My son-in-law is originally from Chennai and loves his cricket and football. He is now a NZ citizen. Unfortunately, for employment reasons, he and his family have been living in Western Australia for the past 9 years 
. We are fortunate to be able to make a pilgrimage to visit once or twice a year.
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W.
T.
F.
FBI LOVEBIRDS: UNDERCOVERS STARS MEET WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE
FBI Lovebirds Stars Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson meet in advance of Lovebirds Play at CPAC
Los Angeles, CA - FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers stars Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson met with President Donald Trump in the White House just before their historic performance at this yearâs CPAC.
President Trump hosted the actors along with the playwright Phelim McAleer and producer Ann McElhinney at the Oval office.
In their private meeting, Cain and Swanson and McAleer and McElhinney discussed the importance of the play with President Trump - and its upcoming historic performance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers is the first play to be staged at CPAC in its almost 50 year history.
In a dramatized staged reading of the play Dean Cain stars as the disgraced FBI Investigator and Trump nemesis Peter Strzok and Lisa Page is played by Kristy Swanson. The two were having an extramarital affair and sent thousands of secret text messages on their work phones.
They also discussed preventing Donald Trump from getting elected - suggesting that the Russia investigation was âan insurance policyâ in the âunlikelyâ event he would win the 2016 election. When President Trump was elected they then secretly discussed impeachment and other ways to undermine his presidency. The play, which is 100 percent verbatim, consists of the text messages and their convoluted answers to an aggressive closed door congressional inquiry into their behavior.
Strzok and Page have become frequent targets of President Trump - who has accused them of organizing a spying operation against his campaign. They have also become the butt of his jokes at various rallies sparking outrage from liberal commentators.
Dean Cain is an actor best known for playing Clark Kent/Superman in the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. He has had a prolific career featuring numerous roles, including killer Scott Peterson in The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story .
Kristy Swanson is best known for her portrayal of Buffy Summers in the cult film Buffy the Vampire Slayer . She also starred in Pretty in Pink , Ferris Buellerâs Day Off, and Big Daddy.
It is the first time CPAC will have a play staged in their nearly 50 years as one of the top conservative conferences in the world.
The play previously premiered in DC at the The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. Politico labeled it âHamilton for the MAGA crowdâ and Vice News described it as âedgyâŚthe most dangerous play in Washington.â
The play was written by Los Angeles-based Phelim McAleer who has been at the forefront of introducing the Verbatim Theater format to the United States. Verbatim Theater, popular in the UK, is âa play constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.â
The critically praised verbatim play is set to go on the main stage at CPAC this afternoon at 3:30PM EST.
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He did most of the talking,â McAleer said.
McAleer said he couldnât remember whether coronavirus came up in his discussions with the president. âIt was 45 minutes,â he said, âwe talked about a lot of things.â
The meeting was not listed on the presidentâs formal daily guidance and was only announced via a press release from New Hampshire Republican Party official with ties to James OâKeefeâs video sting operation, Project Veritas.
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Seems unnatural and definitely impossible without a little âassistance.â Inquiring minds have always speculated about Tâ âhabits.â
https://twitter.com/PeterAtlantic/status/1233375429668605953?s=19
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A clever slice-and-dice portrait of T in the center of this crisis.
NYTimes: Trump Makes Us Ill
By Maureen Dowd
Donald Trump was right.
Germs are scary.
For three decades, I talked to Trump about his fear of germs. When I interviewed him at the Trump Tower restaurant during the 2016 race, the famous germophobe had a big hospital-strength bottle of hand sanitizer on the table, next to my salad, ready to squirt.
He told me about the nightmarish feeling he had when a man emerged from the bathroom in a restaurant with wet hands and shook his hand. He couldnât eat afterward.
Today, in a stunning twist of fate, germs are infecting his presidency and threatening a bad prognosis for his re-election prospects.
Trump is the first president to use the stock market as a near-daily measure of his success â and his virility â and now the market is slumping. If you want to own it on the way up, you have to own it on the way down.
Investors, who worried when Trump began to rise in politics, soon realized that he had their backs. He was just a corporate vessel pretending to be a populist; the stock market was his sugar high.
Now Trump is learning the hard way what my fatalistic Irish mother taught me: The thing you love most is the first to go. As Mike Bloomberg points out, investors have factored in Trumpâs incompetence, and that is contributing to the market cratering.
The president urged the Fed to do something soon to mitigate the stock market losses. Socialism for the rich!
The scaremonger in chief has been downplaying the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic and joining Fox News hosts in accusing the âanti-Trumpâ media and âDo Nothing Democratsâ of scaremongering about the virus.
At the CPAC convention, Mick Mulvaney told a cheering crowd that impeachment was the âhoax of the dayâ and now the press thinks the coronavirus âis going to be what brings down the president.â The media, he said, should spend more time on positive stories, like the presidentâs âcaringâ relationship with his teenage son, Barron, even though White Houses usually frown on stories about young presidential offspring.
Mike Huckabee went on the attack, asserting that Trump âcould personally suck the virus out of every one of the 60,000 people in the world, suck it out of their lungs, swim to the bottom of the ocean and spit it out, and he would be accused of pollution for messing up the ocean.â
On Fox, Don Jr. said the Democrats âseemingly hopeâ the virus kills millions to stop Trumpâs winning streak. Rush Limbaugh chimed in that the media âwould love for the coronavirus to be this deadly strain that wipes everybody out so they could blame Trump for it.â
There are 2,800 dead worldwide and disturbing stories showing how federal criteria delayed the diagnosis of a California woman and how federal health employees interacted with Americans who had possibly been exposed to the virus in China without proper training or gear.
Yet Trump seems more consumed with how the Democrats might blame him for a coronavirus recession than with the virus itself.Trump had tweet-shrieked at President Barack Obama about how he should handle Ebola. (âObama should apologize to the American people & resign!â)
Yet he was so relaxed about the coronavirus threat that he spent 45 minutes Thursday chatting in the Oval with the authors of a little play called âFBI Lovebirds: Undercovers,â inspired by the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The playâs leads, Dean Cain of âSupermanâ fame and the âBuffy the Vampire Slayerâ actress Kristy Swanson, were also in the meeting. Trump joked that heâd be willing to be Cainâs understudy, the actor said. The president got together the same day with a group that included his social media boosters Diamond and Silk.
At the White House press conference, Trump preened: âBecause of all weâve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.â He later said that one day, like a miracle, the virus âwill disappear.â
His top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, pushed the crisis as an opportunity: âStocks look pretty cheap to me.â
Trump wonât be able to deflect and project and create a daft alternative narrative. The virus wonât respond to conspiracy theories from Rush Limbaugh or nasty diatribes from Sean Hannity or nicknames from Donald Trump.
This will be a deus ex machina test of Trumpâs authoritarian behavior. Epidemics are not well suited to authoritarian regimes and propaganda, as we saw this week when Beijingâs use of propaganda tactics to suppress information about the outbreak failed spectacularly and when Iran tamped down news about the virus for political reasons even as it ravaged top officials.
The reality of the coronavirus spreading will reflect poorly on Trump â his cavalier dismantling of vital government teams for health response and his disdain for experts and science.
Trump tried to make federal agencies complicit on his fabulist hogwash about the size of his inaugural crowd and the path of Hurricane Dorian. It is unlikely that he will be able to keep his insatiable and insecure ego in check long enough to give the nation the facts, reassurance and guidance it needs about the infection.
Trump is already doing his orange clown pufferfish routine, acting as though he knows more about viruses than anyone, just as he has bragged that he knows more about the military, taxes, trade, infrastructure, ISIS, renewables, visas, banking, debt and âthe horror of nuclear.â
He appointed Mike Pence to be point man, even though, as the famously homophobic governor of Indiana, Pence helped make the H.I.V. epidemic there worse by substituting moral pronouncements for scientific knowledge. Coronavirus Czar Pence spent Friday at a $25,000-a-plate dinner in sunny Sarasota raising money to try to win back the House, The Tampa Bay Times reported.
Trumpâs history in business â he makes people feel good for a while and then it ends badly â could presage a stock market crash before he exits.
And itâs conceivable that a crash â along with hospitals being overwhelmed by the uninsured â could lead to the election of a real populist promising Medicare for All.
And that would be a very Trumpian arc indeed.
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I donât even know what to make of this.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund was permanently reauthorized as part of the bipartisan John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed into law on March 12, 2019.
And do not forget the part where Donnie is blowing up a national park and selling off large chunks of other ones.
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Yes and the one where Trump slashed the size of two pristine National Monuments in Utah (one by 85%, the other by 46%) so BP can drill for oil there â and then the Zinke adviser who orchestrated the deal left the Interior Dept. and went to work for BP in a cushy job â as a lobbyist, no less â despite that highly touted âethics pledgeâ of Trumpâs.
Natural treasures held in public trust for all Americans have been doled out for private exploitation and desecration just so one person can advance her career. And Trump has the gall to paint himself as a conservationist? What the 'effen F?! 
For more details see this previous post.
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With video.
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âZero-empathyâ Trump shows lack of emotion when told about 8-year-old boyâs family being killed in tornado
https://news.yahoo.com/zero-empathy-trump-shows-lack-230400652.html
Donald Trump has been filmed showing âzero empathyâ for an 8-year-old boy during a meeting with families of Tennessee tornado victims.
