Winding Paths

Background Check
Warren arrived as a visiting professor in 1992, but left a year later. By then, she had been listing herself for seven years as a minority in a legal directory often used by law recruiters to make diversity-friendly hires. She continued to list herself in the book until 1995, the year she took a permanent position at Harvard.


She has said she listed herself in the directory in hope of meeting others with a similar background, but stopped when she realized it was not working. (Boston Globe, 5/25/2012)


The best jokes and much of the best analyses have already been written about Elizabeth Warren who is challenging Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Warren falls into the familiar category of Liberal elitists who pretend they are just like the average working stiff. Lunchpail Joe Biden is another. What is so audacious about Warren is the sheer...well, the sheer audacity of her lies. She claims to be one of the folks until it is revealed that she is a millionaire. She claims to have inspired the Occupy crowd. She hobnobs in Hollywood with movie stars and cashes their out-of-town checks. And long before that she claimed to be Native American. Here it gets really...well extra audacious. You see, she never claimed to be more than 1/32nd Native American, but still portrayed herself as a minority. Warren's justification is a comedian's punch line. She apparently wanted to meet other 1/32nd Native Americans. 


In the interest of providing clarity around just who can and cannot claim minority status, RedStateVT proposes the following. To be a minority and subject to all the benefits that society provides, you have to be at least 3/4 of some kind of minority. Warren gets credit for 1/2 (female) and 1/32 (Native American, provided she can come up with something other than family oral history as proof). Sadly, because she is, in total, only 17/32nds minority she does not qualify. Note also, that President Obama does not qualify, garnering only 1/2 of the required 3/4 minority percentage. We hope that this is helpful and can serve as a framework for advancing the discussion. 


Of course, the bigger issue is the absolute nonsense of diversity hiring. 


Living In
Here’s a riddle: what do you call several years in college, a couple of years as a community organizer, and almost an entire career as a Chicago machine politician? If you’re Barack Obama, you call it … “the real world“. (Hotair.com, 5/25/2012)


Obama's qualifications for the presidency are that he is the president. But if you have done a lousy job, does that still count?


Chronic
Mr. Maraniss’s book goes further in describing Mr. Obama’s pot-smoking days. The book says that “choom” is a verb meaning “to smoke marijuana” and that Mr. Obama was an active member of the group of boys, many of whom also played basketball.


“As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called ‘T.A.,’ short for ‘total absorption,’” Mr. Maraniss wrote. “To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, T.A. was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.” (NYT, 5/25/2012)


Bain Capital, Ann Romney's horses, Barry's dope days. Let it all hang out!


Nothing To Say
Two Democrats with close ties to Wall Street, Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, declined to comment on Wednesday. (NYT, 5/23/2012)


Chuck Schumer declined to comment? First of all, it is highly unlikely that Schumer would not comment. He ALWAYS comments. Second, if true that he did not comment, then this alone should be headline news.