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RE: Elizabeth Warren’s False Claim She Was Fired for Being Pregnant
(10-10-2019 02:15 PM)JRsec Wrote: (10-10-2019 10:20 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: (10-09-2019 02:05 PM)UofMstateU Wrote: (10-09-2019 01:59 PM)JDTulane Wrote: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle...tory.html?
The Elizabeth Warren pregnancy smear shows how poisoned the media world is
Quote:A news report can be narrowly factual, and still plenty unfair.
And so it was with a “revelation” regarding one element of Elizabeth Warren’s personal history, oft-told on the campaign trail: That her 1971 pregnancy caused the 22-year-old to be “shown the door” as a public-school teacher in New Jersey — an unwanted career change that put her on the path to law school and public life. (Warren, of course, is now a Democratic Massachusetts senator who is a leading 2020 presidential candidate.)
The conservative Washington Free Beacon’s new top editor, Eliana Johnson, late of Politico and the National Review, kicked off the contretemps with a report Monday that dug up the minutes from the Riverdale, N.J., school board showing that Warren had been offered another term and that her eventual resignation was accepted with regret.
The headline: “County Records Contradict Warren’s Claim She Was Fired Over Pregnancy.”
Shockingly, nowhere on these documents is it stamped: “The all-male board fired this young woman because she was pregnant and because of its deep-seated misogyny.” (And, more seriously, nowhere in the story is it indicated that the renewal offer likely came before school district honchos knew Warren was pregnant.)
Conservatives and pro-Trumpers gobbled it up — and spit back out an amped-up version, one less tethered to facts. The poisoned version quickly spread into the larger mediasphere.
“Another Elizabeth Warren Lie About Elizabeth Warren?” tweeted Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who — credit where due — does have proven expertise on the subject of lying.
The right-wing Federalist agreed “lie” was the right word with its headline: “Records Show Elizabeth Warren Lied About Being Fired For Being ‘Visibly Pregnant’.”
An embedded video kept it even simpler: “Warren Lied.”
Before you knew it, Fox News, in its wisdom, had jumped in. The chyron: “Warren Facing New Credibility Questions.”
Fox anchor Dana Perino assembled some pundits to consider it — among them Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, who framed it as a troubling “character issue” for Warren. This gave Fox a chance to revisit Warren’s earlier blunder over claiming significant Native American ancestry.
Of course, it’s one of the jobs of the press to scrutinize presidential candidates — to “scrub” them, in the journalistic lingo.
Elizabeth Warren is no different, liberal darling though she is.
As the Free Beacon’s Johnson told Vox, “foundational myths” spun on the campaign trail deserve skepticism: “It seems to me that these sorts of claims, whether it’s Democrats or Republicans making them, warrant scrutiny.”
Fair enough. And Warren’s campaign seemed to have made a tactical mistake by not responding immediately, though they were given the opportunity by the Free Beacon,according to its story.
If Warren had shot back as cannily to this as she did to the recent absurd report that she’d had an affair with a 24-year-old Marine (she wittily tweeted out an image of her alma mater, the University of Houston and their mascots, the Cougars), she could have swatted this away.
It wasn’t until the next day that some much-needed perspective began to emerge, thanks to a CBS News report.
It included crucial context that would have been ever-so-helpful in the initial piece, like this interview with a retired Riverdale teacher, Trudy Randall:
“The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer. But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”
It also included an interview with Warren about why the board originally renewed her contract and even gave her a provisional pass on some other training she needed to continue as a speech pathologist:
“I was pregnant, but nobody knew it,” Warren said. “And then a couple of months later when I was six months pregnant and it was pretty obvious, the principal called me in, wished me luck, and said he was going to hire someone else for the job.”
The CBS piece also takes on another aspect of the Free Beacon’s story — that Warren in 2007 explained her departure from teaching without mentioning being fired. She told CBS that going into elective politics caused her to become more open about that aspect of her past — and, in effect, to air the workplace discrimination that was rampant then and has never fully disappeared, despite being outlawed in the late 1970s.
