Michael Moore: 'Americans Have Always Supported ‘Socialist’ Ideas'

There is an element of truth in what Moore says. Libertarians too think modern-day America is thoroughly Fascist.  And the founding fathers were such devout Communists that a third of them had to die before they went back to private property.  I will not revisit it here but I did put up a few years ago a discussion of the Leftist influence in American history.  See here, here and here.

And Trump is almost single-handedly waging a war on the Leftism that has become deeply embedded in American life.  Even SCOTUS and the Republican Senate obstruct him at times.  And the two years of Republican dominance of both houses gave him precisely nothing towards his chief goal of immigration reform.  He seems to be the last barrier against a wave of Leftism that has been sweeping across America for a long time now.  When he goes will the Leftist creep resume?  One hopes not but it is only a hope. The Donks have swung so far Left that the prospect of them replacing Trump is very disquieting indeed.

But Moore does the typical Leftist trick of speaking in all or none terms.  Like lots else, Leftism can come in various strengths. And America is not as heavily regulated as the EU, though Obama was working on that.  And America's health care system has much more scope for private medicine than Britain does.

So, taking Trump in context, what he was saying is that America will resist any further encroachment of socialism.  One hopes he is right


“Ha!,” activist filmmaker Michael Moore reacted after President Donald Trump promised in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that the U.S. will never become a socialist nation.

On Wednesday, Moore tweeted that it was a “great victory” that a “scared Trump” made the claim, given that Americans always favored socialist principles:

“A great victory for the majority of Americans when a scared Trump declared: "America will never be a socialist country!” Ha! The last gasp of The Greed Class! The truth: from social security to Medicare to libraries & pub schools, Americans have always supported "socialist" ideas”

In his tweet, Moore posted a video arguing that America is already a socialist country that supports things like abortion, homosexuality, drug use, universal health care and “free” goods and services:

In his State of the Union address, Trump said, "Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country" - which drew cheers of "U.S.A!" from the audience.

A transcript of Moore's video appears below:

“Let me share with you a fact that has never been stated in the press, or reported on the nightly news, or even spoken amongst ourselves: the United States of America is a leftist country.

“That’s right: we are one rocking, sh*t-kicking, gay-loving, gun-rejecting, race-mixing, pot-smoking, tree-hugging, hip-hopping, anywhere breast-feeding, quinoa-cooking, left-leaning liberal nation.

“Here are the facts: the vast majority of Americans are pro-choice. They want equal pay for women, stronger environmental laws, legalized marijuana, a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for all, tuition-free college, free child care, support for labor unions, a cut in the military budget, breakup of big banks. Most Americans don’t even own a gun. And, seventy-five percent believe immigration is good for the U.S. And, on and on and on.

“Heck, Texas isn’t even white, anymore. Houston had a lesbian mayor. When you think Texas, you need to think lesbian.

“The values they stood for in the 60’s and 70’s are now the beliefs of this great land.

“Those crazy mother-f**kers have won. And, I love the smell of essential oils in the morning.”

SOURCE 

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Fauxcohontas document: Elizabeth Warren sunk



A lust for power founders on a rock of dishonesty

This new document should finish off her political career. Senator Elizabeth Warren, now vying for the Democrat nomination for president, was a white, middle-class lawyer when she described herself as an "American Indian" in her own hand-writing when registering for the Texas Bar.

James Robbins:

The latest evidence against her should spell the end of her presidential ambitions.

Sen. Warren’s discredited story of Indian ancestry has made her an object of ridicule coming from President Donald Trump, who dubbed her “Pocahontas,” and conservatives generally who prefer the more pointed “Fauxcahontas.” Liberals seem to have been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, seemingly accepting each new explanation for her shifting story of how and why she was mistaken for a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Warren’s 1986 registration card for the State Bar of Texas could put an end to all that. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the signed document in which she wrote that her race was “American Indian.” This supports the two critical charges against her: that she knowingly and personally claimed Native American heritage, and that she did so for the purpose of career advancement.

Warren's link to American Indian identity, according to a DNA test, could amount to no more than one Indian ancestor 10 generations ago, when 1023 other of her ancestors in that generation were white.

