A local newspaper has this story elevated right to the front of page A8.  On the web, they have the story behind a paywall, so I won’t bother to provide a link or name the newspaper.    They did provide these paragraphs of explanation:

Other Republican moderates, including Senators Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, who Democrats had hoped would support the bill, agreed with the Bay State Republican, saying that the legislation would impose too much of a burden on employers and spawn frivolous lawsuits.

Supporters of the bill had hoped to build on the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and more recently the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, by requiring employers to provide a reason for pay gaps when asked, and barring companies from retaliating against employees who discuss pay.
.
.
.
Republicans said the bill would restrict an employer’s ability to reward employees based on performance, provide bonus pay for hazardous work, or differentiate pay rates based on regional standards. And it would subject employers to unlimited damages, even for what they said could be unintentional pay differences.

If these paragraphs are close to being a fair description (and why should I assume that), then there are a few serious flaws in the Republicans’ excuse for not voting for this.

The law  “requiring employers to provide a reason for pay gaps when asked” doesn’t seem to be that onerous.  If any of the supposed legitimate reasons mentioned by Republicans for a pay gap were the real reason, then all the employer would have to do is to say so.  However, don’t you have to wonder why the Republicans think that there might be systematic differences in pay “based on performance”?  Do they really think men do the job so much better than women that they merit a 30% wage differential?

The Elizabeth Warren campaign is onto this issue.

See the link, Tell Scott Brown that women deserve to earn fair wages | Elizabeth Warren, Senator for Massachusetts.

Apparently Scott Brown, Senator for the rich in Massachusetts, thinks it would be too big a burden for companies to explain wage disparities.

He also seems to think that a systematic difference between men’s pay and women’s pay might be based on merit. Does that mean that on average he doesn’t think female workers are as good as male workers?

Scott Brown claims to be working for all of Massachusetts, but he always finds a reason why a particular law to help the middle-class would be bad, and he never finds a reason why a particular law to help the wealthy would be bad. Is this sort of like Faux Noise’s “fair and balanced”?

Governor Deval Patrick addresses the 2012 Massachusetts Democratic Convention on June 2, 2012 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

I was thrilled to hear this speech at the convention. I am so glad it has been posted on YouTube so that more people can see and hear it.

Sturbridge Community Television (Channel 12) will be playing the video of Elizabeth Warren’s visit to Southbridge on Wednesday, June 6th at approximately 10:20 a.m.; 2:20 p.m. and 8:20 p.m.

The Warren visit to Southbridge occurred on May 12, 2012.  There was a turnout of about 125 people at the Fins & Tales restaurant to listen to her and to talk to her.

The Boston Globe has the op-ed piece, Elizabeth Warren’s Wetumka roots, by Farah Stockman.  To whet your appetite for some of the nuance introduced by this column, I give you the following quotes:

The problem with these heritage treasure hunts is that they presuppose that the question of racial identity is always absolute: is she or isn’t she?

Real life is more complex. In 1990, only about 60 percent of the 1.9 million Americans who declared themselves to be Native American on the census were actually enrolled in a federally recognized tribe, according to University of Kansas sociologist Joane Nagel.

More than three times as many people self-identified as Native American in 1990 than in 1960, as tribes became more politically active and cultural ties became more celebrated.

Nowhere in America has more people per capita who identify as Native American than Oklahoma, where Warren grew up. Twelve percent of people there identify as such.

That’s because the place is literally Native America. It was the last stop on the Trail of Tears, where the federal government deposited tribes forcibly removed from more desirable lands in the 1800s.

Sarah Stockman seems to be exhibiting a fair amount of journalistic initiative in seeking out experts to provide a little nuance to the story being fed to the Globe by Scott Brown’s campaign.  If this is the beginnings of an apology from the Globe for their previous journalistic sloth, then I accept.

One minor quibble even with this story is the quote:

Should Warren have had deeper roots to list herself in a directory of minority law professors?

By my reading of the news, Warren did not list herself in a directory of minority law professors.  She listed herself in a general directory of lawyers, and her listing indicated that she was a member of a minority.  Of course, judging from the news coverage of this story so far, anything I learned from reading one news source is as suspect as anything I read in another.

Yes, I claim to be Jewish, but I am not enrolled in any Federally recognized tribe, either.  So I can understand how you can think of yourself as being something even though the Federal Government has not given its blessing to your claim.

My wife tells me that I cannot go around offering to show my circumcision as proof of my claims.

This post is a complement to the previous post Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Heritage.

With family trees so easy to research on the internet these days, I have been wondering why none of the newsmedia and none of the Republicans who brought up the issue could take us through the Elizabeth Warren Family tree to show us all the non-Native American ancestors in that tree.

I have stumbled around her family tree for a little bit today, and using the first source that I found, Ancestors Of Elizabeth Warren, I came across

• John Huston Crawford, born on Mar. 26, 1858 in Missouri, USA and died on Jan. 23, 1924 in Hughes, Oklahoma, USA.
  • Bethanie Elvina Bethania Crawford, born on Oct. 29, 1875 in Lebanon, Laclede, Missouri, USA and died on Nov. 15, 1969 in Oklahoma City, Canadian, Oklahoma, USA.
    • Pauline Reed, born on Nov. 5, 1911 and died on Dec. 3, 1997 in Oklahoma City, Canadian, Oklahoma, USA.
      • Elizabeth Warren, neé Elizabeth Herring, born June 22, 1949 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

My daughter, ShelahJ, used her account with Ancestry.com to corroborate some of the information from Ancestors Of Elizabeth Warren. She did not do an exhaustive check, but she found no contradictions to what she did look at.

