Nobody Believes The Real Clear Politics Averages

*TRUMP INTERNAL POLLING: TRUMP LEADS IN ALL BATTLEGROUND STATES pic.twitter.com/PPQnSsryDp

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 10, 2024

A few people are starting tgo say it: Election tilts toward Trump as suspicions grow that some polls may be masking true size of his lead,

Harris currently leads Trump by 2.0% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 49.1% support to his 47.1%. That figure includes a Rasmussen Reports survey showing Trump with a two-point lead, a Reuters/Ipsos survey showing Harris up two, a Morning Consult poll with Harris up five, a Yahoo News poll with the race tied, and a number of other surveys. A New York Times/Siena College survey showed Harris up three points.

Actually, as of this morning, Harris's RCP lead is down to 1.8%, having been at 2% or more for many weeks. But as I've been saying all along, the national average is meaningless, since it's the Electoral College that casts presidential votes. And Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics would be the first to agree -- so why do they keep publishing this as though it means anythihg? The piece goes on:

But pollsters have pointed to an apparent disconnect between state and national level polls, with state-level surveys increasingly shifting toward Trump while Harris seemingly holds steady at the national level. They have further observed two consistent patterns of national polling that appear to vary widely due to methodology.

. . . Polling averages currently show Trump poised to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona. Harris, for her part, holds narrow leads in Minnesota and Nevada. Should such results hold, Trump would handily carry the Electoral College, barring major upsets. The campaign released its own internal polling in a Thursday memo, showing Trump winning all seven of the key battleground states it tracked.

Which is jusst another way of saying the RCP average is meaningless. But the corporate media consensus for weeks has nevertheless been been that the race is a "stalemate", "razor thin", "essentially tied", "margin of error", and so forth. Here's the standard narrative at The Hill:

Vice President Harris’s slim national lead over former President Trump narrowed after the vice presidential debate last week, a survey published Monday found.

Harris is leading Trump by 2 percentage points, 48 percent to 46 percent, in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted after the debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

Yet again, the national lead, slim or fat, is meaningless, but the narrative keeps putting it in the lede. The piece goes on,

Polling after the Sept. 10 presidential debate, by comparison, suggested Harris was the winner, and her campaign has since pushed for a second debate against Trump. The former president has rejected the idea.

Her sharp performance, though, fell short of moving the needle in the key swing states needed to win in November. Nationally, Harris currently holds a 3.4 percentage point lead over Trump, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ aggregate polling, which has grown just slightly since the day before their debate, when she had a 3.2 percentage point lead.

So Harris is in the lead in a chimerical narional average, but she "fell short of moving the needle", another cliche. The Debate: Did It Move the Needle? Can a VP Candidate Actually Move the Needle? Bill O'Reilly: Did Kamala Harris Move The Needle? And so forth.

So we have the logical problem that the race is "deadlocked" in Kamala's favor, but she needs to "move the needle". Why, if she's ahead? We'll get sone sort of answer along the line that well, the polls had Clinton ahead by x in 2016, but Trump actually won by y, so we need to add a fudge factor to Trump's numbers, so the race isn't really "deadlocked" the way you might think it is if we use that word. So why do they use that word? Why do we need to add a fudge factor? That's when the professor decides he needs to answer some other student's urgent question, and we move on.

The first link at the top of this post cites contrarian pollster Richard Baris's objections to the consensus view:

“More polls today showing Harris down in keys states but also running way behind Clinton and Biden in another blue state. To the point I made yesterday, it's simply not possible for her to win the [popular vote] if she is running this poorly in NY, MD, NJ, CA, etc. Not possible math,” he wrote.

“I'm watching this being covered as a good thing for Harris. It's an absolute catastrophe for her,” Baris wrote, in response to Mason-Dixon/Telemundo data showing Harris leading Trump among California Hispanics 55% to 35%. Biden, by contrast, won that bloc 75% to 23%. Those figures mark a 32% swing in one of the state’s largest voting blocs toward Trump.

