling shares of companies at the time. Mr. Inhofe in a statement said he also has an investment adviser and doesn’t manage trades.

Congress in 2012 barred its members from trading stocks based on information they pick up in the halls of Capitol Hill, a practice that wasn’t previously banned.

CNN first reported the Justice Department was looking into Mr. Burr’s trading.

Most insider trading cases involve trading based on advanced knowledge about an event affecting a specific company or industry. Mr. Burr’s share sales ranged across industries, including hotels, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and technology.

The investigation will likely focus on what information was shared in the briefing and whether it could be deemed “material,” meaning it would be highly relevant to other shareholders’ buy or sell decisions, said Doug Davison, a partner at Linklaters LLP and a former enforcement attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“The more general was the information, the easier it is to argue it wasn’t insider trading,” Mr. Davison said. But “if they said, ‘We think the hotel industry is going to need a bailout,’ the more difficult it is to say it wasn’t material.”

Mr. Burr, regarded as the Senate’s leading authority on pandemics as the author of the 2006 Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, is on the Senate health and intelligence committees, which were briefed on the coronavirus.

He is one of only three senators who voted against the 2012 legislation banning insider trading by members of Congress; he claimed at the time that it was duplicative, because insider trading was already illegal. However, experts disagreed about whether existing laws barring the practice applied to the lawmakers.

[johnu]

I feel safer because we have the Grifter in Chief leading the COVID-19 war. Nobody is sure what side he is leading, but he's doing an incredible job whichever side he is leading.

Trump moves the coronavirus goal posts, pre-spinning 100,000 deaths as ‘a very good job’

Quote

On Feb. 26, when there were 15 reported cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States, President Trump predicted the number of cases would soon be “down to close to zero.”

Only because the Grifter in Chief was doing a great job

Quote

On March 5, he hailed the fact that there were about 3,000 deaths worldwide but only 11 in the United States.

Only because the Grifter in Chief was doing a great job

Quote

On March 9, he noted that there were just 22 U.S. deaths and compared the virus to the seasonal flu, which has killed 37,000 people this year.

Only because the Grifter in Chief was doing a great job

Quote

On March 13, he said the 2009 swine flu had killed 14,000 people in the United States and called the Obama administration’s response to it “a disaster.”

If only the Grifter in Chief was in charge, only a handful of people would have died in the US from swine flu.

Quote

On Sunday night, the same president set the goal posts for his administration’s response to the coronavirus in a very different place. In a White House briefing in the Rose Garden, Trump referenced new data from his task force and said that between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths would represent a victory over the coronavirus.

Only because the Grifter in Chief was doing a great job

Quote

As The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker reported, Trump pointed no fewer than 16 times to the most dire projections of 2 million or more U.S. deaths in the Sunday briefing. This was most prominently projected in an Imperial College London study that spurred a more aggressive response in the United States and Britain two weeks ago.

“So you’re talking about 2.2 million deaths, 2.2 million people from this,” Trump said. “And so if we could hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000 — it’s a horrible number, maybe even less — but to 100,000. So we have between 100 and 200,000, and we altogether have done a very good job."

Trump added, “But to point to up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that, I’m feeling very good about what we did last week.”

So if less than 5 million or so die in the US from COVID-19, the Grifter in Chief has done a great job. MAGA.

[johnu]

Lock em up???

‘Where Are The Masks Going?’ Trump Questions Use Of Supplies As Coronavirus Cases Surge

Quote

President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned the distribution of medical supplies around the nation in recent weeks, even suggesting without evidence that some hospitals may be misusing protective equipment and masks as cases of the coronavirus continue to surge.

“How do you go from using 10,000 to 20,000 [masks] to 300,000?” Trump asked during a press briefing in the Rose Garden on Sunday. “Even though this is different. Something’s going on. Where are the masks going, are they going out the back door?”

I challenge anybody who thinks they are smarter than a 5th grader to identify the reason why hospitals (and other first responders) need exponentially more face masks and other protective equipment.