According to the original source Ancestors Of Elizabeth Warren, the reference for John Huston Crawford was Census 1900 Township 10 N. Range 25 E., Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory Crofford.

There are 4 John Crawford’s listed in that census, but I haven’t quite made a match to the one that is Elizabeth Warren’s ancestor. All of these John Crawfords are listed as Indian.

Is there a genealogy expert in the audience who could help?

Here are two references that claim to debunk the idea that John H Crawford was Native American – Part 1 and Part 2.

This is the 1900 census record that Polly’s Granddaughter thinks is Elizabeth Warren’s ancestor.

There is no daughter Behanie born in 1875, but perhaps she moved out by 1900. This John Crofford was born in March of 1857 not March of 1858, but it is the closest match that I have been able to find to the John Huston Crawford of Ancestors Of Elizabeth Warren.

The Boston Globe headline Warren trounces rival, girds for nasty campaign, tells you more about how this newspaper is going to cover this campaign than it tells you about external reality.

I commented on their web site:

“girds for nasty campaign” Well at least the Boston Globe is honest about how they intend to cover this campaign.

For some reason, perhaps goaded by their competition with The Boston Herald, they have decided that the way to cover this election is to get down and dirty. As I have said before, once a newspaper gets a story wrong, they never let it go. The Globe never fails to insert the phony Native American Heritage issue, that they fell for, into every story they run.

They are bound and determined to make this a real issue, no matter how foolish it may make them look as they fail at this attempt to invent an issue. Apparently they are willing to risk what is left of the newspaper’s reputation, rather than admit that the Republicans duped them into covering this bit of their propaganda campaign. If I didn’t understand where the Globe’s corporate interests lie, I might think I was back in the days when Pravda was the laughing stock of the west.

I can be almost as persistent unmasking The Boston Globe‘s gutter journalism as they are in promoting a non-story so that they don’t have to admit that they were wrong.

Here is the video that Elizabeth Warren used at the Democratic Party Convention in Springfield yesterday. This is what introduced her address to the convention prior to the vote.

This video and her speech got a rousing reception. I think the fact that she got almost 95% of the vote showed how the delegates (and alternates) felt about her.

I was lucky enough to be promoted from alternate to delegate so I could be among that 95% casting our votes for Warren.

We wanted to unite behind her candidacy so we and the rest of the party could devote all our energy to pushing her campaign forward from now until the November election.

Governor Deval Partick’s terrific speech reminded us that the effort does not end in November. We have to build a movement to back up Elizabeth Warren’s efforts in the Senate with grass roots support for our Democratic principles.

In an article in The Boston Globe, Brian McGrory inadvertently highlights Massachusetts’ original sin.

Warren gave far and away her most elaborate and emotional responses to questions over why she still believes she has Native American heritage, despite a lack of documented evidence. She revealed that her parents eloped because of tensions between their two families over her mother’s ancestry.

Her family is not known to have an official affiliation or any registration with an Indian tribe, and any sparse indications that a great-great-great grandmother had Cherokee blood would fall short of federal guidelines that would grant Warren minority status. Warren was born and raised in Oklahoma.

“In the 1930s, when my parents got married, these were hard issues,’’ Warren said. “My father’s family so objected to my mother’s Native American heritage that my mother told me they had to elope.

“As kids, my brothers and I knew about that. We knew about the differences between our two families. And we knew how important my mother’s heritage was to her. This was real in my life. I can’t deny my heritage. I can’t and I won’t. That would be denying who my mother was, who my family was, how we lived, and I won’t do it.’’

Apparently Warren’s mother was Native American enough to be recognized as such and discriminated for it in Oklahoma.  In Massachusetts, these days she is not considered Native American enough.

Reminds me of when I was in High School.  A friend and fellow DeMolay member complained to me that “the damn Jews were taking over the organization.”   I said, “You are aware that I am Jewish, aren’t you?”  His reply was “No you’re not.”

I remember the days when it could be a traumatic experience for a black person to be discovered as having been passing as white.  There were even movies about such things.  Now we are complaining that Elizabeth Warren is not passing for white.

I have long learned that there are people who will disparage you or take umbrage at you no matter what you do.  What set me free from attempts to induce guilt on me for my actions was to realize that the problem was theirs, not mine.

When, in the 1970s, I was talking to a black person who had moved here from St. Louis, he told me that Massachusetts was the most de facto segregated place he had ever lived. I said that I could empathize with his dismay.  Although my minority status as Jewish was not so obvious to the casual passer-by as his minority status, I still had an understanding of how people from the dominant culture had no idea of what it was like to be a minority.

For those that don’t get the reference of the headline, our treatment of native Americans, slavery, and racial discrimination have been considered by many outside observers as the original sin of our democratic country.  It is too bad that we have still not put the last remnants of that sin aside.