In other words, if Harris is losing so many of key Democrat constiutuencies -- labor, ethnics, Catholics, Jews, Latins, black men, and so forth, especially in populous blue states, but "the polls" say she's still getting a national majority, there's soething seriously wrong with "the polls", or as Baris puts it, "not possiblle math".

I'm increasingly convinced Trump is going to outperform significantly in this election.

Tim & Doug's Excellent Adventure

Tampon Tim and Doug went to a coffee shop, walked away from the counter without paying, and left Tim's daughter to inform the cashiers that a handler will be coming to pay with a credit card.

Just like every middle class person does lmfao.pic.twitter.com/a95EK7gyU0

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 9, 2024

A number of aggregators picked up the story yesterday of Second Dude Doug Emhoff and Tampon Tim Walz on some kind of joint campaign stop at the Otro Cafe in Phoenix, AZ. The focus was mostly on how they ordered drinks, didn't pay, and didn't leave a tip, with Walz's daughter forced to reassure the people at the counter that "someone" would soon make good the bill.

The whole context, though, had me scratching my head. The Otro Cafe is referred to in some of the stories as a "pastry shop". I looked it up on Tripadvisor, which says it supports Vegetarian friendly, Vegan options, and Gluten free. Is this a bro thing? I asked Wikipedia:

Bro culture is not defined consistently or concretely, but refers to a type of "fratty masculinity", predominantly white, associated with frayed-brim baseball hats, oxford shirts, sports team T-shirts, and boat shoes or sandals. NPR noted that bros could include people of color and women,

NPR identified four types of bros: dudely, jockish, preppy, and stoner-ish. In their description, dudely bros form close homosocial friendships in a group, jockish bros are defined by ability at team sports tempered by interest in alcohol, preppy bros wear "conservatively casual" clothes such as Abercrombie and Fitch and flaunt "social privilege", and stoner-ish bros may or may not use cannabis but speak in a relaxed fashion and exude the air of surfers.

. . . Oxford Dictionaries identify bros as those who use the word to refer to others, such as in the example of "don't tase me, bro", in which the taserer is not a bro, but the tased is.

. . . Since 2013, the term has been adopted by feminists and the media to refer to a misogynist culture within an organization or community. In a New York Magazine article in September 2013, Ann Friedman wrote: "Bro once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer. But it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men."

So it looks to me as though Tim and Doug's trip to the vegan-friendly pastry shop was in fact an example of bro-bonding, except that both Tim and Doug are exceptionally cheesy buffoons who are so uncomfortable in their own skins that they'd be incapable of manifesting any authentic frat-lodge preppy, dudely, jockizsh, or stoner-ish confidence or ease. They're both wannabes pure and simple.

In fact they're in Arizona, a place where there are many dude ranches. But this is some sort of a campaign stop in a battleground state -- the best I can conclude is that the Harris campaign has sent the two bro-wannabes out to get the dude ranch vote. And there seems to be a growing recognition that Kamala has a problem with men:

MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell said on Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling to resonate with White and Black male voters.

. . . "She's got such a big problem with men," Mitchell said, adding that support for Trump among that demographic could be underestimated.

, , , "I think is a great thing [sic]," said former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. "At this point, when everything matters, you have to take risks and people may make mistakes. It's worth it. Put them out there and have them doing a bunch of stuff."

So OK, Walz has been a disaster ever since his debate with Vance, while Dougie is turning out not to be the sort of modern male role model everyone thought he was. Gutfeld has been doing pregnant nanny jokes every night for weeks, and he's even begun to sneak in quick, sly references to slapping women in his latest monologues -- looks like they finally got those past Fox's lawyers.

But as Jen Psaki says, you have to take risks at this point. Put them out there and have them doing a bunch of stuff.

As the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump inches closer to decision day, Aspen continues to be a popular stopping point on the campaign fundraising trail.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is slated to arrive in Aspen on Friday, Harris’ campaign announced Tuesday.

The 59-year-old husband of Harris is also set to make appearances this week in Idaho and California. The Harris campaign confirmed Emhoff will make a reception stop in San Francisco on Friday before coming to Aspen later that day.