[johnu]

Switching away from the COVID-19 pandemic talk, there is this Did He Really Say That Out Loud?

Trump says Democrats’ push for expanded voting threatens Republicans

Quote

Trump said that Democrat-proposed voting reforms to the $2.2 trillion rescue package passed last week by Congress — which were largely cut from the deal — would have led to “levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Democrats have pushed to mandate that states make plans to expand early voting and mail-in balloting for the fall election, in the event that the coronavirus pandemic makes in-person voting unsafe.

[cherdano]

True populism, I see.

[Winstonm]

johnu, on 2020-March-30, 15:27, said:

Switching away from the COVID-19 pandemic talk, there is this Did He Really Say That Out Loud?

My link

Next thing you know, we could have a democratic republic. Can't let that happen.

[y66]

From Ross Douthat at NYT:

Quote

Over the past two decades, as conservatives and liberals have drifted ever farther from each other, an influential body of literature has attempted to psychologize the partisan divide — to identify conservative and liberal personality types, right-wing or left-wing minds or brains, and to vindicate the claim of the noted political scientists Gilbert and Sullivan, That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.

In its crudest form this literature just amounts to liberal self-congratulation, with survey questions and regression analyses deployed to “prove” with “science” that liberals are broad-minded freethinkers and conservatives are cramped authoritarians. But there have been more sophisticated and sympathetic efforts, too, like the influential work of New York University’s Jonathan Haidt on the “moral foundations” of politics: Haidt argues that conservatives actually have more diverse moral intuitions than liberals, encompassing categories like purity and loyalty as well as care and fairness, and that the right-wing mind therefore sometimes understands the left-wing mind better than vice versa.

Both the crude and sophisticated efforts tended to agree, though, that the supposed conservative mind is more attuned to external threat and internal contamination, more inclined to support authority and hierarchy, and fear subversion and dissent. And so the political responses to the pandemic have put these psychological theories to a very interesting test.

In the coronavirus, America confronts a contaminating force (a deadly disease) that originated in our leading geopolitical rival (an external threat) and that plainly requires a strong, even authoritarian government response. If there was ever a crisis tailored to the conservative mind-set, surely it would be this one, with the main peril being that conservatives would wildly overreact to such a trigger.

So what has happened? Well, several different things. From the Wuhan outbreak through somewhere in mid-February, the responses to the coronavirus did seem to correspond — very roughly — to theories of conservative and liberal psychology. Along with infectious-disease specialists, the people who seemed most alarmed by the virus included the inhabitants of Weird Right-Wing Twitter (a collection of mordant, mostly anonymous accounts interested in civilizational decline), various Silicon Valley eccentrics, plus original-MAGA figures like Mike Cernovich and Steve Bannon. (The radio host Michael Savage, often considered the most extreme of the right’s talkers, was also an early alarmist.)

Meanwhile, liberal officialdom and its media appendages were more likely to play down the threat, out of fear of giving aid and comfort to sinophobia or populism. This period was the high-water mark of “it’s just the flu” reassurances in liberal outlets, of pious critiques of Donald Trump’s travel restrictions, of deceptive public-health propaganda about how masks don’t work, of lectures from the head of the World Health Organization about how “the greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other.”

But then, somewhere in February, the dynamic shifted. As the disease spread and the debate went mainstream, liberal opinion mostly abandoned its anti-quarantine posture and swung toward a reasonable panic, while conservative opinion divided, with a large portion of the right following the lead of Trump himself, who spent crucial weeks trying to wish the crisis away. Where figures like Bannon and Cernovich manifested a conservatism attuned to external perils, figures like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity manifested a conservatism of tribal denial, owning the libs by minimizing the coronavirus threat.

