Inevitable: Media Circle Wagons to Protect Elizabeth Warren

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Another great headline:

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/ ... rican_flap

Inevitable: Media Circling Wagons to Protect Warren Over Bizarre 'Native American' Flap

Guy Benson
Guy Benson
Political Editor, Townhall.com

May 02, 2012 12:10 PM EST

It must be nice to be a liberal Democrat. Unless you've fathered a child with a campaign staffer while cheating on your cancer-stricken wife, or repeatedly lied about accidentally tweeting photos of your genitals to coeds, the media generally has your back. Journalists overwhelmingly support Democrats, yet many delude themselves about their own capacity for objectivity. What would be a "deeply troubling" story if its subject were a conservative magically transforms into a silly and petty distraction, borne of our "divisive politics," if a Democrat happens to be in trouble. To wit: Lefty anti-capitalist superhero Elizabeth Warren is locked in a dogfight with Scott Brown over a Senate seat in Massachusetts. Warren, a multimillionaire who still thinks she's part of America's '99 percent,' is raking in eye-popping levels of political donations -- yet she's been unable to build any sort of stable lead over Brown, even in a deep blue state. Beyond suffering from a likeability deficit, part of Warren's problem is a nagging issue of trustworthiness, exacerbated by the ongoing controversy over her ethnic heritage. Dan wrote about the kerfuffle yesterday.

In short, Warren listed herself as a racial ethnic minority in a directory of law professors between 1986 and 1995. The profile identified her as a Native American. During that time span, she taught at the University of Texas, Penn, and then Harvard. Indeed, Harvard twice touted her as an ethnic minority, even though her former colleagues now insist that her heritage played no role whatsoever in her hiring or professional development. (One lawyer who was at Harvard disputes the likelihood of that claim, based on the university's "diversity" binge during the period in question). Pressed by the Brown campaign about the authenticity of her Native American background, Warren's campaign has delivered an incoherent response. First, they cried sexism. Then they falsely stated that Warren had never cited her heritage in a professional setting, and that both of the candidates' maternal grandparents were of Native American descent. Now, a genealogist has dug up evidence suggesting that Warren does, in fact, have some Cherokee roots. One of her great, great, great grandmothers is listed as a member of the tribe, making Warren 1/32 Cherokee. In light of the minor epidemic of ethic fraud in academia, and the Warren's campaign's indignant and shifting evasions, one might think the press might develop some interest in the story. After all, the nation became acquainted with Christine O'Donnell's years-old witchcraft dabbling in 2010. Alas, the MSM is rushing to cover this dust-up -- but mostly to declare it over. Nothing to see here, editorializes the Boston Globe:


Unless evidence emerges to suggest otherwise, Warren doesn’t need to explain herself any further. There’s nothing untoward about citing one’s actual ancestry in a professional directory. Warren, like everyone else, has a right to her own background. It’s only in the freighted world of academic diversity that these questions become more complicated. As of now, the only apologizing should be done by Harvard Law School.


The Globe's editors credulously swallow Harvard's assurances that race and ethnicity never came up during Warren's hiring process. That may (or may not) be the case -- but then why did Warren classify herself as a Native American in the first place? And why did she suddenly -- and, as of now, without explanation -- abandon the label in 1995? We're to believe that professional advancement had absolutely nothing to do with it? That's possible, I suppose, but I don't think it's a great stretch to at least wonder if Warren may have been exploiting her family's distant identity to help climb the diversity-obsessed ivory tower. The Globe suggests that Warren is entitled to cite her "actual ancestry." Fair enough, but what is the threshold for legitimate claims on minority status? As I understand it, race-based affirmative action is designed to help traditionally underprivileged communities gain access to institutions of higher learning. It also purports to enrich campus environments, thanks to the aforementioned students' unique perspectives and cultural experiences. Granting, for the sake of argument, that these are legitimate ends, would Warren satisfy either stated goal of affirmative action? And if she were not seeking any sort of advantage, why would she bother calling herself Native American at all, then quietly remove the designation years later? The Washington Post doesn't seem interested in any of these questions:


The Harvard Law professor challenging Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown is facing increasing scrutiny over use of Native American heritage in her legal career. But it’s not Warren’s family tree that’s really at issue — it’s her ability to fight back ... The fact that this story has dribbled on for days shows how aggressive Brown has been, and raises questions about Warren’s ability to respond in kind ... The most recent polling shows a dead heat in the race, with about a third of the crucial conservative and moderate Democrats still undecided. If Brown successfully defines Warren as untruthful and hypocritical while remaining well-liked himself, it could go a long way.


It's settled then! The issue is not whether Warren intentionally exploited a broken, race-fixated system to further her career based on an extremely dubious claim of Native American identity. The issue is whether she can "fight back" against the Brown campaign's "aggressive" attempts to cast her as "untruthful and hypocritical." And the important "questions raised" pertain to her ability to punch back, not the veracity of her story. Yes, I'm sure this would also be the media narrative if Scott Brown had called himself, say, an African-American for nine years, then struggled to identify a lone great-great-great grandparent to justify the claim.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... mark-steyn

May 5, 2012 5:00 A.M.
Composite Americans
Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee thirty-second.

By Mark Steyn

About Author Archive Latest RSS Send Follow• 17321 followers

Elizabeth Warren

Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In Dreams from My Father, the world’s all-time most unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend: “When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough . . . ”

But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend — “Julia.” She’s worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can’t even be herself. In fact, she can’t be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his “Head Start” program at the age of three through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you’ll love it: Sweet Dreams from My Sugar Daddy. She’s what the lawyers would call “non composite mentis.” She’s not competent to do a single thing for herself — and, from Barack’s point of view, that’s exactly what he’s looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.

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Then there’s “Elizabeth,” a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack’s white girlfriend, she couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be a composite — a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface make-up and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the “Are you Native American?” box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F***kin’ Chief Dances with Plugs.

How does she know she’s a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather’s “high cheekbones,” and says the Indian stuff is part of her family “lore.” Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am,” and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as the Boston Herald reported, “Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the ’90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty’s lack of diversity.”

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School’s first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have — hang on, let me get out my calculator — duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

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Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

Coincidentally, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission last week issued an “Enforcement Guidance” limiting the rights of employers to take into account the criminal convictions and arrest records of job applicants because of the “disparate impact” the consideration of such matters might have on minorities. That’s great news, isn’t it? So Harvard Law School can’t ask Elizabeth Warren if she’s ever held up a liquor store because, if they did, the faculty might be even less Cherokee than it is.

My colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote the other day about Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain, and other scientific chaps who argue that conservatives suffer from a genetic cognitive impairment that causes us to favor small government. In other words, we’re born stupid. So, thanks to gene sequencing, we now know why conservatives aren’t as smart as, say, Pete Stark, the nigh-on-half-a-century Democratic congressman who believes that Solyndra, which is based in his district, is an automobile manufacturer: “I wish I had a big enough expense allowance to get one of those new ‘S’s’ that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. “My 10 year old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an ‘S’ sedan.” Pete sounds so out of it, you have to wonder if maybe he’s 1/32nd Republican on his great-great-great-grandmother’s side.

But, if conservatives are simply born that way, shouldn’t they be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission?

Aw, don’t waste your time. Elizabeth Warren will be ahead of you checking the “right-wing madman” box on the grounds that she gets her high cheekbones and minimal facial hair from Genghis Khan. And “Julia” will be saying she was born conservative but thanks to Obama’s new Headcase Start program was able to get ideological reassignment surgery. And Barack’s imaginary girlfriend will be telling him that she’d be left if she could, but she’s right so she can’t, but she’d love to be left. So he left her.

Good thing the smart guys are running the joint.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... ory_1.html

Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.

For decades, federal policies — including war, compulsory boarding schools and relocation programs that moved Indians from reservations to cities — waged a brutal campaign meant to eradicate tribes and acculturate Indians. If that effort had been successful, no one would want or be able to claim a connection to a tribe. Instead, some Indians remain proudly unassimilated — or with only blood to show.

Regardless of why Warren claimed minority status (she said she did it in hopes of meeting people with similar heritage), to be a woman from Oklahoma of working-class upbringing — and to want not only to walk the halls of power but to help build them — you have to press whatever advantage you have. Doing so might seem distasteful to those who’ve never had to do it because they were born into privilege and power.


But beyond the question of whether Warren “gamed the system,” isn’t the question of her identity and its deployment suggestive of something else? Doesn’t it show us that whatever its sins, America’s virtues have won — that we have become a plural society? If someone with Indian blood, no matter how little, is a Harvard professor and stands a chance of being elected to the Senate, might that suggest that the American experiment is working and that we live in a meritocracy?

No, not yet. An Indian identity has become a commodity, though not one that is openly traded. It has real value in only a few places; the academy is one of them. And like most commodities, it is largely controlled by the elite. In the 19th century, the U.S. government, Indian agents and even commercial barons had power over who was and who wasn’t identified as Indian. This meant controlling who got annuities, rations of food and clothing, funding, land, and trade. After the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, which allowed Indians a certain amount of acreage based on tribal enrollment, it meant controlling who got an allotment of land and who didn’t. Half-blood Indians enrolled in tribes were allowed to sell their allotments, while full-bloods were not.

So if you were on the make, it was better to classify Indians as half-blood on paper, get them in debt to you and then have them sign their land over to you. Millions of acres were transferred out of tribal control and into the hands of the government — and to timber, mining, farming and railroad barons. Those with power and those in power controlled who could be classified as Indian and how strongly so.

I worry that the same kind of injustice goes on today, but in a different register. Being Indian now is positive. Not everywhere, not all the time — but it is certainly of value in places like Harvard. And just as in the bad old days, what being Indian means is largely decided by powerful people in powerful institutions.

My father is Jewish, but I didn’t really grow up around any of my Jewish relatives, so claiming a Jewish identity — despite that heritage — would feel strange, presumptuous, disrespectful. On my mother’s side we have an ancestor by the name of Bonga, who was African and ended up at Leech Lake in Minnesota, where he married a woman of the Ojibwe tribe, and where I grew up. Despite this heritage, it would likewise feel very odd to claim that I am African or African American. (I am something like one-156th African.)

I identify as Ojibwe, but the important distinction is that I get to make this choice, and that makes me different from many in my tribe. To be able to control one’s identity means you have mastered many social, cultural and economic registers — precisely the ones that can make you a success. It also means you have the luxury of choice; some people make this luxury themselves, but others are born into it. This is, I think, why one’s heritage sometimes smacks of unfair advantage.

For many, to be Indian has meant suffering. For many, to claim it costs very little but can yield tremendous returns. You risk little when you control the commodity and the market. Indian people have not often controlled both. That Warren claims she has Indian ancestry means not only that America is working, but that it could work better.

outlook@washpost.com

David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the author of “Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life.”

Read more from Outlook:

Elizabeth Warren’s worst week in Washington

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http://bostonherald.com/news/us_politic ... 1061130279

Elizabeth Warren brushes off ‘Trail of Tears’ report
Hillary Chabot By Hillary Chabot
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 - Updated 4 hours ago
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Elizabeth Warren waved off reports yesterday that an ancestor helped round up Cherokees in the infamous “Trail of Tears,” as well as demands from U.S. Sen. Scott Brown to prove she never claimed her Native American heritage to further her career — dismissing the developments as “politics as usual.”

“I think what this is about is Scott Brown trying to change the subject,” said Warren at a Brighton event last night. “He just wants to find a way to talk about something else, and I think it’s wrong. I think this is why people are turned off on Washington politics.”

Warren has been under fire for citing “family lore,” without documentation, that an ancestor was a Cherokee, and for listing herself as a “minority” law professor in a professional directory in the 1980s and ’90s.

But Paul Reed, a Utah genealogist who is a fellow at the American Genealogical Society, said he found primary documentation that shows Warren’s great-great-great grandfather Jonathan Crawford served in a Tennessee militia unit that rounded up Cherokees before they were force-marched to Oklahoma in the infamous “Trail of Tears.”

“Jonathan H. Crawford did serve in the Indian wars,” said Reed. “He is listed as serving in the company that rounded up Cherokees.”

Thousands of Native Americans died after they were forced to relocate under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Warren’s family link to the genocidal exodus was first reported yesterday by conservative websites Breitbart.com and Legalinsurrection.com.

Warren also brushed off Brown’s demand to release her law school and job applications.

“If Scott Brown has a question about my qualifications for my job, he can talk to the people who hired me,” Warren said. Citing Brown’s vote yesterday against a bill that would have prevented student loans from doubling, Warren said: “No wonder Scott Brown wants to change the subject. This is politics as usual.”

Democrats tried to turn the tables on the Brown campaign last night, saying they plan to file an ethics complaint against him today, accusing him of filming his recent half-court basketball shot on the taxpayers’ dime. The back and forth comes as a recent Rasmussen poll conducted Monday suggests Warren has not been harmed from the scandal. She is tied with Brown at 45 percent, according to the poll of 500 likely voters.