SOURCE 

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Senate Republicans reveal new rules to speed approval of Trump nominees

Republican senators unveiled a new set of chamber rules Wednesday that would allow them to speed President Trump’s nominees through on an expedited basis, limiting Democrats’ ability to slow-walk the process and throttle the number of candidates who can be confirmed.

The proposal, written by Senate Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt and Sen. James Lankford, would reduce the maximum debate time after a filibuster has been defeated from 30 hours to two hours for most nominees.

Republicans have chafed as Democrats have used the filibuster to slow-walk hundreds of Trump nominees, forcing the Senate to spend months of floor time to get the candidates into their jobs.

The issue is about to become acute. The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to approve 40 judicial picks this week, creating a glut of new nominations headed to the floor.

Under current rules, at 30 hours of debate per nominee, the Senate can confirm perhaps five per week — meaning it would take eight weeks of floor time to go through the judgeships with no other major action intervening. That doesn’t include hundreds of other nominees who will soon be stacked up.

The new rules first will be debated in Mr. Blunt’s committee. “We are likely to have a mark up on that within the next week,” Mr. Blunt, Missouri Republican, told The Washington Times.

The GOP could push the rules through committee on a majority vote, but it would take a supermajority to win approval on the floor.

Democrats, who six years ago supported shorter time frames for nominees under President Obama, are now more reluctant under Mr. Trump.

“We are going to go through the committee to see if there is bipartisan support for it. I hope we do it that way, but if we can’t just because people want to slow us down and drag their feet and prevent the president form filling these nominations, then I’d be willing to consider alternatives,” said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican.

The chief alternative would be to trigger the “nuclear option,” a shortcut that involves reinterpreting the rules. That can be done on a majority vote — though it’s a deeply controversial move that can undermine cooperation in a chamber that relies on comity.

Democrats used the supermajority in 2013 to cut the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster on most nominees from 60 to a simple majority, and Republicans in 2017 used the nuclear option to extend the majority-filibuster threshold to Supreme Court nominees.

Mr. Lankford, who has been reaching out to Democrats on his proposal, said some of them may think they’ll win back the White House in 2020 and figure it’s better to change the rules now so they can avoid the sort of obstruction they have mounted against Mr. Trump. “There is more of a sense of ‘we probably should stop this game,’” Mr. Lankford said.

His proposal would still leave a 30-hour time frame in place for Supreme Court and circuit court nominees and Cabinet-level posts in the executive branch. But district court nominees and lower-level administrative posts would only face two hours of debate.

Republicans say the rules changes are needed because of Democrats’ unprecedented level of resistance to Mr. Trump’s nominees.

GOP leaders over the last two years had to move to head off a potential filibuster on 148 of Mr. Trump’s nominees. In the last two years of Mr. Obama’s tenure, just two nominees needed to overcome filibuster tests.

SOURCE 

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Utopian Dreams, Dystopian Realities

Democrats want to punish the wealthy just for daring to have more money than others.   

“Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” —Donald Trump from his State of the Union address

It’s going to take a lot of resolve. The politics of class warfare, long cultivated by our school system and the media, have apparently taken root. According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll, a whopping 76% of registered voters believe the rich should pay more in taxes. A Fox News survey reveals a similar sentiment, with 70% of Americans in favor of raising taxes on those earning over $10 million.

“There is a deep wellspring in terms of perception of unfairness in the economy that’s been tapped into here that either didn’t exist five years ago or existed and had not had a chance to be expressed,” asserts Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management “This is quite a moment in American economic history where all of a sudden in a matter of months this thing has kind of exploded like this.”

Columnist Karol Markowicz states it far more succinctly. “Watch out, America: Democrats’ class warfare is back with a vengeance,” she writes. “Your money belongs to them to redistribute as they see fit.”

Freshman House representative and media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s desire to impose a 70% marginal rate on income over the $10 million mark was well received by 59% of respondents to a recent Hill/HarrisX poll. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “wealth tax,” which would levy a 2% tax on those with a net worth over $50 million, and 3% on those worth over $1 billion, was supported by 61% of the 1,993 registered voters queried by the Politico/Morning Consult poll.

There’s a reason wealth tax is in quotations in the preceding paragraph. That’s because what Warren is proposing isn’t a tax, but outright wealth confiscation that tramples the 16th Amendment’s authorization of Congress to “lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.” (Emphasis added).