Now we are in a third phase, where Trump is (more or less, depending on the day) on board with a robust response and most conservatives have joined most liberals in alarm. Polls show a minimal partisan divide in support for social distancing and lockdowns, and some of that minimal divide is explained by the fact that rural areas are thus far less likely to face outbreaks. (You don’t need a complicated theory of the ideological mind to explain why New Yorkers are more freaked out than Nebraskans.)

But even now, there remains a current of conservative opinion that wants to believe that all of this is overblown, that the experts are wrong about the likely death toll, that Trump should reopen everything as soon as possible, that the liberal media just wants to crash the American economy to take his presidency down.

Where does this leave the theories of conservative and liberal minds? It’s too much to say that they don’t describe anything real. A certain kind of conservative personality (a kind that includes more than a few of my own friends) really did seem particularly well attuned to this crisis and ended up out ahead of the conventional wisdom in exactly the way that you would expect a mind-set attuned to risk and danger, shot through with pessimism and inclined to in-group loyalty to be.

At the same time, the behavior of what you might call “normie” Republicans — not Very Online right-wingers or MAGA populists but longtime Fox News and talk-radio consumers — suggests that any such conservative mind-set is easily confounded by other factors, partisanship chief among them. The fact that the virus seemed poised to help Democrats and hurt the Trump administration, the fact that it was being hyped by CNN and played down by Hannity, the fact that Trump himself declined to take it seriously — all of this mattered more to many Republicans than the fear of foreign contamination that the virus theoretically should have activated or the ways in which its progress seemed to confirm certain right-wing priors.

So one might say that the pandemic illustrates the power of partisan mood affiliation over any kind of deeper ideological mind-set. Or relatedly, it illustrates the ways in which under the right circumstances, people can easily swing between different moral intuitions. (This holds for liberals as well as conservatives: A good liberal will be as deferential to authority as any conservative when the authority has the right academic degrees, and as zealous about purity and contamination when it’s their own neighborhood that’s threatened.)

But the right’s varying responses to the pandemic also illustrate two further points. The first point is that what we call “American conservatism” is probably more ideologically and psychologically heterogeneous than the conservative mind-set that social scientists aspire to measure and pin down. In particular, it includes an incredibly powerful streak of what you might call folk libertarianism — which comes in both highbrow and middlebrow forms, encompassing both famous legal scholars predicting minimal fatalities from their armchairs and “you can’t stop the American economy … for anything” tough guys attacking social distancing on Twitter.

This mentality, with its reflexive Ayn Randism and its Panglossian hyper-individualism, is definitely essential to understanding part of the American right. But it’s very much an American thing unto itself, and I’m doubtful that it corresponds to any universal set of psychological tendencies that we could reasonably call conservative.

The second point is that on the fringes of the right, among QAnon devotees and believers in the satanic depravity of liberalism, the only psychology that matters is paranoia, not conservatism. And their minimizing response to the coronavirus illustrates the unwillingness of the conspiratorial mind to ever take yes for an answer — meaning that even true events that seem to vindicate a somewhat paranoid worldview will be dismissed as not true enough, not the deepest truth, not the Grandest of All Grand Conspiracies that will someday (someday) be unraveled.

In his novel “Foucault’s Pendulum,” a sendup of crackpot esotericism that anticipated “The Da Vinci Code” years before its publication, Umberto Eco captured this spirit by describing the way that self-conscious seekers after hermetic wisdom and gnostic mysteries approached the rise of Christianity:

… someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? And he bequeathed the idea that whoever uttered the right words at the right time could turn a chunk of bread and a half-glass of wine into the body and blood of the Son of God, and be nourished by it. Was that a paltry riddle?

… And yet they, who now had salvation within their grasp — do-it-yourself salvation — turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge of which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye at the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it.

This is where the pandemic-minimizing sort of conservative has ended up. They are confronted with a world crisis tailor-made for an anti-globalization, anti-deep-state worldview — a crisis in which China lit the fuse, the World Health Organization ran interference for Beijing, the American public health bureaucracy botched its one essential job, pious anti-racism inhibited an early public-health response, and outsourcing and offshoring left our economy exposed.

