What Elizabeth Warren SHOULD Say About Claiming To Be An Indian

This week presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren made a general "I'm sorry for what I did and I apologize to any the people I harmed" without actually admitting what she was apologizing for. Since she's having problems admitting what she actually did and why it's bad, I thought I'd write a proper apology for her:

Back when I was just starting my career I realized that I would have difficulty getting a job at a top tier law school with a degree from a 2nd tier school. In order to get an "in" I relied some old family stories and checked "Indian" as my race. I never actually researched what it actually meant to be Native American. It's as much culture as ancestry and I never had a living relative talk about growing up in a tribe or on a reservation. But no one checked. Harvard was thrilled to have a minority, even a blond, blue-eyed Native American. I was even asked to contribute to Pow Wow Chow, a cookbook of traditional Indian recipes. By that point I'd convinced myself that we were descended from Indians and therefore anything we ate must be traditional, even if it was a seafood recipe I copied from a magazine.

Once I had established myself I quietly dropped any claims to Indian heritage until it came out during my first Senate run. I ignored this issue when it came out but I decided to put it to rest when I began organizing my presidential campaign. I had a genealogist check my DNA and I did an interview with family members where we talked about the stories we'd grown up with. As it turned out, I didn't properly understand that the DNA results undercut my claim and family stories are meaningless.

So I apologize for using this claim to advance my career. I apologize to the people I displaced by elbowing my way in front of them with a false claim. And I apologize to the Native Peoples of America and to all minorities. I used programs meant to make up for centuries of discrimination even though I was not entitled to use them.

Was the Revolutionary War Fought Over Slavery?

According to the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project, the reason that America broke away from Great Britain was that the British government was going to outlaw slavery. This is so stupid it hurts.

Great Britain didn't outlaw the slave trade until 1807 and they didn't outlaw slavery itself until 1833 and it did not become fully effective until 1840. Granted there was an abolitionist movement in England in the 1770s, but there was also one in the colonies.

Under English law, slavery was legal in every colony in 1776. Once independence was declared, various colonies began outlawing it. Six states outlawed it by 1790 and all of the northern states had abolished it or were working to eliminate it by 1804. Slavery was never allowed in the Northwest Territory which meant that free states outnumbered slave states through the Civil War.

Given all of that and how long it took England to outlaw slavery throughout Great Britain, it's offensive to claim that the Revolution was inspired by a desire to keep slaves.

The Objection to Universal Background Check Explained

It's a knee-jerk reaction: there's a mass shooting and immediately the call is renewed for Universal Background Checks, AKA the Gunshow Loophole. This would require a background check for any transfer of a gun. Some proposed versions would even require it for lending a gun to a member of the family. The problem with this as a solution to gun violence is that there has yet to be a single mass shooting where either the shooter(s) passed a background check or the gun existing law was broken for the shooter to obtain the gun. In Columbine, the grandfather of school shootings, a cousin bought the guns and was charged for it. In the recent Dayton shooting, the gunman was legally able to buy guns but a friend made the purchases so his parents wouldn't know. It should be pointed out that the guns used in the vast majority of drug and gang related crimes were obtained illegally.

It should also be pointed out that during the Obama administration the ATF tried to exploit "gunshow loophole" and the "dark web" to buy guns. They were unable to make any purchases while posing as someone who would not pass a background check.

 

So right off the bat you have a disconnect between gun owners and people who want "common sense gun legislation". If universal background checks won't stop mass shootings then why are people pushing so hard for them?

Many of the people pushing for this are doing it reflexively. They've been told that this is needed all of their adult lives going back to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. They never stopped to examine the effectiveness of background checks because people they trust have already told them that these work.

But some people have to know how ineffective these would be. Why are they still pushing for it? What will they gain from them?

The most charitable motive is that they hope to slow the number of gun purchases by making it difficult enough that people give up on the purchase or don't bother in the first place. Opposition to this is the same as opposition to obstacles to abortion. The advocates worry that allowing any anti-gun legislation to pass will make it easier for stricter legislation. Once a background check is mandated then it's fairly simple to extend the time needed for it. In California and other places where local law enforcement has to sign off on concealed carry permits, some authorities have refused to ok a single application turning a formality into a roadblock. That could well happen to background checks.

The real scare for gun owners is that when a background check has to be performed on all transfers, that gives the government a list of gun owners that could be used for confiscation. While this is unlikely in the US, it is how England was able to disarm its population. In England, every gun had to be registered. That made it easy for the government to ask every registered gun owner for their gun.