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http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/16/warr ... lls-apart/

Warren’s Story Falls Apart

Posted by Arnold Ahlert Bio ↓ on May 16th, 2012 Comments ↓
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The wheels have finally fallen off Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s diversity wagon. The reliably leftist Boston Globe has issued a retraction of Warren’s claim that she is 1/32 Cherokee Indian. “Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in the May 1 Metro section and the accompanying headline incorrectly described the 1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee,” the paper writes. “The document, alluded to in a family newsletter found by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, was an application for a marriage license, not the license itself. Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven.” The original story? A headline piece in the Sunday Metro section. The correction? The third item on the correction page, typically buried deep in the paper. The larger issue? The transparent efforts of a biased media to maintain the fiction as long as possible.

The Globe’s original story, published on May 1st, reported that a document proved Warren’s claim. “A record unearthed Monday shows that US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has a great-great-great grandmother listed in an 1894 document as a Cherokee, said a genealogist at the New England Historic and Genealogy Society.” The same day the Boston Herald reported that “the Harvard Law professor’s campaign last night finally came up with what they claim is a Cherokee connection–her great-great-great-grandmother.” ABC News also did a May 1st report, noting that genealogist Chris Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Association ”set out to hunt down Warren’s ancestry last Thursday. In less than a week, he discovered documents citing an 1894 marriage record that lists Warren’s great-great-great grandmother, O. C. Sarah Smith as Cherokee, meaning that Warren is 1/32nd Native American.”

On May 4th the New York Times took it a step further, claiming that Republican opponent Scott Brown’s questioning of Warren’s assertion “is straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy,” and that “Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment.” Writer Kevin Noble Maillard, a law professor enrolled as a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, offer his own take on the controversy. “For the Cherokee Nation, Warren is ‘Indian enough;’ she has the same blood quantum as Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker,” he wrote.

The meme, “Warren is 1/32 Cherokee” continued to be promoted by several different news outlets, most of which did nothing more than regurgitate the original story, absent any independent fact-checking. These included CBS News, the Huffington Post and the Associated Press. The most hilarious assertion regarding Warren’s claim came courtesy of the Washington Post’s David Treuer. In a column entitled, “Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.,” Treuer makes the absurd claim that “an Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice.” He further excuses Warren’s assertion, contending that “to be a woman from Oklahoma of working-class upbringing — and to want not only to walk the halls of power but to help build them — you have to press whatever advantage you have. Doing so might seem distasteful to those who’ve never had to do it because they were born into privilege and power.” In other words, lying is acceptable — as long as one’s lower class and purported ethnicity qualifies one to do so.

Despite the mainstream media pile-on, it didn’t take long to prove that Elizabeth Warren’s assertion was nothing more than wishful thinking. Breitbart.com was apparently willing to do something most other news organizations were unwilling to do: conduct an actual investigation of Warren’s assertion. They reviewed original marriage records found in the files of the Logan County, Oklahoma Court Clerk’s office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and spoke with Logan County Court clerk ReJeania Zmek. Breitbart discovered that the original May 12, 1894 marriage license and the corresponding May 13, 1894 certificate of marriage of William J. Crawford, great-great-grand uncle of Elizabeth Warren, and Mary E. (Long) Wolford contains a column for the race of the bride and the groom — but both of them left it blank

Zmek offered another indication that something was amiss. “In modern times we keep marriage license applications,” she said. “The way they’re issued now, you do the application, then you do the license. We currently do keep records of marriage license applications.” Yet she revealed that this practice didn’t begin until 1950.

Zmek then revealed (probably inadvertently) why many Americans consider mainstream media claims of even-handed reporting beneath contempt. She confirmed to Breitbart that “no other news organization had contacted her to date on any national topic or to inquire about the validity of this purported 1894 Logan County, Oklahoma marriage license application or anything related to the 1894 marriage of William J. Crawford.”

Such “errors of omission” might be acceptable were it evenly applied to both sides of the political spectrum. Yet one need only compare the Washington Post’s recent effort to portray Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney as an anti-gay bully based on a single incident that happened 47 years ago with the mainstream media’s calculated incuriosity regarding large portions of president Obama’s life, which still remain off the record almost four years into his time in office. Furthermore, as the Journolist scandal of 2008 reveals, leftist media members coordinated efforts to keep Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary rhetoric from damaging the president during that election run.

Elizabeth Warren can continue to insist that she is part Cherokee, whether based on dubious assertions, like her grandfather having “high cheekbones,” or ridiculous rationale such as the claim that she did so “in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.” And the leftist media can continue to protect her by asserting that she didn’t use such claims to advance her career. But the fact remains that the University of Pennsylvania, who listed her as a minority in a “Minority Equity Report” from 1987 to 1994, and Harvard University, who listed her as a diversity hire in 1996, were more than willing to do so based on nothing more than hearsay. And the mainstream media, as well as the New England Historic Genealogical Association, which is now saying that “the original [marriage license] application cannot be located” were also willing to take Warren at face value, or base their entire assertions of proof on an unsubstantiated March 2006 family newsletter quoting an amateur genealogist.

Yet it remains to be seen if the people of Massachusetts will be as flexible regarding the truth on election day next November. Undoubtedly they will base their votes for either Republican Scott Brown or Warren on a number of issues. Warren might want to hope that personal credibility isn’t one of them.

About Arnold Ahlert
Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... at/257415/

Is Elizabeth Warren Native American or What?
By Garance Franke-Ruta

May 20 2012, 12:35 AM ET 60

The Democratic Senate candidate can't back up family lore that she is part Indian -- but neither is there any evidence that she benefited professionally from these stories. warrenReuters

Elizabeth Warren is not a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

And Elizabeth Warren is not one of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee.

Nor could she become one, even if she wanted to.

Despite a nearly three week flap over her claim of "being Native American," the progressive consumer advocate has been unable to point to evidence of Native heritage except for a unsubstantiated thirdhand report that she might be 1/32 Cherokee. Even if it could be proven, it wouldn't qualify her to be a member of a tribe: Contrary to assertions in outlets from The New York Times to Mother Jones that having 1/32 Cherokee ancestry is "sufficient for tribal citizenship," "Indian enough" for "the Cherokee Nation," and "not a deal-breaker," Warren would not be eligible to become a member of any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes based on the evidence so far surfaced by independent genealogists about her ancestry.

