FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'
Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
WSJ Opinion: Questions Over Elizabeth Warren's Claims of Native American Heritage Linger. May 3, 2012. http://youtu.be/MN1lvOq2opA
So desperately wanting to belong: Is Elizabeth Warren's desire to finally find a sense of belonging what animated her use of race identity (politics) prior to the current Massachusetts Senate race? It may very well be much more personal than you think once you know her back story
Please see also:
Boston Herald
Elizabeth Warren: I just wanted to find others like me
Boston Globe video: The Back Story: Dina Rudick speaks with Globe reporter Noah Bierman about his profile on Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren
FYI: per the mention in the video above, film and TV star James Garner was also from Oklahoma like Warren, and had even attended the same elementary school years prior.
The first in a series of profiles Noah Bierman is doing on Warren is here:
Once you read this, regardless of what you think about her politics, a lot of things will make a lot more sense in trying to figure her out.
Boston Globe
A girl who soared, but longed to belong.
Elizabeth Warren grew up amid the infinite expanse of Oklahoma, the finite expectations of her place and time, and financial pain at home. The lessons of those years still drive her.
I've been sitting on this for months just waiting for Election Day to get here.
Below is an excerpt of an email that I wrote back on January 23rd, 2010 and sent out to a few dozen people following the election of Republican Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat held for 47 years by Ted Kennedy. (And when was the last time you saw the media talk about him? It's like he died.Or, alternatively, booked a flight on Oceanic Flight 815.) Most of you know who come here regularly know where I stand on the subject of Dan Gelber, as well as his his pack of supporters, which includes some of the most anti-democratic and unethical pols in Broward County. http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search?q=%22Dan+Gelber%22 He's far too ambitious for his own good and doesn't have a record of being honest with voters. He will lose the FL AG race to Pam Bondi, whom I will be voting for, as I think she'll set many media hearts aflutter as she tries to improve on Bill McCollum's decent track record and fight Obamacare.
Obviously, this was written before we all got the good news that Beth Reinhard would be leaving the Herald and heading to Washington and The National Journal.
My worst fear is that her column will be replaced by -dare I say it- Patricia Mazzei. I will be devoting an entire post on Mazzei soon that zeroes in on some particularly irksome articles of her's that all shared the same weakness, regardless of subject matter. Once you notice it, trust me, it's hard to ignore when you see her articles. You'll find yourself actively looking for it.
Sort of like the way that once I knew that Campbell Brown had a certain facial tic when she was on-air, reporting the news, it was hard not to watch her and just wait for it.
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Just a note to let you know that per some of my hints of late, I already had a ton of things I'd already written that were going to be posted on my blog tomorrow.Subjects include: ...the Dan Gelber vs. Dave Aronberg race for AG, and Scott Brown's remarkable triumph, plus a couple of anti-Beth Reinhard pieces, exposing her infamous shallowness when it reached new jaw-dropping lows lately. (Seriously, five sentences about the race to replace Meek?)
But then I read this article below this morning, after which I'm apoplectic, and now, I may have to re-schedule some things just to keep my head from exploding.How does the chief political reporter for the largest paper in the stateNOT mention in a story ostensibly about insiders vs. outsiders, that Gelber's father was/is a longtime judge, someone who knew everyone who was ANYONE in Miami-Dade even BEFORE he was a judge?
Of course, rather than do like Gelber did, and work for his dad, the judge, one summer... or, as the Boston Globe put it:
At the end of his junior year at Tufts University, Scott P. Brown did not take a typical summer job like many of his classmates. Instead, he spent two months in Army basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., after joining the Massachusetts National Guard.
I've now readALLthe Boston Globe stories on Brown for the past few weeks and am even more impressed with him than before.
I will be sharing some of what I learned about him in some of those posts, though they may be after Sunday now just because I'm so tired of writing.By the way, here from Thursday is the best thing written on Scott Brown thus far, featuring some great investigatory sleuthing by the New York Times to connect-the-dots:
G.O.P. Used Energy and Stealth to Win Seat January 20, 2010
This article is by Adam Nagourney, Jeff Zeleny, Kate Zernike and Michael Cooper.