The US president met with the families on Friday in the town of Cookeville as part of a trip to see the devastation caused by this weekâs tornadoes.
As Trump stood in front of destroyed homes he spoke to the press about an 8-year-old boy who was carried away from his family home by a tornado, only to land alive two blocks away.
âAn 8-year-old boy was ripped out, flown to a certain area and dropped off at the street two or three blocks away and they found him walking and he said âI just flew in the air,â said Trump in the Fox News video.
After asking âhow did his parents do?â and being informed the boyâs parents and sister had died in the storms he relayed that information to the crowd before moving on by saying âSo weâre gonna go see some of the folks.â
No condolences were expressed from the president. Twitter user @mysterysolvent expressed disbelief at the way he acted.
âARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Trump while visiting tornado victims in TN tells a story about a boy being carried by the tornado, like itâs the greatest thing heâs ever heard! Then he asks about the parentsâŚPeople tell him theyâre dead along with his sister. No emotion, NOTHING! Idiot!â
User @nightlypolitics echoed that statement accusing Trump of having zero empathy.
âWatch Zero-Empathy Trump Get Excited Over Tornado Deaths, âA Whole Family Got Wiped-Out!â Wow what a pigâ they tweetedâ.â
https://twitter.com/NightlyPolitics/status/1236020255291408384
Wearing a hat emblazoned with âKeep America Greatâ Trump told the crowd at Cookeville that federal aid to help support the affected areas would be arriving âvery quickly.â
âWhat they need. We are going to take care of what they need.â said Trump when asked about when they should expect the funding he had earlier approved.
After speaking to the press, Trump met with local families where he was applauded by some, with one man telling him âWeâre a big family. We support you.â according to the video.
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The pundits are calling this pandemic Tâs KatrinaâŚthe hurricane where GW was held responsible for the entirely too weak response to itâ devistation.
But as the world now faces a pandemic, it has never been more essential to recall that norm-setting performance and to admit what has been demonstrated on a daily basis about the public official who carries ultimate responsibility for the public safety of American citizens: Donald Trump is incapable of truth, heedless of science, and hostage to the demands of his insatiable ego.
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A rant/thread from Preet Bharara tonight, previous prosecutor in nyc. A âgreatist hitsâ perhaps.
https://twitter.com/PreetBharara/status/1236823470815707136?s=19
And some commentary
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I still love this, more than ever. This song so needs an update for a new generation of Trumps.
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The sheer amount of gaslighting and cronyism in this statement from Trumpâs Surgeon General is stunning, and gives one zero confidence that he capable of handling an epidemic.
https://twitter.com/iche_me/status/1237009093912596487
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1236669894747398144
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That one definitely 100% is, which is more than I can say about Trump himself.
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Trump sends signed chart showing stock market gains to supporters
One word: Disgusting.
President Donald Trump on Friday sent a note to supporters that included a chart showing the Dow Jones Industrial Average dramatically rising roughly at the time he began a news conference declaring a national emergency over coronavirus. The President signed the chart.
The note, which was also sent to some members of Congress, included screenshots of television coverage of the stock market closing much higher than Thursday.
"The President would like to share the attached image with you, and passes along the following message: âFrom opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!â " read the note, a copy of which was obtained by CNN from a source with familiar with it.
The message did not mention the overall coronavirus crisis, the number of people who have died or are sick, nor the fact that he had just declared a national emergency. More than 2,200 people had been diagnosed with coronavirus as of late Friday night and 49 have died.
During the news conference, Trump declared a national emergency that would free up $50 billion in federal resources to combat coronavirus. The announcement was part of a raft of new measures Trump hopes can bring the roiling health crisis under control after a week of market seesaws and major disruptions to everyday life.
Trump began speaking at 3:29 p.m., about a half hour before the markets closed.
In boasting about the stock market, the President was cherry-picking a single dayâs rally amid a period of major selloffs and a 20% decline that was the fastest in history.
Friday was the best day for stocks since 2008, but the S&P 500 ended the week with sharp losses and fell into a bear market on Thursday.
The dayâs rally also came the day after the worst day for stocks since the 1987 crash.
Mr. Trump - People are suffering and dying for Godâs sake â and this is what you distribute? Have you not one ounce of shame?
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I keep telling everybody: being around Donald Trump is hazardous to your health.
Avoid him like the⌠well. You know.
Trump defiant on testing and handshakes even as third Mar-a-Lago case emerges
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https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1238970847525834755?s=19
But he continues to be a sick guy who deserves none of our attention. 
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