At its heart, this is an emotion vs reason argument. People who want background checks are not acting rationally and are unwilling to listen to reasons why this would be ineffective. Rather than listening to gun-owners' objections, they see the gun-owners as either tools of the NRA or "being willing to sacrifice childrens' lives". Beign talked down to like that just makes the gun owners dig in deeper with their opostition.

 

The Problems with Joe

Joe Biden tops the polls of contenders for the Democratic nomination for president. The first two debates didn't budge him. His biggest challenger, Bernie Sanders, has slid a bit and is now fighting it out with Elizabeth Warren for second place. This is typical. Biden is a former Vice-President and when one of them runs he gets to be his party's candidate (the one exception to this was Hubert Humphrey who narrowly failed to get nominated for a second time in 1972 following his loss in 1968). Biden has a glow about him from residual warmth for President Obama and he projects the image of a father or grandfather. There are some warning flags that Biden is not up to being president.

Biden has a reputation as a "gaff machine". He often says things wrong. Recently he told a group of children that " Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kid". He caught his mistake and added " wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids." It's possible that he slipped and said "white" when he meant "wealthy" or it could be a Freudian slip. It's also easy to write off him getting the locations of last week's shootings wrong. Trump made a similar mistake. But some of Biden's other slips are much harder to ignore.

Recently he also said, " those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president". The shooting happened in 2018, more than a year after he left office. His campaign says that he was thinking of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 but that raises more questions.Sandy Hook involved very young children while Parkland was young adults, some of them months away from graduating high school and the two shootings were more than five years apart. That is more significant than substituting one "w" word for another.

This is nothing new. In 2008 he talked about how FDR went on TV to address the nation after the stock market crash of 1929. Again, this was more than a slip of the tongue. FDR wasn't elected until 1932 and no one was on TV in 1929.

There is also Biden's temperament. He has a temper and often resorts to violent imagery. When the Access Hollywood tape came out with Donald Trump's comments on touching women. When asked about it, Biden said  "The press always ask me, don't I wish I were debating him. No, I wish we were in high school, I could take him behind the gym. That's what I wish."

A year or two later, when asked about debating Trump he referenced Trump looming behind Clinton and said if it was him, he'd have turned around and slugged him (note, Trump never left his podium. Clinton repeatedly crossed the stage and stood between Trump and the camera in a practiced move to make Trump appear to loom over her.)

In a different interview Biden said, "The idea that I'd be intimidated by Donald Trump? ... He's the bully that I've always stood up to. He's the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I'd smack him in the mouth." 

Recently when asked about debating Trump, Biden said he was looking forward to it and raised his fists in a boxing stance.

It's not only Trump that causes Biden to lose his temper. Recently a teenage girl asked him how many sexes there are. He said "three". She asked him to name them and he accused her of playing games. She started to walk away and he grabbed her arm and said he was the first to support (gay) marriage. This was a very minor incident although it left the girl upset but it shows Biden's temper.

He also (with a smile on his face) challenged Trump to a pushup contest.

If I was a Democrat I would be very worried that this man was my front-runner and the face of moderation.

If Trump's a racist then why is it so hard to find proof?

We're constantly told that President Trump is an irredeemable racist but I have yet to see an accurate quote taken in context that proves this. Why is this so hard?

The quote most often used "good people on both sides" was butchered. In the same breath he condemned the white supremacists and then went on to say that some of the people protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee were acting in good faith and speculated on statues of Washington and Jefferson being next (surprise, he was right). There's no racism there.

After some ISIS-inspired attacks in the US including the Pulse Nightclub shooting and during a wave of refugees from ISIS-infested territories, Trump suggested a temporary freeze on accepting people from these countries until we could put stronger vetting in place. This is still being referred to as a ban on all Muslims.

At least three times Trump has made statements about the violent drug-gang MS-13 that were rephrased to claim that he was talking about all Latinos.

Just a few days after people insisted that it was not racist for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to respond to attacks from the Squad, the same people insisted that it was racist for Trump to respond to their attacks. His tweet suggested that the three of them who were from different countries/territories or whose parents were should clean them up before telling us how to change the US. He did not tell them to "go back where they came from" which is how his tweet was reported. The same was true when he responded to attacks from Rep. Elijah Cummings by pointing out how little he's done for his district and how bad things are in Baltimore. Suddenly it's racist to point out reality.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post had at least a dozen reporters investigating Trump and the worst example of racism they could find was his father's company being fined for discrimination in the 1970s.

So, again, if Trump is so racist then why do they have to manufacture all of the evidence of it, something like saying that "poor kids can be as smart as white kids?"