"These are my family stories," Warren has said. "This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw." But so far she and her campaign have been unable to establish that her family lore about being part Native American is anything more than one of the most widely shared family myths known to American genealogical researchers, myths especially prevalent in Warren's home state of Oklahoma, the state with the highest percent of Native Americans in the nation and one where the Cherokee are the largest minority group.

"There's a running joke in Indian country: If you meet somebody who you wouldn't necessarily think they're Native, but they say they're Native, chances are they'll tell you they're Cherokee," said Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, which with more than 300,000 citizens is the largest Cherokee tribe.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society backtracked on Warren's ancestry, saying it has "no proof" of Cherokee descent.

Warren, now running as a Democrat to unseat incumbent Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, has been embroiled in the controversy since reports surfaced that she described herself as a minority in a law school directory and was touted as a Native American faculty member while tenured at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. Warren has described herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry. Brown's campaign has seized on the story to raise questions about whether Warren misled Harvard or sought to use distant Native American ties for professional gain, and hammered on the propriety of a blonde, blue-eyed white woman describing herself as a minority. But the biggest question raised during the fracas is the one no one has been able to answer: whether she has Native American ancestry at all.

Warren has doubled down on her description of her background and dismissed suggestions she was ever an affirmative action hire as preposterous. "I'm proud of my Native American heritage," she said Monday in an appearance on CNN. "I'm proud of my family."

Her inability to name any specific Native American ancestor has kept the story alive, though, as pundits left and right have argued the case. Supporters touted her as part Cherokee after genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society said he'd found a marriage certificate that described her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the late 18th century, as a Cherokee. But that story fell apart once people looked at it more closely. The Society, it turned out, was referencing a quote by an amateur genealogist in the March 2006 Buracker & Boraker Family History Research Newsletters about an application for a marriage certificate:

Lynda Smith said, "When Neoma's son William J. Crawford married his second wife Mary LONG in Oklahoma, he stated on his marriage application that his parents were Johnathan Houston Crawford and O. C. Sarah Smith and that his mother was Cherokee Indian."

No one has surfaced that document, and there's some reason to believe it may not exist. Lynda Smith later wrote that she does not believe she ever saw it herself, according to a report by amateur genealogist Michael Patrick Leahy, who has helped lead a full court press from the right on the Warren ancestry story, along with other conservative outlets such as the Boston Herald and the blog Legal Insurrection. (Smith declined a request for comment.)

The New England Historic Genealogical Society backtracked on Warren's ancestry in a statement Tuesday, saying the group has "no proof that Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great-grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith either is or is not of Cherokee descent" and that the Society "has not expressed a position on whether Mrs. Warren has Native American ancestry, nor do we possess any primary sources to prove that she is."

The Boston Globe, which had taken the Society's earlier statements as confirmation of Warren's Cherokee heritage ("Document ties Warren kin to Cherokees"), issued a sniffy correction Tuesday about the "1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee," noting that "Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven."

But even were such a document to be found, Warren would not be eligible to enroll as a Cherokee based on it alone. To begin with, the Cherokee Nation doesn't accept marriage licenses as documentation of Cherokee ancestry -- let alone a document described as an application for a marriage license by a descendent of the individual claimed as Cherokee.

"Marriage licenses don't cut it," said Krehbiel-Burton of the Cherokee Nation.

Further, to enroll as a member of the Cherokee Nation, an individual must have had a direct ancestor listed among the more than 101,000 people enrolled on the "Final Rolls of the Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory" between 1898-1914, now known as the Dawes Rolls. The Cherokee Nation is very strict about this, even keeping descendants of siblings of men and women on the rolls out of the tribe, as well as descendents of Cherokees who were living out of the area at the time the lists were drawn up in what was then Northeastern Oklahoma.

"If she does not have an ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, she cannot be considered Cherokee through this tribe," explained Lydia Neal, a processor with the registrar's office of the Cherokee Nation.

O.C. Sarah Smith died long before the rolls were drawn up, too far in the past to make Warren eligible for membership in the tribe (assuming Smith was Cherokee).

No direct-line relatives of Warren are listed on the Dawes Rolls, according to Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (the doubled name is not a typo), the independent genealogist who identified Michelle Obama's slave ancestors in 2009 in a project with The New York Times.

"The Dawes Rolls don't lend support to [Warren's] claim," she told The Atlantic.

The Eastern Band of the Cherokee, for their part, have since 1963 required individuals to be at least 1/16 Cherokee to enroll -- and also to have "a direct lineal ancestor" on "the 1924 Baker Roll of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians." Even were Smith discovered to be Cherokee, Warren would not be eligible to join the tribe as someone who also lacks a direct-line ancestor on the 1924 rolls, according to Smolenyak's research.

"If she has Native American ancestry, it's likely quite a ways back and not reflected in more contemporary resources," Smolenyak said.

"In her immediate pedigree there is no one who is listing themselves as not white," the New England Historic and Genealogical Society's Child told the Boston Herald after looking at her maternal line in late April.

And while many have pointed out that the current principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker, is only 1/32 Cherokee, his background is not like Warren's; he was "born and raised in Cherokee County" and is a direct descendant of "Nancy Walker Osage, an early Tahlequah business owner and Cherokee Healer" listed on the Dawes Rolls.

The difference between him and Warren is he has a direct-line ancestor clearly documented as a Cherokee whom he can name. So far, Warren has only been able to point to family lore.

Asked if Warren were claiming O.C. Sarah Smith or any other ancestor was Cherokee or if the campaign or Warren had reached out to a genealogist to research Warren's background, Warren spokesperson Alethea Harney said she'd have to look into it, then declined to answer the questions in a follow-up email exchange.

None of this to say that a Cherokee citizen couldn't look like Warren. Though it confounds many people's expectations, the Cherokee Nation considers being Cherokee as much an ethnicity as anything racial, and given the tribe's centuries-long history of intermarriage there are many Cherokee citizens today who do not look stereotypically Native American. As well, "there are a lot of folks who are legitimately Cherokee who are not eligible for citizenship," said Krehbiel-Burton, because, for example, their ancestors lived in distant states or territories when the rolls were drawn up, or because they are direct descendants of people left off the rolls for other reasons.

Fractional Native American ancestry is quite hard to prove to the standards of the U.S. government, which in many ways acts as the ultimate "birther" in this regard. Percentage of ancestry or "blood quantum" -- the creepy and antique-sounding term used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which certifies it for two of the three Cherokee tribes -- is recognized by the Bureau based on original documents (such as birth certificates, Census records, and death certificates) through something called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, or CDIB.