Well, I guess Dougie's still good for the vegan-friendly circuit, San Francisco and Aspen, maybe OK for the folks at the pastry shop, not so much for the male demographic, though. Not sure what the bossgirl will have Tim doing next.

More Allegations Surface Against Second Dude Doug Emhoff

Last week I looked at Second Dude Doug Emhoff's legal career and began to match it up with Kamala's rise in politics. One thing stood out. According to Wikipedia,

He opened his own firm with Ben Whitwell in 2000, which was acquired by Venable LLP in 2006. Emhoff became managing director of Venable's West Coast offices. . . . Emhoff joined DLA Piper as a partner in 2017, working at its Washington, D.C., and California offices. He earned $1.2 million per year as a partner of the law firm. Following the announcement that his wife would be Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 United States presidential election, Emhoff took a leave of absence from the firm. After the Biden–Harris ticket won, the campaign announced Emhoff would permanently leave DLA Piper before Inauguration Day to avoid conflict of interest concerns.

He married his second wife, Kamala, in 2014, while she was Attorney General of California. In 2016,she was elected to the US Senate as a senator from California. She assumed office in 2017, the same year Emhoff left Venable LLP and went to DLA Piper, where he stayed making $1.2 million a year until his marriage to Kamala became uncomfortable to that firm; he left permanently when Kamala was elected vice president in 2020.

Several things occurred to me last week. One was that DLA Piper didn't see any conflict when Kamala was a US senator -- in fact, they paid him $1.2 million a year precisely because he was married to a US senator. According to Wikipedia,

A 2012 survey by Major, Lindsey & Africa found that law firm partners' average annual compensation was $681,000 ($896,000 for equity partners, $335,000 for non-equity partners) and tended to go up based on number of years in the partnership[.]

So Emhoff, as best anyhone can tell, was a new partner at DLA Piper but earning at the top of the scale. Wikipedia prefaces its discussion of law firm partners with the statement, "In law firms, partners are primarily those senior lawyers who are responsible for generating the firm's revenue." It sounds as if DLA Piper was expecting Emhoff's connection with Kamala to pay off big, at least until, a few years later, it apparently started to make them nervous.

This brings us to the latest allegations against Emhoff, which date from his time at Venable LLP between 2006 and 2017. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Attorneys who worked with Doug Emhoff at his former firm Venable say he yelled expletives, held a men-only cocktail hour in the office, revoked work perks from women who didn't flirt with him, and took only young, attractive associates in a limousine to a ball.

A 2019 lawsuit also claimed sex discrimination by other partners in the LA office Emhoff ran, and that while engaged to Harris, he hired an 'unqualified' part-time model as a legal secretary 'because she was young, attractive and friendly with the powerful men in the office'.

. . . One senior former staffer claimed Emhoff 'bragged' about yelling 'get the f*** out of my office' to a female partner at the firm, later telling his top male colleagues that he had 'put her in her place'.

. . . 'What's worse was he bragged about it to the management at Venable and they were aghast. He's an a**hole. He told them how he "put her in her place". A misogynist, that's who does that.'

Although the story says Emhoff was promoted from Partner-in-Charge of Venable's LA office to West Coast Managing Director in 2015 after he married Kamala, then state attorney general, there seem to have been reasons for Emhoff to leave Venable two years later in 2017. On top of what are reported to have been continuing complaints of harassment and inappropriate behavior, I have a sense that even as the husband of the state attorney general and then a US senator, Emhoff wasn't bringing in the revenue the firm expected -- and this may have happened at DLA Piper as well, since all of a sudden, they saw a potential conflict of interest in his marriage to Kamala, when they hadn't seen one when they hired him, even though she was a US senator.

For starters, I suspect certain of Emhoff's senior colleagues were in fact "aghast" at his various escapades. Emhoff's apparent enabling of sexual harassment by his subordinates at the firm got them sued for it in 2019, after Emhoff had left. But I'll bet Emhoff had been wearing out his welcome at Venable for years, and his marriage to Kamala was, if anything, an attempt to maintain his standing there -- except I have a feeling that even his marrying the ditzy state attorney general never quite resulted in a windfall to the firm, and he was eased out notwithstanding. All of a sudden, his former colleagues are spilling the dirt. They couldn't turn down the opportunity, I would think, and they were happy to see him leave when he finally did.

I would guess the same applied to his brief tenure at DLA Piper: he led them to expect big things from his connection to Sen Harris that never quite paid out, and they suddenly discovered a conmflict of interest, even though they themselves had had great expectations from just the conflict Emhoff tried to sell them.

This just confirms my first impression of the guy -- above all, he's cheesy.

Yet More On Charleroi

An article in yesterday's City Journal fleshes out a litrtle more on the coordination between the federal government, NGOs, staffing agencies, and local power players that's behind the sudden migration of quasi-legal immigrants to places like Charleroi, PA, but it really doesn't add much that's new. First, there's the federal government:

[T]he White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.

The article then immediately skips to NGOs while only briefly recognizing that it's the federal government that's using the NGOs to pass through funding (less their skim), as well as to funnel the immigrants into federal programs:

The next link in the web [sic] is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.

I'd feel much more comfortable with pieces like this if the writers could avoid phrases like "link in the web". What other elementary defects are in their thought processes? But this does echo the questions other observers have had about who's paying for what in Springfield and Charleroi -- the immigrants somehow drive new cars, for instance, although they don't know how to drive. I think if I were the reporters writing this story, it would bother me a lot more than it bothers these.

Next are the staffing agencies:

A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines. While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work. . . . three staffing agencies—Wellington Staffing Agency, Celebes Staffing Services, and Advantage Staffing Agency—are key conduits for labor in the city. None have websites, advertise their services, or appear in job listings.

The agencies work closely with local sweatshop employers and slumlords, who often turn out to be the same people:

At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with approximately 1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line. . . . The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour.

The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. . . . The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce. A property search for David Barbe and his other business, DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets.

After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers. A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.”

The piece omits other issues, especially occupancy laws. A dozen people in a two-bedroom home seems out of line, but the reporters here didn't follow up. What are the occupancy limits in Charleroi? Has anyone tried to report the situation? What was the result? This isn't much different from the problem of Haitians driving cars they don't know how to drive in Springfield, with local law enforcement looking the other way. Who's behind this? City Journal talks about it only in general terms:

the benefits of mass migration seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers absorb the costs. No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent—just like the company towns from a century ago.

. . . The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes, the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities, nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by elite powers—the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps.

I don't understand the fatalism here. On one hand, Charleroi somehow can't revitalize itself on its own, but on the other, traffic laws, occupancy limits, and other local ordinances apparently aren't enforced, while federal laws on immigration either aren't enforced or bypassed by fiat -- and the writers at City Journal throw up their hands and say there's nothing they can do. Nothing, apparently, but blame Trump:

Former president Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light. As he told the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.”

It's all Trump's fault for bringing the whole thing up. Of course, that was something the journalists should have been doing before now, except they wouldn't have paid attention unless Trump brought it up. The thing I notice here, though, is how little actual effort the City Journal writers have put in to document much beyond what several amateur and part-time investigators have already revealed.

Who enforces the occupancy laws in Charleroi? Did the reporters try to interview anyone? How about the traffic laws? What does the police chief have to say? The mayor? I'd be ashamed to have my byline on this piece.

More Thoughts On The White House Baggie

Whatever the specifics of whose fingerprints or DNA might be on the baggie of cocaine discovered in the White House in summer 2023, as I noted yesterday, there's been a revival of interest in the case. I decided to go after the key questions not from the forensic evidence, which we may never learn, but from what we know about the nature of cocaine addiction. (I've never used it -- according to Wikipedia, the US cocaine boom started in the late 1970s, after I'd outgrown my undergraduate drug use in the 1960s).

As of July 7, 2023, I was already leaning in the direction that the baggie was Kamala's:

[Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino] made the point that "protectees", that is, the president, vice president, and members of their families, are escorted past all checkpoints by Secret Service special agents, in part because the agents carry firearms that wouldn't get past metal detectors. For others, the checkpoints include drug sniffing dogs.

But as Bongino suggests, the pool of likely suspects, assuming family members are the likeliest, expands beyond just Hunter. Vice president Harris and her husband can't be eliminated, and the vice president in particular has something of a cackling, party-girl persona.

. . . Others have suggested White House security insiders already know who brought the baggie in, just as both the US Navy and the Royal Navy knew what happened to the Titan submersible the moment it imploded. I'm leaning in that direction myself.

More than a year later, Bongino's post that I embedded yesterday reported

Whistleblower stated that promotions are now being handed out to agents with inside knowledge of the details of the investigation into the cocaine found at the White House. These promotions are believed to be in exchange for silence on the matter.

Whistleblower also states that that acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe is “under a lot of pressure” to “tie up loose ends” and to “destroy the cocaine evidence” before Trump gets back in office.

So this continues to confirm my theory that Secret Service protective details for both the First and Second Families have been fully aware of whose cocaine this was all along. But there are more implications here, as I noted on July 23, 2023:

[I]f the suspect is a protectee, which is to say Hunter himself, the mathematics of addiction say that someone like Hunter needs a lot more than a random baggie of cocaine to satisfy his habit. He needs near-industrial quantities of coke, and it just isn't worth his trouble to smuggle in a baggie at a time; the supply is too small and unreliable.

The Secret Service people say it's the protectees who are never searched, so logically, we would expect Hunter to bring his own drugs in anyhow. Why would he need a drop at all? That just doesn't make sense.

In that post, I went on to refer to comments to Jesse Watters by Jordan Belfort, the former cocaine addict and "Wolf of Wall Street", that

when you're in that mindset of an addict, you want to have little 'drop points' so you can kind of sneak in, take a quick hit, leave it there for safekeeping, and come back. So it was being stored somewhere.

This would be consistent with the theory of the speaker in the video I linked yesterday (who seems to be talking to the same people who are talking to Bongino):

Now, a man told Bolden that the cocaine was brought into the White House by a Kamala Harris staffer. The speaker explains that media blamed Hunter Biden for the incident, but some insiders knew that the VP's staff was involved.

. . . So it was Harris who brought the cocaine? No, but the cocaine was brought in for Harris. The one from the staff brought it. Clearly, some high-rating staffer," he added.

Although Bongino says that only protectees themselves and their families bypass the normal searches that include drug-sniffing dogs, I wonder if certain close stafffers like the so-called "body man" or "body woman", who attend to the protectees' closest personal needs, might accompany the protectee in the envelope that bypasses the checks. So I'm leaning toward a combination of the Jordan Belfort and Dan Bongino theories, with the anonymous commentator's remarks thrown in: someone heavily addicted to cocaine can't just rely on a single baggie. And in the post I linked above, I asked why Hunter would need a drop -- he's got a stash in the family quarters where he can get to it any time.

On the other hand, a vice preaident who needs an ongoing supply to get through the day can't just pull it out in a meeting -- it needs to be stashed somewhere, in a spot where it might be discreetly picked up on the way to the restroom facilities, for instance. So all this seems at least consistent with the idea that it was Kamala's -- Hunter wouldn't be wasting his time in security council meetings, for instance, but Kamala might, while Hunter wouldn't need a drop in a more public area, but Kamala might.

Still, as the saying goes, two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead. I would guess that too many people already know whose cocaine that was in the baggie, and that info has reached Trump already. Strategic promotions aren't going to be much help at this point.

This Is Too Good Not To Notice

BOMBSHELL: A recent report claims it was Kamala Harris, not Hunter Biden, who brought cocaine to the White House in 2023

Is this legit? pic.twitter.com/SFNfdbY6V4

— Futurist™ (@americasgreat) October 3, 2024

Let me start out being perfectly clear: these allegations are completely unsubstantiated, and the video has the air of something produced to look like a James O'Keefe-style undercover video, but made in some cheap studio. So take it with heavy skepticism. Even so, it has a certain ring of truth.

This post at MSN introduces and summarizes the video:

Independent journalist James Bolden posted a video on social media, showing a man claiming Kamala Harris is somehow linked to the Hunter Biden cocaine scandal. Without providing any evidence, the unidentified individual said President Biden's son took fall for the incident. Neither the president nor the First Son have reacted to the newly surfaced clip yet.

. . . Now, a man told Bolden that the cocaine was brought into the White House by a Kamala Harris staffer. The speaker explains that media blamed Hunter Biden for the incident, but some insiders knew that the VP's staff was involved. The scandal eventually led to a heated conversation between President Biden and Harris, he added.

. . . However, there is no concrete evidence to prove this theory.

The story quotes the unidentified speaker in the video:

"We either blame Hunter or put the blame where it rightfully belonged on Harris and her staff, which, you know, that would have destroyed Biden's campaign. Everybody knows that Hunter's a drug addict, but if people got wind that...Harris' work was partaking in the best-given use. This would cause a major problem. So it was Harris who brought the cocaine? No, but the cocaine was brought in for Harris. The one from the staff brought it. Clearly, some high-rating staffer," he added.

Last July 3, I said,

[M]y instinct says the Secret Service, the FBI, the DC police, and whoever else know, for instance, whose baggie of coke was in the cubby outside the White House Sit Room last summer, and it wasn't Hunter's. Frankly, Kamala's speech is just a little too nasal for it not to have been hers. I would guess the deep state is sitting on quite a bit that could be used as leverage. . .

This theory is indirectly borne out by a tweet from former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino a week ago:

BREAKING 🚨
With more details on my show at 11a on Rumble.

A Secret Service whistleblower has reached out to me with damning information about the ongoing White House cocaine scandal.

Whistleblower stated that promotions are now being handed out to agents with inside knowledge…

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) September 30, 2024

This points back to the vetting problem I brought up in yesterday's post. Second Dude Doug Emhoff, whether he actually slapped his date at the Nice film festival in 2012, was clearly familiar with the jet-set partying lifestyle, and specifics aside, the Daily Mail had full documentation that he and his date were drinking heavily at a party they left at 3:00 AM. You have to be pretty cranked up to do this sort of thing in your late 40s, and I very much doubt that booze was all that was involved.

But here's another question: she married Dougie, a high-powered attorney, in 2014, when she was California Attorney General, an office she held from 2011 to 2017, when she took office as a US senator. Dougie remained a high powered attorney until Kamala was elected vice president, when it was belatedly determined that his position as a high-powered attorney would be a conflict of interest for her. Apparently nobody ever asked if Dougie's position was a conflict of interest while she was state attorney general, nor a US senator.

In fact, once I started to look at Dougie's career in more detail last week, I started to ask myself how someone living his cranked-up lifestyle could contiinue in the upper echelons of the legal profession, and it only dawned on me just the other day that he kept his jobs in the later phase of his career precisely because he was married to the state attorney general and then a US senator. In other words, hire Dougie or his firm, your case will have a sympathetic ear.

This, of course, was the Biden family frammis as well. But it's worth considering that the Biden frammis, with Hunter as a key ingredient, had to be assiduously covered up in the 2020 campaign, and its elements were a problem for Joe's reelection until his cognitive condition overtook everything else. But nobody has even begun to look at how Dougie's position represented a major conflict for Kamala in her career as state attorney general and US senator.

It's a major question how she and Dougie were able to bypass any sort of conventional vetting in the runup to her selection as Joe's running mate. This would have included, but not been limited to, their likely heavy cocaine use throughout their marriage.

I've Been Writing About Permission Slips All Year

Back in February, I first brought up the UK constitutional crisis of 1936, in which, although elites were fully aware of Edward VIII's intent to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson, the UK press censored itself and didn't mention it until remarks by an obscure Church of England bishop were interpreted as giving "permission" to cover the story -- and Edward abdicated ten days later. Joe Biden's cognitive decline, on the other hand, has sparked a similar constitutional crisis, but unlike Edward's, which was resolved with remarkable speed, this one is ongoing, and it's been marked by only incremental "permission slips".

