Elizabeth Warren Admits Reporting Native American Heritage to Schools

For weeks, Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren — derided by conservative opponents as "Fauxcahontas" for her claim to Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry — has insisted that she never authorized Harvard to list her as a Native American in its faculty directory.

As it happens, the nation's top schools do not use tribal divination rituals to determine the ethnicity of their faculty for the purpose of creating directories and filing accurate EEOC reports. They rely on self-reporting…

"At some point after I was hired by them, I… provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard," she said in a statement issued by her campaign. "My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I'm proud of it and I have been open about it."

Warren's statement is her first acknowledgment that she identified herself as Native American to the Ivy League schools. While she has said she identified herself as a minority in a legal directory, she has carefully avoided any suggestion during the last month that she took further actions to promote her purported heritage.

Particularly galling is the fact that university administrators would trumpet the hiring of a professor with (at best) 1/32 Cherokee ancestry as a sign of their overwhelmingly white faculties' diversity. It's reminiscent of Rick Santorum's claim that he "came from the coal fields of Pennsylvania," based on the mining career of his immigrant grandfather. By this logic, which turns the clearly white Warren into a Native American and the upper middle class Santorum into a hardscrabble coal miner, I am an Eastern European peasant who spends his days narrowly avoiding rape by Cossack hordes.

Despite the controversies hobbling the Warren campaign, she and her Republican opponent Scott Brown remain locked in a tight race; the latest poll has Brown up by just 1%. Probably because the only thing more mythical than Warren's Native American roots is the idea of a Republican resurgence in Massachusetts.

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Tags: Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts, Native American, Scott Brown

Elizabeth Warren Is Probably Not a Native American

From 1985 to 1996, Elizabeth Warren listed herself in the Association of American Law Schools as a Native American minority. Which is disgraceful. As a lawyer, she isn't supposed to lie to the Association of American Law Schools. She's supposed to lie to judges and juries.

Elizabeth Warren lied and that's wrong, but before we judge her too harshly, who hasn't lied in a job resume? Does anyone honestly know how to actually use Microsoft Excel? If we lived in a logical and rational political landscape, the following exchange would've taken place after that revelation…

Elizabeth Warren: I'm sorry. It was just a stupid thing I did forever ago and I wouldn't repeat that mistake.

Scott Brown: Apology accepted. Now we can finally move on to talking about the real election issues. Like you being a socialist.

But because we live in a terrible world full of terrible people, this is what happened instead…

But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford [Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great grandmother] is that her husband, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee — the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

Conservative pundits dug into Elizabeth Warren's family history to uncover her ancestors were involved in the Trail of Tears. I never thought I'd say this, but can we please get back to talking about local Massachusetts' issues? What started out as kind of a non-issue has evolved into a full blown, steaming pile of Sitting Bull.

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Tags: Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts, Scott Brown

Scott Brown, Elizabeth Warren Seek to Cripple Attack Ad Industry

I'm not sure upon which side of this issue Newt Gingrich is today, but I am absolutely positive that he would be either very impressed or extremely enraged by what's currently happening happening in the Massachusetts senate race between Sen. Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren…

Senior officials from Brown's and Warren's campaigns will soon meet to try to craft an unusual pact to curtail the influence of so-called super PACs that have grown in power since the Supreme Court's Citizens United case loosened campaign finance rules in 2010…

"What I’d like to do is I’d like to be able to run my campaign," Warren said before a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event at this city's convention center. "I'd like for Sen. Brown to run his campaign and we both be responsible for what is said. I think that is the right way to be able to run the campaign."

Brown, speaking outside an American Legion post in Mattapan, Mass., said he's "glad professor Warren seems to be coming around on this issue," adding that he’s been calling on her to disavow outside spending for several weeks.

And what of the sickly child of the man who breaks his back all day in an editing suite churning out attack ad after attack ad? Is that poor young thing to go to bed hungry?

I find it disturbing to see Sen. Brown so quickly bending to the anti-capitalist tactics of admitted-academic Professor Warren.

Photos by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/Getty Images and U.S. Treasury Department/Wikimedia Commons

Tags: Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts, Money, Scott Brown, Senate, Super PACs

Our Endorsements: Standing-Up to Wall Street

* Comedian Lee Camp's live stand-up performance at Occupy Wall Street.

* The official NSFW Anthony Weiner porn parody is finally here.

* Second City: Michele Bachmann's Make-Up Tutorial

* The Onion: Shaken Secretary of Transportation Reduces Speed Limit to 5 MPH After Witnessing Accident

* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: The White House acknowledges that mistakes were made in regards to SponchGate.

Tags: Anthony Weiner, Anthony Weiner's Penis, Comedians, Daily Links, Food, Michele Bachmann, Occupy Wall Street, Scott Brown, SMBC, The Onion, Transportation

From the Pork Barrel: Homework

* Barack Obama today asked members of the media to act like journalists. I don't know. I think that's asking a bit much of them.

* Rep. Paul Broun made an excellent point today, pointing out how Occupy Wall Street is an "attack upon freedom" from having to listen to people express their opinions.

* Hahaha! Sen. Scott Brown really nails Elizabeth Warren for being old and not a Victoria's Secret model. Burn!

* Sarah Palin remembers Steve Jobs as "an island that touched so many people." That's such an island thing to do, isn't it?

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Tags: Elizabeth Warren, House of Representatives, Massachusetts, Occupy Wall Street, Paul Broun, Pork Barrel, Protesters, Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Senate, Steve Jobs