Warren would need to be certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as at least 1/16 Eastern Cherokee on a CDIB to be eligible to join the Eastern Cherokee. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee has an even stricter enrollment cut-off: "a minimum blood quantum requirement of one quarter (1/4) degree Keetoowah Cherokee blood" documented via a CDIB plus a direct descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls. Tribal citizenship standards are set by the tribes themselves, and not the U.S. government.

Warren has never attempted to join a tribe and had no documentation of her Native ancestry claim before the controversy broke, Harney told William A. Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor, in late April. Instead, Warren has cited the sayings of her Aunt Bea, who was given to complaining that Warren's maternal grandfather who "had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do" had not passed them on to her.

To be sure, the absence of readily located evidence of Native ancestry outside the oral tradition does not mean that Warren has no Native American ancestry. Genealogy is a complicated field, where firm answers are hard to come by quickly. Proof of distant Native American ancestry could yet surface, were Warren to hire a genealogist to do a thorough dive into her own background while she works on riding out the political storm.

But a lack of Native ancestry despite the family stories she's heard all her life would also be consistent with one of the most common genealogical myths in the United States.

"Many more Americans believe they have Native ancestry than actually do (we always suspected this, but can now confirm it through genetic testing)," said Smolenyak in an email. "In fact, in terms of wide-spread ancestral myths, this is one of the top two (the other being those who think their names were changed at Ellis Island). And someone who hails from Oklahoma would be even more prone to accept a tale of Native heritage than most."

She added: "There's also a tendency to accept what our relatives (especially our elders) tell us."

As for Warren, "I can't confirm or refute Cherokee heritage without extensive research," she said. "All I can say is that Ms. Warren's scenario is a wildly common one -- minus the public scrutiny, of course."

Should the genealogists be unable to find supporting documents, Warren could also quietly pursue familial DNA testing, which might confirm Native American ancestry, even if records of individual ancestors or their specific tribal affiliations have been lost to the mists of time. Her one-time Harvard University colleague Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has promoted such efforts as part of helping African Americans learn more about their mixed ancestry, hosting a series of shows on PBS featuring famous figures tracking down their forebears using genetics and genealogy. (He's also pointed out that many African Americans erroneously believe they have Native American ancestors, especially Cherokee ones, making it "the biggest myth in African-American genealogy.") DNA ancestry tests are not dispositive, and even a positive result would not be useful for tribal affiliation or CDIB purposes. But it would silence her critics, and -- more importantly -- it would help her learn whether what she had spent her life thinking she knew about herself and her family was true.

"Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born," Warren told the Boston Herald in early May. "These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl."

Many prominent figures in American life learn, once the eye of the national press alights on them, that they are not the people who they always thought -- or said -- they were. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, for example, grew up thinking she came from a Catholic Czech family. It was not until she joined the U.S. Cabinet that she learned her parents -- not her great-great-great-grandmother, but her own parents -- were Jewish refugees who had converted and misled her about her ancestry after losing their families in the Holocaust. "This was obviously a major surprise to me. I have never been told this," she said in 1997, after the Washington Post broke the news. "The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up," she said.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spent years describing himself as the "son of exiles" from Castro's Cuba, but the Post reported that "documents show that Rubio's parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro's forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power." "I'm going off the oral history of my family," Rubio said in explaining the discrepancy.

Public scrutiny allowed New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez to close off a potentially damaging story-line when it was discovered that a Mexican grandfather suspected of having been an undocumented immigrant was in fact a lawfully admitted 1918 entrant who obtained U.S. citizenship in 1942. Questions had been raised about him after news reports revealed he was marked AL for "alien" on the 1930 Census, and people jumped to conclusions that this meant he was an "illegal alien" -- illustrating just how much trouble incomplete genealogical research can cause for political actors.

But sometimes genealogy also confirms family stories. Michelle Obama in 2009 learned a great deal more about the slave ancestors she always knew she must have had, and Smolenyak and The New York Times were able to "substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear."

Warren's story has become so politicized and such a hot potato in her race to unseat Brown that she'll be in a sticky situation no matter what she finds.

The best argument she's got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn't appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee."

Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, "Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?'' "No," she replied.

While a teacher at the University of Texas, she listed herself as "white." But between 1986 and 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty; the University of Pennsylvania in a 2005 "minority equity report" also listed her as one of the minority professors who had taught at its law school.

The head of the committee that brought Warren to Harvard Law School said talk of Native American ties was not a factor in recruiting her to the prestigious institution. Reported the Boston Herald in April in its first story on Warren's ancestry claim: "Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, a former U.S. Solicitor General who served under Ronald Reagan, sat on the appointing committee that recommended Warren for hire in 1995. He said he didn't recall her Native American heritage ever coming up during the hiring process.

"'It simply played no role in the appointments process. It was not mentioned and I didn't mention it to the faculty,' he said."

He repeated himself this week, telling the Herald: "In spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary, the story continues to circulate that Elizabeth Warren enjoyed some kind of affirmative action leg-up in her hiring as a full professor by the Harvard Law School. The innuendo is false."

"I can state categorically that the subject of her Native American ancestry never once was mentioned," he added.

That view was echoed by Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who voted to tenure Warren and was also involved in recruiting her.

"Elizabeth Warren's heritage had absolutely no role in the decision to recruit her to Harvard Law School," he told the Crimson. "Our decision was entirely based on her extraordinary expertise and legendary teaching ability. This whole dispute is fabricated out of whole cloth and has no connection to reality."

And that's the second arena where an absence of evidence should have some weight. If there's no easily located evidence that Warren has Native American ancestry, there's also no evidence Warren used her family story to boost herself into a Harvard job.

A huge tell -- beyond the flat denials of two of the men who brought her to the school -- is that Warren's ancestry was not touted in 1995 in the Harvard Crimson as the Law School's first Native American hire, despite the ethnic studies movement's gathering force on the college's campus at the time and continued controversy over the lack of diversity at the law school (as highlighted at a protest involving Prof. Derrick Bell and law school student Barack Obama in 1991). The Crimson article on Warren was titled simply, "Woman Tenured at Law School."

"Liz Warren is a spectacular addition to our faculty," Law School Dean Robert Clark told the Crimson. "She is a leading scholar in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law, and she is one of the rare legal academics to have devoted herself to a large-scale empirical research project of great relevance to legal policy making."