And their response? Too simple: Just a feint, a false flag, another deep state plot or power grab, another hoax to take down Trump. It can’t be real unless Hillary Clinton is somehow at the bottom of it.

From "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers":

Quote

Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams): How are we gonna get out of here?

Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland): Through the door. Come on.

Me: Where's the door?

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-March-31, 07:11, said:

From Ross Douthat at NYT:

This is a very interesting and challenging column. Here is one way to think about some of what he discusses: Suppose I say "I want to go my own way". Does this make me a liberal or a conservative, or do I first have to say what my own way is? Most of us do not want government telling us what to do. But of course governments do tell us what we can do, and sometimes what we must do. And most of us welcome that sometimes. And not at other times.

[johnu]

Grifter in Chief waiting for something important to happen before invoking Defense Production Act to fight the COVID-19 pandemic (for more than 1 contract).

The Trump administration had invoked the Defense Production Act hundreds of thousands of times, but hesitated when the virus hit.

Quote

Chemicals used to construct military missiles. Materials needed to build drones. Body armor for agents patrolling the southwest border. Equipment for natural disaster response.

A Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act has been invoked hundreds of thousands of times by Mr. Trump and his administration to ensure the procurement of vital equipment, according to reports submitted to Congress and interviews with former government officials.

Yet as governors and members of Congress plead with the president to use the law to force the production of ventilators and other medical equipment to combat the pandemic, he has for weeks treated it like a last resort, to be invoked only when all else fails.

“You know, we’re a country not based on nationalizing our business,” Mr. Trump said earlier this month. “Call a person over in Venezuela, ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out? Not too well.”

The law’s frequent use, especially by the military to give its contracts priority ratings to jump ahead of a vendor’s other clients, has prompted those most familiar with it to question why the administration has been so hesitant to tap it for a public health emergency.

I'm sure that once the virus deaths in the US exceed 200,000, the Grifter in Chief will unleash the full power of the federal government to fight the pandemic.

[shyams]

johnu, on 2020-March-31, 15:26, said:

I'm sure that once the virus deaths in the US exceed 200,000, the Grifter in Chief will unleash the full power of the federal government to fight the pandemic.

He seems to be delighted by the massive viewership figures he gets on the daily briefings. That, and deflecting all criticism, is where his focus seems to reside.

[johnu]

shyams, on 2020-March-31, 15:51, said:

He seems to be delighted by the massive viewership figures he gets on the daily briefings. That, and deflecting all criticism, is where his focus seems to reside.

What a boon to his reelection campaign. Millions of people see him on the Coronovirus press conferences every day, compared to thousands at a typical campaign rally.

Certainly he shouldn't be getting any criticism because anybody can see that it was Obama's fault for any mistakes made.

[shyams]

shyams, on 2020-March-11, 15:52, said:

I am not American and I have no say (or substantial interest) in your country's elections. However, I strongly feel that Biden as Democratic nominee will definitely ensure the reelection of Trump in November.

The only thing that can derail that outcome is the potential disaster from Coronavirus. Given the misery such an event will bring, I will pray for no disaster even if it means 8 years of Trump.

PS: Does anyone watch Rising with Krystal and Saagar on YouTube? I have recently begun watching their daily shows and I must say they sound refreshingly different from mainstream media.

Here is a video from Saagar (https://youtu.be/kNPCONha02E) which brings sharply into focus why Biden is a poor choice.

[hrothgar]

shyams, on 2020-March-31, 17:44, said:

Here is a video from Saagar (https://youtu.be/kNPCONha02E) which brings sharply into focus why Biden is a poor choice.

The Hill is a propaganda organ for Donald Trump and has been dedicated to doing biased takedown attacks against Biden since he originally announced.

You'd need to be an idiot to take anything they say seriously
Especially on this topic.

[In all seriousness, this is where John Solomon was working up until a few months back]

I'll cut you some slack because you're from the UK and might not understand the American media landscape, but seriously... The Hill?

