Despicable, evil, jerk!
He really doesnât want todayâs news cycle to be Bonespur vs. Bonesaw, does he?
âSometimes referred to as Pocahontas.â That would would be you, trump. When will the Cherokee tribal leaders smack down trump for calling her by a racist name?
Pocahontas (the bad version)
Bingo. The only bad version is the racial slur version which he calls out specifically.
I am just flummoxed. How can normal people support this sociopath and psychopath?
I will remain eternally grateful that Trump is not my child.
If he were, however, Iâd have taken that Twitter machine away from him aeons ago. His barely-verbal diarrhĆa is pathological and needs treatment.
âFlummoxedâ is a great word!
More people should admit to being flummoxed. It could only help.
8 years with a black man in the White House, thatâs how.
Iâm really thankful that the leader of our great country is consumed with the really important things that he has to deal with.
I have a nuanced view of all of this.
I do have issues with Warrenâs timing, but that said I think itâs actually hurting the GOP more than the Dems. Dems are focused with a business like attitude and a burning intensity similar to 2008 and 2012. Trump is taken in by these distractions and isnât able to deliver a clear message. The last 3 weeks of the national political news cycle are always pure garbage against Dems. You can go back decades on this. From 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, to 2017, the media have a poor understanding of whatâs happening on the ground, theyâre intellectually lazy and they indulge in cheap political reporting. So if Warrenâs gambit took the focus away from the annual âshame HRCâ campaign and both were overtaken by Khashoggi, which itself was overtaken at the local level by debates and campaigns, that would seem to work out well for Team Blue.
Setting aside the timing, the importance of what Warren did here is she demystified Trumpâs attack and made the issue more conventionally focused on her past actions and potential flaws. People are flawed. People say and do stupid things. People have to answer for that. Thatâs ok. Whatâs not ok is enabling Trump to use an attack on a political figure to springboard into a broadside against an entire race and college educated women. When the Trumpers snicker in the audience every time Trump brings up the racist/sexist âPocahontasâ smear, itâs not about Warren. Itâs about being able to make racist/sexist broadsides vicariously through Trump. These racists are too scared and timid to show themselves, but they put their faith in Trump to push that envelope. Thatâs one of the keys to understanding his appeal.
By pushing back on this, you can see Trump backing off on the gratuitous Pocahontas smear. Heâs now hiding behind the Cherokee Nation to call Warren a fraud. Thatâs ok. There are certain things she may need to answer for. The Cherokee Nation also messed up the politics here by being on Trumpâs side at a time when a Trumper judge is about to whack protected status for Native Americans, and the GOP is after Native American lands and their voting rights. That creates an opportunity for both Warren and Cherokee Nation to have a summit and settle things out the way that politicians typically do. Trump will continue to attack Warren, but it will be more like the way he falsely attacks Blumenthal, taking a potential vulnerability or error and expanding it. The key is it will be personal to Warrenâs actions alone and not include whole groups of people. Thatâs key in my view. When the Trumpers sense that Trump isnât the same old racist grandpa that they love, theyâll get a little nervous and retreat to the woodwork.
The other thing here that I like is the ability to confront a narcissist (whether she intended it or not). Narcissists always judge people as hypocrites for failing to live up to standards that he/she has no intention of living by. Itâs a âheads I win, tails you loseâ argument. You canât win that argument. They demand that you have to be 100% perfect before the narcissistâs actions can be questioned. That permeates all of Trumpâs arguments and itâs how he has infected the GOP. There is no consequence as long as you follow Trumpâs combative narcissism as a political strategy (unless of course youâre all the Trumpers who ended up in jail or were forced to resign). Here, by essentially admitting that she herself may be flawed, Warren shows that she can handle what Trump throws at her, and that she can answer her own flaws and mistakes on her own terms without reference to him. Thatâs powerful in my view.
Did Warren help her candidacy for President? That depends on how she plays it. She has to be focused on the Congressional campaigns and turn her attention to the bad Trumper policies that flow from that malice that imbues everything he does and says. Iâve never really thought of Warren as a top tier candidate though she has good name ID. I donât think she really connects with the center-left HRC base of the party or with POC voters. If she doesnât become the nominee, that would be better for the party, because the party and its nominee will have the benefit of her being willing to challenge Trump where he lives without having to absorb the cost of it.
A man whose family anglicized their rather lumpy German family name. A man who sports a fake tan every day of the week. A man who had chestnut hair 30 years ago but now wears a Clairol blonde comb over weave installed by a boutique hair implant shop. Who impersonated a successful businessman on Television. Claims someone else is a fraud.
Christ, what an asshole.
He gets to attack another Democratic woman with lies and insults!
Awesome.
She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American
Letâs compare this gross mischaracterization to the actual report.
1: DNA testing done by a world-renowned geneticist and advisor to the only consumer companies doing DNA analysis, done in a blinded fashion, is not âbogusâ. It is a strong step up from Trumpâs proposed route of throwing a consumer DNA test kit at her during a debate.
