Headliner

I see old Gatsby Wyden has made it into the Rolling Stone this week. But unlike our lazy local media in Oregon, they're not canonizing him. Instead, they're calling him and his wife out for her outrageous trading in individual tech stocks while he pushes the administration to make the tech bros richer.

You couldn't pick a better poster child for conflict of interest in the United States Congress. A well-deserved distinction.

Interestingly, the story reveals that Wyden and his wife, Nancy Bass Wyden of Strand Bookstore fame, file separate tax returns. You'll have to take their word for it; you'll never see those returns.

Wyden is not among the small number of Senate Democrats who have signed onto legislation that would ban stock trading by members of Congress and require lawmakers, their spouses, and dependent children to either divest their stock holdings or put them in a blind trust. 

“The investments and virtually all of the assets you listed are owned by Nancy Bass Wyden,” Wyden spokesperson Keith Chu said in an email. “Sen. Wyden and Ms. Wyden keep their finances separate, including filing taxes separately, and do not discuss their work.”

Huh. 

But while the Stone-rs call out Mrs. Dub for plays on stocks like Apple and Microsoft, they miss out on her monster tech-hardware move: Nvidia. Maybe they don't know what that company does, besides printing money.

Anyway, it's about time somebody else picked up on the Wydens' conflicts. I've been ragging about them for years.