US Politics - A Society in Meltdown

Fox News is the official media organ of the Tiny Hands regime, pal.

They are saying the exact same thing as that what you produced a laughing smiley for what you claimed @Julio_Geordio was saying.

So you’d be much better off laughing at the regime you support.

Everybody else is.

Again, you fail to read.

He said the Global Power.

The Soviet Union was still one of the two global Super Powers in the later 20th century despite its economy trailing badly the US for much of that period.

A super power is measured on economic strength, military, political and soft power.

The Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, military power, scientific and space investment (up until the 70s anyway), geographic position, strategic bases and overall soft power made up for a lot of that.

Economic strength is up for debate as it is. GDP is important, but so are a whole host of other metrics. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.

Julio stated that China could finally overtake the US as the Global Power on earth. That has to be across a range of things to be even open to debate. They are still only arriving at the Stage as a super power.

Why would anyone steal your lines? You’re a shit writer, if you were any good someone would publish you, instead you spend your entire day posting drivel on here. It must be highly embarrassing for such a well qualified “journalist”.

The largest economy on earth not being a global power, of course. :laughing:

In your case it’s because you’re a quasi-illiterate.

My gosh.

Failing to read again.

This is what he said;

You’ll note in my very post where I said China were a Super Power. We’re talking about number one.

Hey, I thought Trump was supposed to be “anti-war”?

So why the obsession with being the world’s number one “superpower”?

Maybe him and his supporters are just full of shit?

Again, Sidney’s thing is to steal other people’s lines and repeat them ad nauseum. It’s either a physiological reflect from the routine cul de sacs of stupidity he gets himself down or a weird thing that he does that he thinks is quirky and funny, like pretending to support the Northern Ireland football team for years.

Generally what happens is I come up with the lines and others steal them, mate.

I take it as a compliment.

But I wouldn’t expect a poster such as yourself who has such little handle on reality to understand that.

I don’t care for your deflection.

Quote me again if you can find an argument on the internet for you to Copy and Paste here as to why China are about to replace the US as the number one global super power.

Nobody said “superpower”, mate, except you when you tried to deflect for the 1,345,339th time on this forum.

Forgive me for including the same word as you did in your last post. I do that because you’re an utterly transparent hypocrite.

You’re trying to move the goalposts after being caught out rotten.

That’s what shit debaters, like yourself, do.

He’s not wrong.

He is wrong. Unless China were to change dramatically it has absolutely no chance of replacing the US, near term or long term.

China is an authoritarian, non democratic state and it’s values and ideals will never be acceptable not just to the US and it’s allies, but even it’s democratic neighbors in Asia. They have zero chance of exporting their ideas to other countries, and are more likely to go the way of the USSR, there’s some evidence of that already.

China is facing a future of population shrinkage and slowing economic growth, estimates are its population will shrink to 1B by the end of this century while the US will reach almost 500M. Despite all the hysteria over Trump, the US remains the country of choice for immigrants and those seeking economic opportunities. In a recent Gallup poll, 147 million people worldwide would move to the US, if given the chance. Not many would want to move to China.

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America is the greatest country in the world, that fact drives some lads insane, imagine moving to the likes of China or India

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Or Venezuela

Or South Galway

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He is completely wrong.

The idea that they are finally about to overtake the US as the global power is ridiculous.

They have quite a bit of things still to do.

What a bunch of lying lowlife scumbags the Democratic party has become, an embarrassment to what was once an honorable party with integrity.

On the eve of the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme court, a man with an impeccable career, Democrats have come out with two smears, one form an anonymous source and one based on doctoriong his Senate testimony to distort his record.

Kavanaugh was asked at his nomination hearing about the views of a Catholic organization Priests for Life on birth control, he clearly responded regarding “their” views. Asshole Democrats like Kamala Harris removed the word “they” from the clip and claimed he was representing his own views.

In the latest outrage, Sen Feinstein has come forward with an unnamed source who apparently claims some sexual misconduct between Kavanaugh and herself during high school, but wants to remain anonymous, declines to come forward and doesn’t want to pursue the matter further.

Sadly, the barrel has no bottom any longer in politics.

Kavanaugh is a lying scumbag and the Republicans have behaved disgracefully during his hearing.

Kamala Harris made a fool of him last week.

For all your pretence at being pro-choice it’s clear you’re only gagging to see Roe v Wade overturned.

I Wrote Some of the Stolen Memos That Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate About

He should be impeached, not elevated.

By LISA GRAVES

SEPT 07, 201811:43 AM

Much of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.

I do not raise that question lightly, but I am certain it must be raised.

Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.

Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.

No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it.

For example, in 2004, Sen. Orrin Hatch asked him directly if he received “any documents that appeared to you to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Kavanaugh responded, unequivocally, “No.”

In 2006, Sen. Ted Kennedy asked him if he had any regrets about how he treated documents he had received from Miranda that he later learned were stolen. Kavanaugh rejected the premise of the question, restating that he never even saw one of those documents.

Back then the senators did not have the emails that they have now, showing that Miranda sent Kavanaugh numerous documents containing what was plainly research by Democrats. Some of those emails went so far as to warn Kavanaugh not to distribute the Democratic talking points he was being given. If these were documents shared from the Democratic side of the aisle as part of normal business, as Kavanaugh claimed to have believed in his most recent testimony, why would they be labeled “not [for] distribution”? And why would we share our precise strategy to fight controversial Republican nominations with the Republicans we were fighting?

