monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

they charge by the inch

When this story first surfaced six years ago, I wrote that it was more embarrassing for the Ivy League than for Warren. The identification didn’t seem to have improved her academic career — something confirmed subsequently by documentation from her hirings — and her brief period as a supposed minority trailblazer was, I suggested, probably a whim of self-identification that she subsequently regretted, and was happy enough to let slip away. In which case it was the schools’ eagerness to turn a woman they had hired on the merits into an embodiment of an essentially phony diversity that was the real problem, not Warren’s attachment to her family tales.

But what Warren should have done when the story resurfaced, what she obviously should have done, was to simply express mild regret for letting her enthusiasm for family lore carry her away into identifying as someone who might possibly receive affirmative-action consideration, apologize to Cherokee groups for any offense, and literally never speak of the matter again. And if and when Donald Trump started up his Pocahontas jibes, she should have simply ignored him and talked about the many issues where he’s on the wrong side of public opinion.

At least 10 people have been killed and dozens more wounded in an explosion at a college in Russian-annexed Crimea.

Officials said an "unidentified explosive device" detonated at the technical college in Kerch, where Russia has built a bridge between the peninsula and Russia.

Initial reports had suggested that the blast was some sort of gas explosion.

But a Russian national guard official said the incident was a deliberate "terrorist act".

Sergei Melikov told Tass news agency the explosion had been caused by an improvised explosive device.

A Kremlin spokesman had also said that a deliberate attack was now being investigated as a possibility.

A local official said most of the blast victims were students of the technical college, which is a vocational school for teenagers.

The director of the college, who had not been at the scene at the time of the attack, told Russian media that unknown armed men had broken into the building. She compared it to the school siege of Beslan in 2004, during which about 330 people died.

"There were lots of corpses, corpses of kids, a real terrorist attack," she said.

One of the innumerable ways in which Donald Trump has degraded American politics is his habit of relentlessly using belittling nicknames for his political opponents. Seizing on a superficial or imagined characteristic — “Liddle Marco,” “Low-Energy” Jeb Bush, etc. — he repeats it, like a middle-school bully, recruiting his sycophants to circulate the meme.

Axios reports that Trump is especially pleased with his insulting of Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination. Axios brings us word that behind the scenes the bully-in-chief and his lackeys are chortling about their success. “Trump’s nicknames slyly capitalize on and exacerbate a real or perceived weakness: A former aide said: ‘You hear them and laugh, and then they say: ‘You know what? He’s kinda right!’,’” it reports, adding in the news outlet’s signature “Be Smart” coda: “Be smart … Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ nickname, as offensive as it may be, has been wickedly effective from his point of view.”

One of the preconditions for the success of Trump’s method is a news media that will devote far more attention to grading the effectiveness of Trump’s bullying than its truth. Even on those amoral terms, this story is especially credulous. It gives Trump credit for inventing a nickname that he did not actually devise. In fact, the theme and the term were used against Warren when she ran for Senate in 2012. “The term Pocahontas” was “near ubiquitous in conservative media,” complained one critic.

The far more common term of abuse at the time was “Fauxcahontas,” which at least involves some wordplay. So to the extent Trump can claim any contribution here, it is nudging Republicans away from a somewhat clever bullying nickname and toward the adoption of a dumber version.

The accusation implied by the nickname is that Warren falsified Native American heritage to advance her career in academia. Warren has said she has been told by her family that she has part Cherokee descent, and has listed that designation at times. This week, she released the result of a DNA test trying to ascertain whether that family lore is correct. The test suggested she probably did have a Cherokee ancestor six to ten generations ago. Conservatives claimed this proved she had less Native American ancestry than the average person, and the conclusion spread virally through conservative media, although it was false.

More to the point, did she benefit from affirmative action as an alleged Native American? The Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey conducted an exhaustive investigation of this question last month, digging through personnel records and interviewing former colleagues and supervisors. The result of her reporting was unambiguous. “The Globe found clear evidence, in documents and interviews, that her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools,” it found. “At every step of her remarkable rise in the legal profession, the people responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman.”

Perhaps because this report came out on Labor Day, or perhaps because the news media is too shallow to care, its findings have failed to make much impact. Instead we are left with lots of admiring commentary about Trump’s bullying game being on point. “It clearly got in Warren’s head: The fact that she got a DNA test, let alone is doing a massive rollout of the results, shows how much it’s on her mind,” reports Axios. “It now becomes a symbol of whether she’s honest. Did she lie to advance her academic career?”

Well, she didn’t — a fact the story declines to mention. But who cares about the truth when we can describe the effectiveness of the lie?

she should have simply ignored him and talked about the many issues where he’s on the wrong side of public opinion.

So she made a mistake in a college application. Did she get preferential treatment. Is her law degree null and void. Did she get a real Native American to do her schoolwork for her? Does any of this matter, what 40 years later?

No **** Sherlock. A fascist America is bad news for everybody.

Republicans vote for more dead children.

It will be a mistake if he continues to dodge payment.