Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (1129320)	4/11/2019 1:45:40 AM
From: Heywood40	1 Recommendation Recommended By sylvester80 Respond to of 1575154

FatRump's sister resigns in tax fraud scandal. All FatRumps are frauds!

To: FJB who wrote (1129320)	4/11/2019 7:37:53 AM
From: sylvester80	1 Recommendation Recommended By Land Shark Respond to of 1575154

OOPS! 04-11-2019: OBAMA APPROVAL RATING MUCH HIGHER THAN LYING CORRUPT TRAITOR POS tRump AT THE SAME TIME DURING HIS FIRST TERM.... projects.fivethirtyeight.com

To: FJB who wrote (1129320)	4/11/2019 8:19:34 AM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 1575154

OOPS! BARR IS TRYING VERY HARD TO BE tRump's ROY COHN By Timothy L. O'Brien April 10, 2019, 12:00 PM MST bloomberg.com The attorney general of the United States is, we now know, quite sure of himself. Exhibit A: Spying During Senate testimony on Wednesday, William Barr was asked if, as Bloomberg News reported, he was planning to review how and why the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched an investigation into possible conspiracy involving Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. He was indeed, he responded. “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal,” Barr said, citing federal guidelines governing when it’s OK for intelligence agencies and law enforcement to conduct domestic political surveillance. “It’s a big deal.” “I’m not suggesting that those rules were violated, but I think it’s important to look at that,” he added. “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily but intelligence agencies more broadly.” “So you’re not suggesting, though, that spying occurred?” asked Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat. Barr stumbled a bit in responding to that, but he found his footing. “I don’t, well, I guess you could, I think there’s a spying did occur, yes — I think spying did occur,” he said. “The question is whether it was predicated, adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting it wasn't adequately predicated, but I'd need to explore that.” Barr went out of his way to say that he supports and admires the FBI but that there was “probably a failure among a group of leaders there at the upper echelon.” (Are you looking over your shoulders now, James Comey and Andrew McCabe?) Barr is wading into a political and legal quagmire here and of course he knows that. He’s also, in his own soft-spoken and resolute way, dropping depth charges into the national conversation about the Trump presidency and the Trump-Russia investigation, and he knows that, too. Barr could have simply said he’s reviewing the investigation to make sure it was conducted properly but couldn’t comment beyond that. Here’s a handy sample sentence for future use: “I’m reviewing the investigation to make sure it was conducted properly. I can’t comment beyond that.” Instead, unprompted, Barr referred to what he’s examining as “spying.” Spying is cloak-and-daggerish and, when it doesn’t involve foreign governments trying to game and surveil one another, it feels untoward. It’s your neighbor looking into your bedroom window, it’s an old boyfriend stalking an old girlfriend online, it’s the FBI or the Central Intelligence Agency snooping around the Trump campaign and it’s all sort of dirty. Saying you’re looking into spying prejudices the perspective and prejudices the conversation, especially if you’re relying on gut instinct and your thoughts about all of it are just sort of a … hunch. Asked if he had any “ specific of evidence that there was anything improper” in the FBI investigation or Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, Barr said, “I have no specific evidence that I would cite right now — I do have questions about it.” “You just have some interest in this, you don’t have any evidence?” asked Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat. “I have concerns about various aspects of it,” Barr responded, noting that whether Mueller had conducted a “witch hunt” of Trump “really depends on where you’re sitting.” To clarify: Barr has no evidence of improprieties in the FBI investigation, including “spying,” but wants to examine the matter anyway because he has concerns and because, as he said, he believes that spying did occur (even if he hasn’t seen evidence of it). Well now. It’s reasonable and proper for Barr to make sure that the Justice Department, which he runs, has its house in order. It’s reasonable for him to make sure that the agency’s employees, including FBI agents, are on the straight and narrow. But it’s unreasonable and reckless for him to taint the public’s perspective about a matter of grave national concern because his Spidey-sense is tingling. Exhibit B: No Obstruction We’ve been here before with Barr, however. And quite recently. On March 24, Barr rushed to exculpate Trump and his advisers in a four-page letter in which he put his personal imprint on the Mueller report before Congress or the public had even seen it. He noted that although Mueller felt his report didn’t completely exonerate the president, he also didn’t think Trump and his team engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia to sabotage the 2016 presidential campaign. On the other hand, Barr advised, Mueller didn’t decide whether Trump had obstructed justice. But why leave any lingering uncertainties? If Mueller hadn’t decided, Barr would. There was no obstruction, he proclaimed. Happy days. The president took that to mean he was “completely exonerated” and went about saying so. Much criticism of Barr’s rash behavior and omniscience followed. Barr, recognizing that he may have come across as a little too sure of himself in that first letter, decided to write a second missive on March 29 that walked back some of what he said on March 24. The first letter, he wrote, was never meant to be a summary or even an “exhaustive recounting” of everything in Mueller’s report. It was just a “bottom line” conclusion. Too late, counselor. Your decision to pollute perception of what the Mueller report contained had already gained lots of traction. I suspect your decision to label an investigation as “spying” without any evidence may have a similar effect, even if it doesn’t keep you from behaving like this again. Summary Judgment Why is Barr — a lawman presumably devoted to the fact pattern and dedicated to the rule of law — taking it upon himself to single-handedly and repeatedly offer subjective and definitive appraisals of the complex and troubling events that have hung over the Trump presidency? I’ll take a page from Barr and offer my own subjective and definitive take: 1. His ego is substantial and he’s having the time of his life, or 2. He has an imperial view of the presidency and doesn’t care about the character of the person who inhabits it, or 3. He’s his boss’s legal hatchet man, or 4. All of the above. Trump has complained, notably, that Jeff Sessions didn’t act like Roy Cohn when he was attorney general. Cohn was a ruthless and sleazy attack dog who taught Trump how to weaponize the legal system to get his own way as a young developer in New York. Barr certainly isn’t anything like Cohn. But he’s trying.