It all seems to track: There is no big controversy here. No apparent lie and no “character issue” that should unduly concern the voting public.
If there is a scandal here, it’s how — in the bad-faith media world — narrowly presented facts without sufficient context can do unfair harm.
They can and will be weaponized, falsely regurgitated and twisted beyond recognition.
The only thing missing from this mini-saga is President Trump’s custom-made insult. Stand by for that.
She wasnt properly accredited for the job she had. Read that over and over until you get it.
To be fair, proper accreditation matters a LOT more today than it used to.
This is actually a huge complaint of libertarians: more than 1,100 occupations require licenses in at least one state (up from about 800 in the mid-1990s). But fewer than 60 require licenses in all 50 states. So most licensure requirements are not actually necessary to protect the public. More often, they're put in place by lobbyists for the workers in the profession who are seeking to limit competition - the modern day equivalent of medieval guilds.
We've become a society that is more concerned about a piece of paper that says "you're qualified" than about the person's character or actual competency.
I could cite many examples of this but my favorite two are these and of course the first and most ridiculous one is from Public Education.
A woman who was retiring from the University of Georgia as Dr. of English returned to her rural hometown, but after 30 years of service still young enough to teach. She applied for a high school position that the local school board posted to teach creative writing at the high school level. She was refused because she didn't have an education major.
The first industry to establish the paper credentials requirement was public education and they did so to prevent people who had been in business or industry from returning with better skills and usually better communication abilities and competing with them for their jobs.
Education majors traditionally didn't have to take as many hours in the major or minor course work as those getting a BA or BS in those fields. The fear was always there that they would one day compete with people who not only had the full hours for a B.A. but might even have gotten a masters in the field. So when a woman who taught the education majors at UGA (and everyone else) was turned down because she didn't take blackboard preparation and audio visual courses it was a hoot.
We had a local industry near here that required a fork lift operator. They hired three guys who were "certified" lift operators which means they paid out money to a group which certified the operators. All were young and had not driven lifts before. The first one snagged the fork on a steel runner bending it and the fork and digging up part of the concrete warehouse floor, his replacement dropped a 1500lb palate on merchandise obliterating it, and the third dropped some heavy rolled material that almost made it far enough to get to an assembly table where people were working. They finally hired the first applicant whose application they did not consider (because he was uncertified) even though he had over 20 years experience as a lift operator. That guy is still there doing a terrific job. He just never felt the need to get a piece of paper that cost him 7 or 800 dollars and a week of his time in order to prove he could do what he had been doing well for 20 years. The certifications in most cases are cottage industries legislated in by the State House that their cronies can set up to glean money from the poor looking for a job in a particular field, and most don't mean that the certificate holder has any clue as to how to provide the service the piece of paper says he or she can provide.
Now as to Warren and many other house members, the House is supposed to conduct the business of the Nation. Wouldn't it be better if we had a prohibition on lawyers from serving in the House and had a requirement that anyone seeking that office was required to have had at least 10 years experience in operating or owning a business? What a different nation we might have. Instead we deal with a majority of lawyers who have turned the House into a career they retire from for 8 years of service (absurd) and most of the laws they pass serve their constituency, other lawyers.
All of the stories about Warren point to the same thing. She was privileged, used her privilege to her advantage, and now that her particular way of getting ahead is frowned upon she's lying to try create a narrative of victimization to appeal to what has now become the Democratic base. But of course once elected she will revel in her privilege once again.
An example on the certification with something that really needs certification.
To become a CPA in Georgia after being a CPA elsewhere you still have to re-certify your education and your experience requirements (where you have to work under a CPA). So they want you to document things that could have been 25-30 years ago and could have been at a company that is no longer in existence or with a person now retired or deceased, instead of using reciprocity with other states, almost all of whom use a uniform law. The only reason for that is to make it slow and difficult for new people moving into a growing state.
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Elizabeth Warren’s False Claim She Was Fired for Being Pregnant
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