Another email chain included the subject line “spying.” It’s hard to imagine a more definitive clue than that. Another said “Senator Leahy’s staff has distributed a confidential letter to Dem Counsel” and then described for Kavanaugh that precise confidential information we had gathered about a nominee Kavanaugh was boosting. Again, it is illogical to think that we would have just given Miranda this “confidential” information for him to use against us. But this is precisely what Judge Kavanaugh suggested in his testimony on Wednesday. He is not that naïve.

In the hearing this week, Sen. Leahy also noted that the previously hidden emails showed that Miranda asked to meet Kavanaugh in person to give him “paper” files with “useful info to map out [Sens. Joe] Biden and [Dianne] Feinstein, and others.” The promised information included “Biden-speak.” Again, this would not have been a normal information exchange.

In response to Leahy’s questions this week, Kavanaugh made the outlandish claim that it was typical for him to be told what Democrats planned to ask at these combative hearings over controversial nominees, and that this was in fact the “coin of the realm.” As a Democrat who worked on those questions, I can say definitively that it was not typical at all. Kavanaugh knows this full well.

At the time, Kavanaugh was working with Miranda and outside groups to try to force these nominees through the Senate over Democratic objections, and it would have been suicide to give them our research, talking points, strategies, or confidential letters. The GOP senators, their staff, the White House, and outside groups were working intensively to undermine the work of Democratic senators to block the most extreme of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

The Leahy talking points given to Kavanaugh were from my in-depth research into why the Senate had compelling historical precedent for examining Miguel Estrada’s Department of Justice records, which the White House counsel’s office was refusing to surrender. Other confidential materials Miranda shared with Kavanaugh related to investigations Democrats were pursuing over how Judge Priscilla Owen had handled an abortion case involving parental consent and about the overlap between her funders and groups with business before the courts of Texas. We would never have provided that information—key to our strategy to try to block what we considered extremist judicial nominations—to Miranda or to the White House.

During his testimony, Kavanaugh conflated these adversarial proceedings with ones in which Democrats might have cooperated with the other side, like the Patriot Act and airline liability. But these weren’t hearings on some bill where senators would share their concerns across the aisle to try to get a bipartisan fix on problems in a piece of legislation. These were oppositional proceedings in committee and on the floor over controversial judicial nominees. Kavanaugh knew this just as intimately as I did—our sides fought over those nominations intensely.

It was also an area where Kavanaugh’s judicial nominations alliance had taken a scorched-earth approach, attacking Democrats ruthlessly. The White House’s closest allies went so far as to call Leahy and other Democrats on the committee “anti-Catholic,” even running attack ads.

Perhaps Kavanaugh was so blinded by his quest to get the most controversial Bush nominees confirmed in 2003 that he did not have any concerns about the bounty of secret memos and letters he was receiving—the full extent of which is not known because so many documents are still secret.

But, surely, reasonable questions about what he had been party to would have been considered after the story of the theft exploded in the news, Miranda was forced to resign, and the U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms began a bipartisan investigation into the files stolen from the Senate?

As of November 2003, when the sergeant-at-arms seized the Judiciary Committee’s servers, Kavanaugh would have been on notice that any of the letters, talking points, or research described as being from Democrats that were provided to him by Miranda were suspect and probably stolen from the Senate’s server.

But he did nothing. He did not come forward to the Senate to provide information about the confidential documents Miranda had given him, which were clearly from the Democrats.

Kavanaugh also apparently did nothing when the Senate referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. (Miranda was never prosecuted.)

Eventually, though, Kavanaugh went even further to help cover up the details of the theft.

During the hearings on his nomination to the D.C. Circuit a few months after the Miranda news broke, Kavanaugh actively hid his own involvement, lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee by stating unequivocally that he not only knew nothing of the episode, but also never even received any stolen material.

Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft. Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too.

But he lied.

Under oath.

And he did so repeatedly.

Significantly, he did so even though a few years earlier he had helped spearhead the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for perjury in a private civil case. Back then Kavanaugh took lying under oath so seriously that he was determined to do everything he could to help remove a president from office.

Now we know that he procured his own confirmation to the federal bench by committing the same offense. And he did so not in a private case but in the midst of public hearings for a position of trust, for a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary.

His actions were dishonorable and dishonest.

This week, as part of his efforts to be elevated to the highest court in the land, he has calmly continued to deceive, falsely claiming that it would have been perfectly normal for him to receive secret Democratic letters, talking points, and other materials. And if this absurd notion were somehow true, it would not even be consistent with what he testified to 12 and 14 years ago. Back then, he didn’t state it would have been normal for him to receive secret Democratic strategy materials.

Instead, he explicitly and repeatedly went out of his way to say he never had access to any such materials . These objectively false statements were offered under oath to convince the committee of something that was untrue. It was clearly intentional, with Kavanaugh going so far as to correct Sen. Kennedy when the senator described the document situation accurately.

That’s why—without even getting into other reasonable objections to his nomination—he should not be confirmed.

In fact, by his own standard, he should clearly be impeached.

Lisa Graves is the co-founder of Documented, which investigates corporate influence on democracy. She is the former chief counsel for nominations for the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice.