NothingTo See Here, Blogger!

Yesterday's post got flagged by Blogger for "sensitive content", and visitors got the following notice if they tried to view it (click on the image for a larger copy):

I also got a notification that "This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content as outlined in Blogger’s Community Guidelines." I've been blogging on one thing or another for almost 20 years, often on sensitive topics, but this is the first such notice I've received. I'm assuming the problem was the photo of W Mark Felt posing as an FBI hotdogger in the act of drawing his firearm, and the algorithm deemed it potentially triggering, so to speak.

I'm assuming for now that this was a one-off, and I'm going to proceed as usual. I may try using photos of kittens and ducklings as a header for a while to make it clear to the algorithm that I have no intention of triggering anyone, at least no more than I have in the past, although back in the day, I certainly did some triggering. As far as I can determine, a "sensitive content warning" is the least serious of Blogger's restrictions, although in researching this, I find there's no appeal, and these decisions are final, for whatever that's worth. As my ninth-grade English teacher, Mr Foley, used to say, Quid hoc ad aeternitatem? Mr Foley first encouraged me to become a writer.

Regarding weekend fallout from the Friday search of Biden's Wilmington home, I still think commentators are missing the point. The conventional wisdom is that allowing the documents to be randomly distributed among household effects was variously careless, unacceptable, irresponsible, blah blah blah, but don't we already know this about the Biden family -- most notably, but not exclusively, Hunter? His daughter Ashley is noted mainly for leaving a diary behind from her time at a rehab facility, and at least two generations of the whole Biden family have given new meaning to the term "dysfunctional".

Ever since Biden has been in public life, his siblings, children, nieces, and nephews appear mainly to have made lucrative careers out of their connections to Joe, and starting with Joe himself, they've been remarkably sloppy about it. This is at the root of the current dilemma. We can certainly ask what's in the docs, although between the claim they're classified and assertions of attorney-client privilege, we'll likely never find out, and in my view, the actual contents may be trivial.

The classified docs themselves aren't the reason an ever-growing group of highly connected, highly paid lawyers have been combing through an ever-widening set of Biden family records. As I've been saying, the docs are a byproduct. White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber was brought on last May in anticipation of Republican gains in the November elections, in an attempt to stay ahead of revelations from Hunter's laptop, but I've got to assume the laptop was only the start of thread after thread that by last fall had extended to the Penn Biden Center, which in the nature of things Biden represented just another trove that would lead to yet further questions.

By that point, Dana Remus and at least two other Covinigton & Burling partners were working as Biden personal attorneys, with Bob Bauer joining the team even more recently. Why?

An intriguing recent data point is that Hunter was spotted returning to the Wilmington family home in company with Joe last Wednesday night. It's been put about that Hunter is under de facto house arrest at a compound in Malibu as he dabbles in painting, but it appears he's actually much more closely involved in the family damage control than we've been led to believe.

I think the basic problem is the commingling of Biden family funds, which has already led to tax problems for Hunter, but from what I can gather, the whole family has made a living through collecting baksheesh, some part of which, Hunter's e-mails suggest, goes to Joe. I would imagine problems for the whole family extend not just to taxes, but to questions like money laundering and even bribery, which in the US constitution is mentioned along with treason as a high crime that's grounds for impeachment.

Actually, I think the most generous interpretation of the Biden family frammis is that it's just a con, whereby they represent themselves as working with Joe to collect payoffs that will reach him through the family channels, but Joe just takes them and never delivers. But even that would be a hard thing to recover from.

Who, by the way, is paying for all these lawyers who are working for Joe personally now?