The most recent has involved Tim Walz, who's been controversial ever since his designation as Kamala's running mate -- but Kamala's own story this year has been just a sub-plot to the overall crisis, which has nominally been about Joe Biden's cognitive ability. Following Joe's June 27 debate performance -- which amounted to another "permission slip" for the press gingerly to take up the issue -- Speaker Emerita Pelosi attempted to bypass the 25th Amendment, which designates the vice president as the leader of a cabinet-based effort to declare a president incapable of serving, by personally bullying Joe into withdrawing as a candidate for reelection in favor of Kamala, which solved precisely nothing.

Tim Walz's performance in the October 1 debate has simply reignited the same consitutional crisis, which in fact isn't exclukively about Joe's cognitive abilities -- it's also about Kamala's, but the permission slip to talk about that hasn't been signed yet. As I noted the other day, Trump simply told the truth when he said there was "something missing" there, too, and respectable media has been raising the Harris-Walz question as gingerly as it can; Politico is treating it as some kind of vetting glitch:

Walz himself raised some of these issues with Harris and her team during the vice presidential vetting process, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Harris’ circle, for example, knew of Walz’s 1995 DUI arrest when he was a school teacher in Nebraska, despite Walz’s past campaign and official staff trying to downplay and in some cases outright mislead reporters about the circumstances of the arrest.

Harris’ vetting team called some of Walz’s former House colleagues and other allies to check out that episode, his drinking habits and temperament since then, according to two other people familiar with the calls at the time.

The subtext here, although Politico won't say it outright, is that Walz shouldn't have made it through the vetting process, which is another way of saying his candidacy is a big mistake. But what was the cause of this mistake? This was Harris's call, start to finish. And as someone wrote in The Hill right after his selection:

When I heard that Vice President Harris had selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, the first thought to hit me was that of revered baseball manager Casey Stengel: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

This is an ever-so-oblique reference to Kamala, of course, and it's just an early confirmation of Trump's recent assessment -- there's something missing with Kamala, and everybody knows it. So the consitutional crisis is still with us, it doesn't stop with Joe, who is still in office anyhow, but there was something wrong with how Kamala was vetted back in 2020. Look at what's been coming out about Second Dude Doug, just as an example. Something's missing there, too.

But this leads us to a question of what caused Kamala to become vice president if, as is gradually becoming clear, she's no more capable than Joe and would never have been capable of exercising her respnsibilities under the 25th Amendment. Well, she was selected by Joe as his running mate (some would say as his insurance policy), and the vetting process was just as deficient in her case as it was with Walz. Doesn't this raise the question of whether there was something wrong with the 2020 election? In other words, isn't the ongoing constitutional crisis something bigger than just Joe Biden and the 25th Amendment?

This brings us to Sen Vance, who won the October 1 debate in effect by confirming Walz's own unfitness for office:

Senator JD Vance repeated a tired Republican lie from 2020 — that Donald Trump actually won the election, despite all evidence to the contrary — and then doubled down on it during a recent recorded encounter.

On Thursday, comedian Jason Selvig posted a clip of an interaction he had with Vance on X. During their brief encounter, Selvig repeatedly asked Vance if Trump won in 2020. The settled issue of who won the 2020 election came up again after Vance told viewers who tuned into Tuesday’s vice presidential debate that he would have helped Trump carry out his “alternative electors” scheme to maintain power in the White House.

“Who won the 2020 election? Could you just answer? Did Donald Trump win?” Selvig asked.

“Yes,” Vance replied.

After asking Vance to confirm that he was saying Trump won in 2020, Vance replied “Yep.”

What Vance, who is nothing if not smart, just said there was clear: the current constitutional crisis stems from the 2020 election. The permission slip we need is the ability to open the Overton Window to talk about it.