Warren wants to confiscate pre-existing wealth — on an annual basis, no less. Thus, those with assets of $50,000 would automatically pay $1 million per year to the government and those with assets of $1 billion would automatically fork over $30 million per year, even if their annual earnings were zero.

Freshman Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar is also aboard the bash-the-rich bandwagon. She’s proposing a 90% tax. “We don’t have a problem of scarcity, really,” she insists. “What we have is a problem of moral courage.”

Socialist Bernie Sanders is after inheritances. He’s proposing a bill that would levy a 45% tax on the value of an estate between $3.5 million and $10 million, and a 50% tax on the value of an estate between $10 million and $50 million. “From a moral, economic, and political perspective,” he pontificates, “our nation will not thrive when so few have so much and so many have so little.”

Morality and fairness have nothing to do with it. As of 2016, Americans who earned $250,000 and above per year paid 52.6% of the nation’s income taxes. Those who earned between $249,000 and $200,000 paid 5.9%, and those who earned between $100,000 and $199,000 paid 21.9%.

Those three groups comprised 16% of the returns filed — yet they paid 79.4% of the nation’s income tax bill.

As for the top 1%, a Washington, DC-based think tank called the Tax Foundation reveals that in 2015, that tiny group of Americans paid 39% of individual income taxes, while the bottom 90% of Americans paid just 29.4%.

And for 2018, approximately 76.4 million American workers, or 44.4%, will pay no income tax at all.

That is not to say those Americans pay nothing. There are a host of other levies such as sales tax, property taxes, and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Yet when nearly half of Americans are relieved of the burden levied on their fellow Americans, it is no surprise that “soak the rich” is an attractive mantra for those with no skin in the game.

Unsurprisingly, hypocrisy abounds. The 2017 Republican tax cut included a $10,000 per household cap on state and loan tax deductions — meaning the so-called rich would no longer be able to deduct any income above that threshold from federal taxation.

So who complained the loudest? High-tax states controlled by those same Democrats. In fact, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey filed federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the deduction cap, while other states engaged in dubious machinations to lower the federal-tax liability of their richer residents.

In short, those who advocate for higher taxes on the rich attempted to protect “their” rich from paying them.

Yet such hypocrisy apparently remains irrelevant. “We need additional revenue if we’re going to provide health care for all, rebuild our infrastructure, [and] make public colleges and universities tuition-free,” asserts Sanders.

Few ideas are more intellectually bankrupt than the assertion that some government-provided benefits are “free.” Nothing is free, and the idea that Democrats can actually sell wealth transference as free epitomizes the astounding level of economic ignorance that afflicts this nation.

That ignorance is amplified when it ignores reality, as in the 2017 tax cuts engendering an economic boom. “US real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2018 was 83 percent greater than it was in the second quarter of 2016, the last year of the previous administration,” the Boston Globe reported last October. “The growth of real private fixed investment was 129 percent greater. The unemployment rate fell from 5.0 percent in September 2016 to 3.7 percent in September 2018.”

Nonetheless, the true believers remain unconvinced even when reality bites. On Monday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state had a dramatic drop in state income-tax revenue, amounting to $2.8 billion. He blamed it on the aforementioned cap on state and local tax deductions that are causing high-earning New Yorkers to … leave the state.

How many jobs will they be taking away, along with their personal wealth? How many millions of jobs will Democrats sacrifice in service to their power-hungry, bash-the-rich agenda?

More important, when will Americans realize that job creation requires incentive, not coercion?

Moreover, middle class Americans need to take heed. If they think Democrats can implement the massive expansion of their welfare-state ambitions solely on the backs of the rich, they’re quite mistaken: A 2008 analysis revealed that taxing every American millionaire at a rate of 100% would only run the federal government for 111 days. If the same outright confiscation scheme were applied to everyone earning more than $200,000 the government would run for only 253 days.

That is not to say wealthy American can’t pay more in taxes, and raising the tax rate on carried-interest that disproportionately benefits the select few goes to the top of the list.

But that doesn’t negate the reality that Democrats will eventually need to go where the real money is. And when they do, Americans should expect the definition of who’s “rich” to be considerably expanded.

The fundamental transformation of the nation into the socialist/Marxist “utopia” Democrats yearn for demands nothing less.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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