Compare that to the Crimson editorial that greeted Lani Guinier just three years later, which heralded her as "the first female African-American professor in the 181-year history of HLS." While this article also repeated the claim about Warren's ethnicity -- "Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American," the '98 piece said -- that information had so little penetrated the consciousness of legal circles that Guinier was quoted in the very same article saying, "Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me." Dean Clark said he felt hiring her would "attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds." He made no similar statement upon Warren's hire.

What Law School spokesman Michael Chmura was doing when he told the Crimson in 1996 and the Fordham Law Review in 1997 that Warren was Native American is a question for the university, not the Warren campaign. And the university is duly being pressed on that question and others about Warren's time there. (Massachusetts Republican Party Chairman Robert A. Maginn Jr., an alumnus of Harvard Law, has called on the university to do an internal investigation into whether Warren misled the university about her heritage.)

The challenge for Warren will be to withstand an ongoing barrage of attacks on the topic that seek to undermine perceptions about her character and honesty. "That Warren allowed Harvard to hold her up as an example of their commitment to diversity in the hiring of historically disadvantaged communities is an insult to all Americans who have suffered real discrimination and mistreatment, and Warren should apologize for participating in this hypocritical sham," Jim Barnett, the campaign manager for Brown said when the story broke.

Warren's campaign has tried to keep its head down and fight around the edges of the story, which it's called a distraction from the issues Massachusetts voters care about. Senate candidates have survived far more potentially damaging controversies and gone on to win. But the longer the questions about Warren linger, the harder it will be for voters to feel like they know who she really is.

[backhoe]

Google Fauxahantas...

[RedDog]

Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In Dreams from My Father, the world’s all-time most unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend: “When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough . . . ”

Obama is a psychopath. Who we really have to direct our gaze at though are tens of millions of delusional and very gullible Americans.

[Ogopogo]

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/24/p ... achusetts/

Poll: Bogus ancestry claims not hurting Elizabeth Warren much in Massachusetts
posted at 1:21 pm on May 24, 2012 by Allahpundit

Maybe they bought the spin that she’s a “mythical Indian”?

Nah, just kidding. There’s no mystery about these results. As noted last week, if they can forgive Teddy for leaving a woman to drown, they can forgive Spouting Bull anything.

“In both the February and May polls, Brown has fallen short of the coveted 50 percent mark for an incumbent, while Elizabeth Warren has converted some undecided voters since February,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “This leaves both campaigns no choice but to spend tens of millions of dollars in an all-out war to woo the five percent of voters who will decide this election.”

Seventy-two percent of likely voters were aware of the recent controversy concerning Elizabeth Warren’s heritage. Of those, 49 percent said Warren was telling the truth about being part Native American; 28 percent said she was not telling the truth; and 23 percent weren’t sure. Meanwhile, 41 percent said they believed that Elizabeth Warren benefited by listing herself as a minority, while 45 percent said she did not benefit. Sixty-nine percent of likely voters said that Warren’s Native American heritage listing is not a significant story, while 27 percent said that it is…

Brown’s popularity (58 percent favorable) moved up six points from February (52 percent favorable), while his unfavorable rating remained the same at 28 percent. Warren gained 8 points on her favorable rating (43 percent) since February, when it was 35 percent, but she also tacked 5 points onto her unfavorable rating, which is now 33 percent unfavorable, as opposed to 28 percent in February.

She’s actually gaining in popularity and now trails Brown overall by just a single point. That’s not to say the Cherokee nonsense hasn’t hurt her — 27 percent say that it’s significant — but no doubt the vast majority of those who have a problem with it are already committed Brown supporters/Warren opponents. In fact, for all the fun we’ve had with the story online and all the coverage in the Boston Herald, just 72 percent of respondents have heard about it. By comparison, 80 percent are aware of the story about Romney forcing a haircut on his classmate 50 years ago. (Of those, 46 percent say it makes him a “bully” versus 40 percent who say it doesn’t.)

But here’s the cruelest cut of all:

You can look at that two ways, I guess. One: In Massachusetts, the typical split on Democratic/Republican credibility is probably vastly wider. Two: Really? A woman who evidently lifted recipes for a fake-Indian cookbook and whose strongest claim to Cherokee ancestry is “high cheekbones” is more trustworthy than Scott Brown? Dude?

The silver lining is that this might not yet be over. William Jacobson, who’s been in the lead on this story for weeks, hinted a few days ago that “There are other shoes to drop. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. It’s just a matter of when.” Stay tuned.

[Ogopogo]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -hunt.html

Michael Tomasky on the Media’s Foolish Elizabeth Warren Witch Hunt
by Michael Tomasky May 26, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
The press is obsessed with Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee heritage. Too bad it’s the biggest media-manufactured story since the Lewinsky scandal nearly brought down a president.


So now Elizabeth Warren has to prove that she’s 1/32nd Cherokee? The temperature on the story is rising. There was a huge article in the Boston Globe on Friday written to raise a number of questions and suggest that Warren used the minority designation to get her job, or get ahead—exactly at the same time that a poll was released (PDF) showing that 69 percent of Bay State voters don’t consider her heritage to be a “significant” story. It reminds me of nothing so much as Monica Lewinsky, and of the media’s need sometimes to get a grip.
Warren Indian Identity

In this May 2, 2012 photo, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Elizabeth Warren, speaks to reporters during a news conference while campaigning at Liberty Bay Credit Union headquarters in Braintree, Mass. Warren addressed questions on her claim of Native American heritag (Steven Senne / AP Photo)

Why Lewinsky? The situations are in fact almost precisely the same. You had then a press pack that had decided that whether Bill Clinton was telling the truth about Monica was a question on which the fate of the republic hinged. The press became self-righteously consumed with its search for The Truth. Meanwhile, outside the Beltway, and outside of Wingnuttia (it existed then, just at about half of its current GDP), nobody cared what the truth was. The media kept producing revelations; surely, now, swore Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly, America will see this man for the reprobate he is! America looked, yawned, told the press to start acting like grownups, and continued to approve of the job Clinton was doing as president at rates near 70 percent and to oppose impeachment at similar levels.

The appearance Thursday morning of this Suffolk University poll (linked to above) made me think: Well, this story line is about to wrap up. If more than two-thirds of voters don’t care, then that’s that. But no—still going strong! And now it’s not the loopy, right-wing, and pro-Brown Herald, which pushed the story first, but the Globe trying to play catch up. Yes, yes, it’s all in the public interest. What, you say, the public says it isn’t interested? Well, we’ll teach them what’s in their interest!

