Quote Of The Day

In the news today is the announcement that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) will be setting up her 2020 Presidential exploratory committee. This is the first step in running for the presidency.

Earlier this year she had a DNA test run to try and quell the rumors about her supposed Cherokee ancestry. Unfortunately for her, the results did not show her to be 1/32 Cherokee but rather to have some potential undefined Native American ancestor somewhere between 6 and 9 generations back. That would have made her between 1/128th and1/1024th unspecified Native American. Maybe. She received a lot of criticism from this and politically it was considered a stupid move on her part.

The quote of the day comes from Joshua S. on Facebook in response to the news that Warren plans to run for President.

I named my Jeep Elizabeth Warren. It is white and it says it is a Cherokee.

That about sums it up. 

Elizabeth Warren Is More Native American Than I Am

I got my results back from Ancestry.com DNA and despite what my cousin Van led me to believe I am not more Native American than Elizabeth Warren. I know that was a low threshold. My cousin had led me to believe that our great-grandfather on my paternal and his maternal grandfather’s side of the family had some Cherokee blood.

According to the results shown below I am 64% Irish and Scots and 36% Welsh and English. Given I know that three out of four great-grandparents on my mom’s side of the family were born in County Cavan, Ireland, this makes sense. Moreover, my Grandma Richardson’s maiden name was Morgan which is a good Welsh name.

I really did want to have more Native American blood than Elizabeth Warren just to say I did. Oh, well. Our ancestors are our ancestors and there is nothing one can do to change that.

Fauxcahontas Isn’t Paying Her Fair Share

Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate from Massachusetts, has a high six-figure income and a net worth in the neighborhood of $14 million or so. She is said to have created the “intellectual foundation” such as it is for the Occupy Wall Street movement. She also claims based upon family lore to be 1/32 Cherokee Indian.

Thus, when I read this morning in Professor William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog that she had obtained fee waivers from at least 50 judicial districts for the use of the federal Pacer system, I was pissed.

But Warren, who berates factory owners, obtained fee waivers for access to the bankruptcy docket maintained by the federal PACER system, for which others have to pay.
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Warren took advantage of a policy at PACER which provides for fee waivers for academic research based on her standing as a law professor….
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It is easy to surmise that Warren saved thousands of dollars, maybe even more, over the course of her research, by not having to pay the PACER fees that all other users have to pay.
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The savings were a result of her representations that the research was being done for academic purposes. 

Why am I pissed? Because I have been using the Pacer system to download court records, filings, opinions, etc. since I started this blog. I have paid my fair share of fees to use this system and there have been quarters where the amount ran over $100. I like to think that my posts on the various Second Amendment cases serve to educate readers. However, unlike Warren I don’t make close to $900K a year or have assets of over $14 million. Moreover, I don’t get grant funding which pays the fees as well as the cost of law clerks to assist in the research. I do this because it is fun and because it helps to advance, in a small way, our rights.

As to Warren’s claim of being a Cherokee Indian, I have clients who are enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and her supposed 1/32nd wouldn’t cut it with them. The Eastern Band are those Cherokee who lived so deep in the mountains that they were able to avoid the forced removal. I find it insulting that someone who’s ancester is more likely to have helped in the removal of the Cherokee from the mountains around me and put them on The Trail of Tears dares to claim kinship with them.

A Dukakis Moment?

There must be something in the water up in Massachusetts. I can’t think of anything else to explain the propensity of liberal Democrats to sit atop heavy metal to prove their toughness.

First, there was former Gov. Michael Dukakis who rode on a M1A Abrams tank in 1988. That image plus the Willie Horton ads probably doomed his presidential campaign as much as anything.

Now we have Harvard Law professor and US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren pictured astride a Harley. You can almost hear her saying, “Vroom, vroom!” It was tweeted by Emily’s List which seeks to support liberal female candidates. However, it was pretty stupid as people are already calling it her Dukakis moment.

Rather than calling it a Dukakis Moment, I think Fauxcahontas just wants to be like JayG of the gun blog MArooned.

H/T Legal Insurrection

Hick Vote?

Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren who is running for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) said in an interview she is “going for the hick vote.”

Warren, who has taught at Harvard Law for the past 17 years, was born in Oklahoma. According to Politico, she referred to herself as an “elite hick”. I’d be tempted to just go with elitist especially given the way she looked over her glasses and down her nose at Scott Brown for posing in the nude for Cosmo to help pay for  college.

The Massachusetts GOP quickly responded.

But Massachusetts GOP Communications Director Tim Buckley had a different position.

“Professor Warren’s insulting use of the word ‘hick’ offers a revealing prism into her elitist and arrogant worldview. Massachusetts voters deserve an explanation about just who Professor Warren was referring to when she spoke of winning the ‘hick vote.’”

Checking her campaign website, she makes no mention of her stance on the Second Amendment. However, she says she is for green energy development and making it easier for workers to organize. Somehow I don’t think her stance on the Second Amendment would be the same as Massachusetts gun bloggers JayG or Weer’d Beard.