[y66]

From Martin Wolfe at FT:

Quote

History accelerates in crises. This pandemic may not itself transform the world, but it can accelerate changes already under way. One ongoing change has been in the relationship between China, the rising superpower, and the US, the incumbent. Being a superpower is not just about brute strength, it is also about being seen as a competent and decent leader. After victories in the second world war and the cold war, the US was such a leader. Despite rising economic strength, China is not. But times can change. The coronavirus may accelerate the process.

Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singaporean diplomat, has written a characteristically provocative book on the struggle for primacy between the two superpowers under the provocative title Has China Won? The answer, he suggests, is not yet. But it might. This is not just because of its scale, but also because of American mistakes, including false perceptions of Chinese reality. Perhaps the most important conclusion to draw from his analysis is that global influence derives mainly from one’s own choices. China and the US have each made big mistakes. But the US failure to create widely shared prosperity at home, and its bellicosity abroad, are proving crippling. The dismal presidency of a malevolent incompetent is one result.

Now has come the virus, an event not considered in this book. It casts a harsh light on the competence and decency of the superpowers. It has done the same on EU solidarity (or its absence), the effectiveness of states, the vulnerability of finance and the capacity for global co-operation. In all this, the performance of the US and China is of pre-eminent importance. So what have we learnt?

The novel coronavirus, which is causing such social and economic havoc, emerged in China’s Hubei province. There seems little doubt about this. The US National Institutes of Health state that it originated in bats. Irresponsibly and tragically, the local authorities suppressed news of the infection, causing a delay of at least three weeks in the response. That let the virus spread across the world. Thereafter, however, the Chinese state took brutal action, bringing the disease under control in Hubei and halting its spread across China. Relative to population, China’s mortality rate has been very low. Both the initial suppression of bad news and the scale of the response are characteristics of a repressive, yet effective, state. (See charts.)

Effective response to the disease will have had a big economic cost in China. But the state encouraged employers to retain their employees, while also providing support to enterprises to do so. The official urban unemployment rate has risen very little. The largest group of victims has, as usual, been migrant labour. China can now reopen the economy, though there is a risk of a second wave of the disease as it does so.

The US has had its own forms of denial, emanating shamefully from President Donald Trump himself, together with huge failures in ramping up testing and providing equipment, as has the UK. Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs has written devastatingly of the ill will and ineffectiveness on display. Infections are spreading at fearful speed across the country. It could get worse. Italy and Spain show how much worse. Yet the US has the additional drawback of a defective health system.

The US, like other high-income countries, has now responded with “social distancing”, although Mr Trump has only reluctantly extended it, and a fiscal response, worth $2tn. Roman Frydman of New York University, argues that this is neither big enough, given the scale of the American economy, nor well-focused: only a 20th of this sum is going to hospitals, while state and local governments are short-changed. Worst of all, argues veteran anti-corruption campaigner, Frank Vogl, is a $500bn fund for big corporations likely to be under Mr Trump’s unsupervised control, which is contrary to the will of Congress.

The fundamental American principles of democracy and individual freedom remain attractive to many around the world, despite the global rise of populist autocracy. The vigour of its private economy may yet save us all. But today the US is losing its reputation for elementary competence, already badly battered by its long list of futile wars and the financial crisis of 2007-09. Parts of government, notably the Federal Reserve, remain effective for now, though who knows what would happen in a second Trump term? But the fundamental capability of the often despised “administrative state” — the bulwark of any complex urban civilisation — really matters. At these times of crisis, its absence is lethal. A government at war with science and its own machinery is now very visible to all.

For those of us who believe in liberal democracy, these US failures hurt: they give credence to the idea that autocracy works better. But the death of decency and competence in core western governments matters beyond even this. The arrival of the pandemic is a global moral challenge. It is necessary to tackle the spread of disease, manage financial shocks, stabilise the economy and help the weak. The US has to play a big part. There remains no alternative to its role.