This is close to embarrassing. True, Warren’s story is a little cheesy. No let’s back up even further. It’s hard to see why someone who is 1/32nd anything can be called that thing. But those are the Cherokees’ rules, and the United States of America for all moral and legal purposes accepts them as the rules. As you may have read when this story broke, the current head of the Cherokee nation, Bill John Baker, is also just 1/32nd Cherokee. He is also, by appearance, completely white. You could mistake him for a Tea-Party Congressman.

So if Warren’s mother told her there was Cherokee blood, and if one little rivulet of Cherokee blood going back generations makes one a Cherokee, which legally it does, then she’s Cherokee, at least as far she knows. Now she has to prove this? You have to go back five generations to get to 1/32nd. It’s entirely possible that such a thing can’t even be proven.

As it happens, I just recently underwent a slightly jarring heritage-related experience myself. I grew up being told I was Serbian on my father’s side. Croatians, naturally, were the fiendish enemy, second only to the Turks. But lo and behold, said my uncle at a dinner last year, it seems that my father’s father, who died before my bouncing arrival on the orb, might have been Croatian. Historically speaking, I’d guess I’d rather be a Serb, although Milosevic’s service to mankind has rendered that a far closer call than it would have been before he hit the scene. At the end of the day, I don’t care much one way or the other. But my point is: Proving it? I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to start.

What does this matter anyway? It’s a “character” issue? Oh please. Elizabeth Warren’s character is pretty well established. She was the daughter of an Oklahoma janitor, for God’s sakes, who started working as a pre-teenager when her father had a heart attack. She has children and grandchildren and has taught Sunday school. She’s served on a number of prestigious boards. She got her law degree from Rutgers—a very good school, but the outpost of someone scratching her way up the mountain on her own, without legacy or connections.

She became a professor at Harvard Law. No one doubts that she earned that, whether as a Cherokee or a whitey or anything else. She is one of America’s leading experts in her field. She chaired congressional oversight of TARP. She came up with the idea for a new agency, the most important consumer-protection agency created in this country in decades (note: she first espoused this idea in the journal I edit, but she did so before I worked there, so I don’t really know her; I interviewed her once, last year). She has simultaneously fended off Tim Geithner, who hated her diligence on the TARP question, and Republicans, who went banshee about her precisely because she was effective and unassailable. They never laid a glove on her (and boy, they tried). If doing all that after growing up poor in the Dust Bowl doesn’t convey character about someone, then nothing does.

This is a “character” issue? Please. Warren’s the daughter of an Oklahoma janitor who became a prof at Harvard Law. She has children and grandchildren and has taught Sunday school.

The people of Massachusetts have perspective on this. (As does Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who hasn’t endorsed Warren but who stated on Friday that the issue is “not relevant at all” to the campaign. Right.) She may or may not win. The poll had her and Scott Brown tied. It’s hard to beat an incumbent, and Brown has positioned himself pretty shrewdly. She’ll have to swim through this muck largely under her own steam. She will have to, as they say, “put this behind her.” I’ll grant that this is a character issue to the extent that she has to have the character to put this in its proper context and change the story in the crucible of a hard-fought race. That’s within the rules of politics, and they certainly apply to her no less than to anyone, and she hasn’t managed to do that at all so far.

But this is a media story as much as it’s a Warren story. We’re sticklers about getting the little things right in our business. But the big things—how important Lewinsky was, whether George Bush’s case for war in Iraq was honest—we (well, not me) almost always get wrong. Count it among the many lessons in life that will never be learned.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

[Dogpatch]

Related
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=155083

Found these snippets at The People's Cube

Democrat geneologists: every time you drop litter on highway, Elizabeth Warren sheds a single tear

Elizabeth Warren claims kinship to Sitting Bull; receives Indian name of Lying Cow

[Ogopogo]

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics ... ean/53004/

Elizabeth Warren Comes Clean
AP


Adam Martin 769 Views 11:23 AM ET

All you really need to know from The Boston Globe's exhaustive report on Elizabeth Warren's ethnic identity is this: Warren finally admitted she told Harvard and Penn she was of Native American descent.

Aside from Warren's actual admission, what's interesting about Mary Carmichael's and Stephanie Ebbert's story is not Warren's work history, which is laid out in intricate detail, but how the reporters used it to get the Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate to cop to something she'd been denying. After digging through Harvard's archives and finding that the years the university's law school reported a Native American professor (it only had one), corresponded to the years Warren was on the faculty there. Then they brought the papers to the Warren campaign and asked the question again. Pretty simple stuff, all you journalism students, but you have to think to do it.

Warren insisted that her claim had no bearing on her getting hired, but she did offer it as part of her biography, saying, "At some point after I was hired by them, I . . . provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard... My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I’m proud of it and I have been open about it."

Expect this small admission to be used as a cudgel by Sen. Scott Brown all the same, if only because Warren has dodged the question for so long. As Elspeth Reeve noted earlier this month, the trickle of hints that keeps coming out about Warren's heritage has damaged her because it buoys the suggestion that she inappropriately benefitted from affirmative action. Previously, Warren's line until the Globe story was that she only heard Harvard was claiming her as a minority when she read it in The Boston Herald.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at amartin@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

[Ogopogo]

http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/04/eroti ... -campaign/




Erotic gay wrestler is fundraising for Elizabeth Warren’s US Senate campaign
Published: 12:10 AM 06/04/2012
By Alex Pappas - The Daily Caller

Stephen Driscoll's online biography describes him as "Co-Chair of National Stonewall Democrats. He is on the Executive Committee, Massachusetts Democratic Party and he is the Affirmative Action Outreach Officer, Pembroke Democratic Town Committee. He promotes professional wrestling and is owner and director of NewProWrestling. He was Associate Director and Resident Choreographer of The Opera Company of Boston, was on the faculty at MIT for 15 years, was Resident Photographer at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and a member of the Boston Repertory Theatre and National Mime Theatre." (photo from EqualityGiving.org)

The founder of an erotic gay website featuring nude men wrestling with each other is fundraising for Democratic Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Stephen Driscoll, a Democratic activist in Massachusetts who runs the adult gay wrestling website BGEast.com under the name “Kid Leopard,” has raised nearly $5,000 for Warren under the organizational banner “LGBT for Elizabeth Warren.” The disclosure comes from the ActBlue online fundraising platform, which facilitates people using the Internet to fundraise for Democrats.