BOSTON — The e-mail message from a Massachusetts supporter to one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement arrived in early December. The state was holding a special election to fill the seat held by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, it said, and conditions were ripe for a conservative ambush: an Election Day in the dead of winter with the turnout certain to be low.
“To be honest, we kind of looked at it and said, this is a long shot,” said Brendan Steinhauser, the director of state campaigns for FreedomWorks, which has become an umbrella for Tea Party groups. But the group was impressed by the determination of organizers in this decidedly Democratic state and was intrigued by the notion that this could be a way to effectively derail federal health care legislation. Read the rest of the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/us/politics/21reconstruct.html
This is the single best-written article I've read on any subject the entire year.
In the hard copy of this, they even have a chart showing the number of events Brown and Martha Coakley attended the past few weeks, and as you may already know by now, he outworked her 3:1. Truth be told, some of those Globe stories appear brilliant in retrospect.
Florida's top candidates for U.S. Senate hardly political outsiders
By Beth Reinhard
January 23, 2010
Out of the cascade of commentary about Tuesday's upset by a Republican in Democrat-rich Massachusetts came this gem from state Sen. Dan Gelber of Miami Beach, who used to shoot hoops with the U.S. senator-elect in college:
"To the legions of Republicans in Florida who are claiming the 'I'm Scott Brown mantle,' let me say this: 'I know Scott Brown, Scott Brown was a friend of mine . . . you're no Scott Brown.' ''
The riff on the famous slap at Republican Dan Quayle after he compared himself to Jack Kennedy during the 1988 vice presidential debate was spot on. The leading candidates for Florida's open U.S. Senate seat -- Gov. Charlie Crist, Marco Rubio and U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek -- are all career politicians who commit sins of omission when they distance themselves from the establishment.
QUITE A LEAP
The governor is the biggest insider of them all. Crist compared Brown's avowed commitment to "the people's seat'' in Massachusetts to his ownclaim to be the "people's governor'' of Florida. It's quite a leap for the sitting governor of the nation's fourth largest state, a vice presidential shortlister, and the once-presumed Republican nominee to claim kinship with a truck-driving state senator who faced a double-digit deficit in the polls. (Do they even let pickups onto Fisher Island, where Crist's wife owns a $3.2 million manse?)
Crist's scorn for "the radical Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda'' when he congratulated Brown also rang hollow since the economic stimulus package he supported sits at the very top of that agenda. Crist pointed out that he had spoken to Brown after his victory, as if sound waves made them soul mates.
While Rubio is certainly the underdog in the GOP race, the former speaker of the Florida House and a six-figures-earning lawyer is no political outsider either. In the last 11 years, Rubio was out of public office for only the last one -- a part of his resume he frequently skips over in his stump speech. Can he honestly lay the blame for the recession at the feet of Crist and President Barack Obama and claim to have had nothing to do with it?
Rubio has to stretch pretty far to the left to put his arm around Brown, who backs abortion rights and the state health insurance program in Massachusetts. Rubio touted his participation Friday in the "Virtual March for Life'' on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Earlier this week, he backed Attorney General Bill McCollum's claim that the pending healthcare legislation is unconstitutional because it requires people to buy insurance. Like in Massachusetts.
PART OF THE MAJORITY
As for Meek, he does have one thing in common with Brown: Political analysts expect him to lose the general election. But while Brown was competing against the Kennedy dynasty in Massachusetts, Meek practically inherited his seat in Congress from his mother, Carrie Meek. She staved off potential rivals by waiting until the last minute to rule out another term.
That part of his bio didn't come up when campaign manager Abe Dyk said: "Having worked as a skycap for tips, as a Florida State trooper and having led the Coalition to Reduce Class Size, Kendrick Meek is the candidate best positioned to deliver that change as a U.S. senator.''
Ahem. Meek is part of the Democratic majority who sits on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. He has roots in Liberty City but has long roamed the halls of Washington and Tallahassee. The closest he ever got to a nude Cosmo centerfold like Brown? A mention in a celebrity blog called "Young Black & Fabulous.''
Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.