We have been reminded that no man is an island in a pandemic. As Gordon Brown argues: “Out of this crisis must come reforms to the international architecture and a whole new level of global co-operation.” If this is to happen, some states must lead. Any global order rests on co-operation among powerful states. China and the US must not only function. They must function together, recognising the many interests they share, while tolerating their deep differences.

If not us, who? And if not now, when?

[Winstonm]

Along with everything else, this is not good news:

Quote

(Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is trying to call time on a fire sale of Treasuries by foreign governments and central banks.

Foreign official holders of Treasuries dumped more than $100 billion in the three weeks to March 25, on course for the biggest monthly drop on record, according to weekly Fed custody data that captures much of the pandemic-fueled turmoil. They joined others seeking to unload government debt globally to raise cash amid the volatility, according to traders and market makers familiar with the transactions. Countries reliant on oil exports and smaller Asian economies have been selling U.S. debt, and central banks have been primarily offloading older, less-liquid Treasuries, these people said.

The Fed on Tuesday rolled out its latest effort to restore proper functioning in markets, on top of moves to ramp up debt purchases and backstop several market sectors. It introduced a temporary repurchase agreement facility that will let other central banks swap Treasuries for dollars. The Fed stopped short of saying it wanted to prevent a snowball effect from the selling. But it said the program will provide “an alternative temporary source of U.S. dollars other than sales of securities in the open market.”

“The fall in custody holdings is a clear signal that foreign central banks -- which have a lot of Treasury holdings -- have been selling them to source dollars,” said Subadra Rajappa, head of U.S. rates strategy at Societe Generale. “They need access to dollars as a lot of their payments are in dollars and that has driven them to sell Treasuries.”

As fear swept through markets last month and fueled unprecedented volatility, liquidity -- the ability to trade without causing significant price moves -- deteriorated in Treasuries to its worst since the 2008 financial crisis. At the same time, the greenback surged as investors sought refuge in the world’s primary reserve currency. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index rose 3.1% in March, the most since 2016.

[Winstonm]

Huffington Post headline: PENCE PLAYS DUMB

Dear Huff: he ain't playing.

[barmar]

Winstonm, on 2020-April-01, 14:59, said:

Huffington Post headline: PENCE PLAYS DUMB

Dear Huff: he ain't playing.

Got a link? I can't find this headline. I googled for "pence plays dumb", but it found an older article, but all it found was "Trump Plays Dumb On Mike Pence And William Barr Using His Hotels". Of course, the reply still fits.

[kenberg]

Here is where I am:

Like most everyone, I want to understand about covid-19. What it means to me and my family, to the country, to the world. So I read postings here on the WC, I read The Washington Post, I read the New York Times. I listen to PBS NewsHour. What I don't do is to listen to Donald Trump or Mike Pence. It's not that they are not first on my list, rather they are not on my list. I do not expect them to say anything that I would be willing to trust and act on.

Of course we are all skeptical of politicians. But I cannot recall any time in the past when, on a matter of national and world importance, I have regarded it as completely pointless to listen to what the resident has to say on the matter.

I do not think this is a political stance, it is not ideological, it is not partisan. It simple comes down to who I expect to say something that is worth listening to.

If this were just a matter of me being weird then who cares? But I think it is a completely rational approach, and I expect this view is broadly shared.

[y66]

I live a sheltered life but I don't know anyone who takes Trump seriously. Even the Trump supporters I know don't take him seriously. I would be surprised if even the trolls who post here occasionally to get a rise out of winstonm and hrothgar take anything Trump says seriously.

[Winstonm]

barmar, on 2020-April-02, 09:09, said:

Got a link? I can't find this headline. I googled for "pence plays dumb", but it found an older article, but all it found was "Trump Plays Dumb On Mike Pence And William Barr Using His Hotels". Of course, the reply still fits.

It was a repost of Huffington from yesterday via Yahoo. I doubt it is still around. I also only posted part of it so that's why you couldn't find it.