To: FJB who wrote (1129320)	4/11/2019 8:32:08 AM
From: sylvester80	1 Recommendation Recommended By Land Shark Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575154

OOPS! Demographic Decline Is the Real Threat to the U.S. Trump says the country can’t admit more people, but immigration is the answer to heartland depopulation. By Noah Smith April 10, 2019, 5:30 AM MST bloomberg.com There’s plenty of room here. Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg Some supporters of President Donald Trump argue that his restrictionist agenda only targets illegal immigration, but that idea has now been decisively disproven. Many of the Central Americans now being detained by the Trump administration are legally seeking asylum rather than people trying to enter the country without permission. But during a recent briefing, the president declared: Our country is full. Our area is full. The sector is full…Can’t take you anymore. I’m sorry, turn around, that’s the way it is. The president’s actions show that he’s serious. He has initiated a purge of officials in the Department of Homeland Security whom he perceives to be insufficiently tough on immigrants, and said that hardline adviser Stephen Miller is now “ in charge” of immigration policy. That could indicate that Trump is planning to renew his contentious family separation policy, close the Mexican border, try to curtail birthright citizenship or enact any other number of harsh nativist policies. But what about Trump’s central contention that the U.S. is “full”? Is that true? Although there’s no widely accepted definition of what it means for a country to be full, the answer is probably no. First, although the U.S. has a higher population density than Canada or Australia, it is still sparsely populated compared to most other developed countries: Packing Them InPeople per square mile Source: United Nations, World Bank via Statistics Times Of course, population density by itself doesn’t really tell whether a country can accommodate more people. Much of Canada and Russia, for example, is not ideal for human habitation (though global warming may change this). Australia, meanwhile, doesn’t have much land for growing crops. The U.S., in contrast, has plenty of land available for farming -- 16.6 percent, compared to 12.7 percent in China, a country with four times the population and about the same land area. Thanks to its natural bounty, the U.S. is one of the world’s top food producers, and easily the world’s leading food exporter. It would have no trouble feeding a much larger population. An equally important natural resource is water, especially as climate change begins to bite. Here the U.S. again comes out looking better than most other developed countries: Water, Water EverywhereRenewable internal freshwater resources per capita in thousands of cubic meters Source: Index Mundi And of course, with recent advances in hydraulic fracturing, the U.S. is self-sufficient in energy too. So in terms of space and natural resources, the U.S. is far from full. Many states, such as New York, Illinois, Connecticut and Louisiana, are actually losing population. A number of metropolitan areas, including those surrounding Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore and St. Louis, are losing people as well. The U.S. population is still growing, but the rate is slowing -- 0.62 percent in 2018, about half the rate of the 1990s. Part of this is due to the end of mass immigration from Mexico, but part is due to a fall in the U.S. fertility rate: Baby BustU.S. total fertility rate, children per woman Source: World Bank The U.S. fertility rate, at 1.8 children per woman, is now well below the 2.1 needed for long-term population stability. In other words, without continued immigration, the U.S. population will peak and decline. What’s more, the drop in fertility looks like it’s not just a temporary response to the economic hardship of the Great Recession, but a structural shift. Hispanic fertility has converged with white and black sub-replacement levels: U.S. Fertility Rates by RaceAverage number of children per woman in child-bearing years Source: National Vital Statistics Report Economist Lyman Stone predicts that the fertility rate will fall even further, to 1.5 or even 1.4. That would put the U.S. in the same situation as countries like Japan, where a rapidly aging population places an increasing burden on the young and decreases companies’ desire to invest domestically. So rather than being full, many parts of the U.S. are in danger of emptying out. But paradoxically, some cities in the U.S. actually do look like they’re getting full. These are the superstar cities -- New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a handful of others -- where knowledge industries have been clustering in recent years, bringing in an influx of highly paid workers and sending rents soaring. So far, local politics in most of these cities have not allowed the construction of new housing supply to accommodate the increased demand (though some have done much better than others). So the population problem in the U.S. is highly location-specific. Instead of keeping immigrants out of the country, the government should focus on sending them to places where the population is stagnant or declining and the economy needs shoring up. The Economic Innovation Group, a think tank, suggests using place-based visas to send skilled immigrants to declining regions. But even low-skilled laborers can bring new life to declining towns across rural America. By trying so hard to keep foreigners from moving to the U.S., Trump is threatening to sentence the country to demographic decline -- and to decreasing relevance, dynamism and power. Embracing the myth that the country is full would be a misstep of historical proportions.