Dr. Carlos D. Bustamante is an internationally recognized leader in the application of data science and
genomics technology to problems in medicine, agriculture, and biology. He received his Ph.D. in Biology
and MS in Statistics from Harvard University (2001), was on the faculty at Cornell University (2002-9),
and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010. He is currently Professor of Biomedical Data Science,
Genetics, and (by courtesy) Biology at Stanford University. Dr. Bustamante has a passion for building
new academic units, non-profits, and companies to solve pressing scientific challenges. He is Founding
Director of the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (CEHG) and
Inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Data Science. He is the Owner and President of CDB
Consulting, LTD. and also a Director at Eden Roc Biotech, founder of Arc-Bio (formerly IdentifyGenomics
and BigData Bio), and an SAB member of Imprimed, Etalon DX, and Digitalis Ventures among others.
2: The test showed that she absolutely is between 1/64th and 1/1024th American Indian. The specific measurement is 1/256th (8th generation, although the analysis allows for a MoE of up to 2 generations in either direction, hence 6th-10th generation). Claiming 1/1024th is as intellectually dishonest as seeing a poll with Trump approval at 40% with an MoE of 4% and describing it as saying Trump approval is at 44% (aw, shit, I guess Trumpâs done that one too âŠ)
The analysis also identified 5 genetic segments as Native American in origin at high confidence, defined at the 99% posterior probability value.
- This means that there is at least a 99% confidence that these five genetic segments are in Elizabeth Warrenâs DNA because she had an American Indian ancestor (âhigh confidenceâ starts at 99% and extends upwards from there; the specific p value for just one segment is given as 0.00026, where 1.0 is no confidence and 0.0 is complete confidence). There is a (well under) <1% chance that these five segments arose randomly without American Indian ancestry, but that is well above standard confidence interval claims. There is no âmayâ in that statement. She has American Indian ancestry.
3: The average American - meaning the median American although I wouldnât expect Trump to know precise words like that - has 0 American Indian ancestry. That is, they find no significant markers of American Indian ancestry in the vast majority of Americans, not even degraded enough to indicate 6-10 generations of inheritance. If Trump actually did mean the âaverageâ (meaning, take the lengths of these markers in all people and average their lengths) then the âaverage lengthâ is significantly smaller than seen in Warren, indicating the âaverage Americanâ if you put us all in a blender somehow has much less American Indian ancestry. See here, for just one of the five segments:
The total length of Native American segments observed in the individual is greater than the average value for the reference individuals â by 12.4-fold (corresponding to 12.7 standard deviations) for the individuals from Great Britain and 10.5-fold (corresponding to 4.9 standard deviations) for the individuals from Utah.
That is, she is over ten times more likely to have American Indian ancestry than the average (here literally average, not median) of Utah residents.
Segment length roughly equates linearly to the fraction of ancestry. That is, a full-blooded Amer Indian would expect to have significantly more Amer Indian markers in their DNA than an 8th-generation Amer Indian. However, even a full-blooded Amer Indian does not have 100% Amer Indian marker DNA, as there is natural variation in the DNA between individuals (duh) as well as common DNA across multiple genetic trees (for Amer Indian, East Asian DNA is most similar). With a straight fractional expansion from Warrenâs 25.6 centiMorgans of uniquely American Indian DNA sequences being â8th generationâ we would expect a âfull bloodedâ American Indian to have 6,553.6 centiMorgans of Native American marker in them, but we also know there is a total of 7,190 centiMorgans of DNA in each individual, that is an unrealistically high amount of it deemed âuniqueâ to Native Americans. As a result, I strongly suspect that the âmarkerâ DNA decreases somewhat less rapidly than fractional.
All of which is to give an estimate of how far âbackâ the âaverageâ (as in, throw them all in a blender and pull one humanâs DNA out with a syringe) Utahnâs American Indian ancestry is. If Warrenâs 25.6 cM maps to around 1/256th, then the âaverage Utahnâ would be 1/2688th at most, which is an estimate centered around 11.392 generations back (with a smaller MoE due to much larger sample size), which is an âaverageâ of well before the average Utahn arrived on the American continent.
4: When we say âAmerican Indianâ with respect to DA testing, we really mean specifically native South/Central American Indian. We only have DNA profiles for Mexican, Peruvian, and Colombian Native American tribes. Thus it is entirely possible that there is a more recent Native American ancestor in Warrenâs lineage who could not be identified by this test. Again, though, Trump himself defined the test to use, and this flaw does not at all disqualify the results showing Warren does indeed have at least one American Indian ancestor. If anything, the test understates Warrenâs Native American lineage.
For Native American references, we used samples within the 1000 Genomes project of Native American ancestry; these samples come from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. (It is not possible to use Native American reference sequences from inside the United States, since Native American groups within the US have not chosen to participate in recent population genetics studies.)
The nation didnât take a side on this. Their argument was the Warren test is useless and inappropriate.
too late for that
Thanks for the excellent précis.
Iâm sure youâre aware it wonât make a lick of difference to the mouth-breathers.
Yes.
They meant it does not prove she is legally entitled to membership in a specific tribe.
Hereâs what theyâre down-playing: It may be useful to her against Trump because it establishes for the record that she has more Native American DNA in her than many people.
Is this important? Trump seems to have made it so.
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âItâs not particularly helpful to Indian country for this kind of debate to go back and forth. We have a lot of issues. We would rather the President of the United States and Sen. Warren focus in on things that affect us.â
I agree, and I would rather the President of the United States werenât a complete buffoon, but he is and one has to deal with him without flinching, so here we are.
Thats his fault.