Driscoll, who did not return emails Sunday from The Daily Caller seeking comment, runs BGEast.com and has starred in several wrestling videos on the adult site.

“This site contains adult-oriented subject matter and is intended to be viewed by persons 21 years of age or older,” a content warning on the site reads. “By entering this site you acknowledge that you will be requesting the electronic transmission of adult oriented material.”

Some videos on the website show men wrestling in Speedo-style trunks, though another part of the website called “The Arena” is devoted to an audience seeking videos of nude men.

“THE ARENA is BG East Wrestling’s members-only area, where we show all the nude and erotic pictures that are too hot for general web viewing,” the site announces.

BGEast.com does not list Driscoll as the owner of the business on its website, but evidence shows that “Kid Leopard” and Driscoll are one and the same.

The user profile for “Kid Leopard” at Yahoo lists the user as “Stephen D” of “Pembroke, MA.” A video of Driscoll speaking at a 2006 convention shows that Driscoll resembles “Kid Leopard” in a wrestling video.

In an interview with a wrestling blog in 2011, “Kid Leopard” discussed his wrestling website and politics, declaring: “I’ve never kept my political involvement a secret.”

“I helped found and eventually headed a national gay Democrats organization, and for over 20 years we’ve contributed at least 7.5% of our profits to LGBT organizations,” he said.

Driscoll has been very involved in Democratic politics: he has been a leader of the National Stonewall Democrats and the Massachusetts Democratic Party’s LGBT Caucus. He was a co-founder of National Stonewall Democrats, a grassroots network connecting gay Democratic activists.

He was also a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1996, 2000 and 2008, and served as a Democratic member of the Electoral College in 2000.

Driscoll has also listed himself as a “sports promoter” when donating money to Democrats, a likely reference to his wrestling website.

Driscoll has donated money to a number of Democrats recently, including Warren, President Barack Obama, Wisconsin Rep. Tammy Baldwin, and the Democratic State Committee of Massachusetts, according to a review of records provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.

He gave $1,000 to Warren in September 2011 and then another $1,000 in December 2011.

Warren’s campaign did not return a request for comment about whether the campaign approves of Driscoll fundraising for them.

The Harvard Law School professor is running against Republican Sen. Scott Brown. Her campaign has suffered a series of setbacks related to her claims during her legal career that she was descended from Native Americans. So far, the Warren campaign has been unable to provide reporters and critics with documents substantiating that claim.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/04/eroti ... z1wsTVqoE9

[Ogopogo]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timst ... -a-racist/

Tim Stanley
Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.
Elizabeth Warren's 'Native American' claims: if she was a Republican, the media would call her a racist

By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: June 14th, 2012

490 Comments Comment on this article

A satirist's view of Warren - but the MSM is giving her an easy ride

Imagine if a Republican candidate claimed, confidently, that she was part Native American. Imagine if she had actually used that identity to have herself listed as a minority at Harvard, qualifying her for special treatment and celebration as proof of how diverse and progressive her department is. Imagine if, many years later, it turned out that her claims to Native heritage were dubious and, when pressed for proof, she offered her “high cheekbones.” Oh, and she once contributed a recipe to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow” (that may even have been plagiarised).

Chances are, that Republican candidate would be hounded night and day by the press, branded a racist and probably be winding down her political career. Right now, she’d be sitting by the phone, praying for a call from the producers of Celebrity Apprentice (gotta pay the mortgage on that wigwam somehow).

The incredible thing is that all this has happened to a Democratic senatorial candidate called Elizabeth Warren. And not only has she been given a pass by her party, which normally treats race with the respect it deserves, but also by the mainstream media. Last night she was chatting with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Matthews failed to mention the scandal once. If there’s any one reason why Democrats and liberals aren't showing the expected anger about this, it’s because their section of the media has declined to discuss it.

The sad thing is that Warren is, otherwise, an intelligent and credible candidate for the Senate. The product of a working-class family, this self-made academic was one of the bright sparks behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is one of the leading liberal minds of her generation. She’s competing in a naturally Democratic state (Massachusetts) that turned bellwether when it elected Tea Party Republican Scott Brown. The 2012 senate race ought to be about jobs and the economy.

Alas, Warren’s bizarre posturing as a Native American (which she has pursued with all the conviction of a full blown delusion) has sapped her credibility. Race shapes a lot of the way that Democrats think about economics and social justice – and within that narrative, Native Americans were the very first minority that the Europeans oppressed on American soil. It thus ought to be not just odd but immoral that Warren would try to borrow their heritage of suffering in order to advance her political career. Worse still, the Harvard Law Journal described her as a “woman of color,” as if it was translating her claimed identity into proof that it was reaching out to African-Americans. A lot of liberals invested a lot of emotional effort into sustaining this myth. This sort of thing is just as inappropriate as Mitt Romney suddenly claiming to be the descendent of slaves.

But what is almost worse is how much the liberal media has tried to smooth the story over. They want the Massachusetts senate race to be a straightforward fight between Warren’s populism and Brown’s conservatism. And so headlines have been massaged, innuendoes have gone unreported, and only one local paper has pursued Warren with the righteousness that the issue deserves. Articles have been written expressing sympathy along the lines of “Well, we’re probably all a little bit Native American.” The Matthews softball interview is only a representative pass.

The takeaway from all of this is that racial insensitivity only matters if it’s done by a Republican. That isn’t to say that conservatives don’t deserve everything they get when they flirt with racially coded appeals (George Allen ought to be hiding in shame, not running for office again). But Democrats can have records of racist activity (the former Senate Majority Leader, Robert Byrd, was a member of the KKK in his youth), express racist sentiments towards Asians (step forward, Marion Barry) and appropriate the racial heritage of others – and no one seems to mind. When it comes to racism, the Democratic credo is “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Tags: Chris Matthews, Elizabeth Warren, MSNBC, racism

[backhoe]

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

PROF. JACOBSON: Elizabeth Warren loses it, lashes out at “right wing extremist” (me). He is unmoved: “Sorry Professor Warren, you created the problem and you own it. No one else.”http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/06/elizabeth-warren-loses-it-lashes-out-at-right-wing-extremist-me/

Observer | June 19, 2012 at 9:52 pm

LOL. Professor Jacobson is now a right-wing extremist? Is that because he believes in the U.S. Constitution, the rule of law, basic decency?

I’m not surprised that a liberal phony “woman of color” like Warren finds those values “extreme.” But I have a feeling she’s going to be surprised in a few months to find out just how many American voters share the professor’s “extremist” views.