GRAY LADY DOWN: Meet the New York Times Source Who Claims Kamala Harris’s Late Mother Told Her That Her Daughter Worked at McDonald’s. She’s a Harris Campaign Surrogate Who’s Visited the White House.

A New York Times report on Sunday that equated skepticism about Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim to have worked at McDonald’s with birtherism was based in large part on a source—a friend of Harris’s—who said that Harris’s late mother told her about the job.

“Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain,” the paper said. “Her campaign and a friend say she did.”

Meet Wanda Kagan, Harris’s high school classmate and longtime girlfriend, whom the Times described as “a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal.” Kagan, per the Times, “said that Ms. Harris’s mother, who died in 2009, had told Ms. Kagan about the summer job years ago.”

What the Times did not tell its readers is that Kagan is a full-throated Harris supporter who has appeared alongside the vice president at several campaign events. She also served as a surrogate for her old friend on television during the Democratic National Convention.

“It’s an emotional and chilling ride, and I’m just overwhelmed with happiness for my friend, and I’m happy to be alive to be able to witness her now fighting for the people of America,” Kagan told MSNBC during the Democratic convention in August.

Kagan is the first living person to step forward in the seven weeks since a Free Beacon investigation first raised doubts about Harris’s claim to say that Harris worked at McDonald’s. Kagan’s claim, that she heard about McDonald’s from Harris’s mother, cannot be verified because Harris’s mother is dead. To date, the Harris campaign itself has not produced a single person with firsthand knowledge of Harris’s McDonald’s job, other than Harris herself.

Hey, you know has gone on the record with a story that’s damning to the Harris campaign?

But then, to get back to the Times, as “As Byron York wrote on September 24th of 2008, “Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase ‘God damn America.’” Flashforward to the middle of 2021:

And then to the next year: Almost Two Years after 2020 Election, the New York Times Discovers Hunter Biden Laptop and Corruption Investigations Are Real.

Clearly, this is a paper that takes its story vetting seriously. Or perhaps there’s another reason why its slow-walks news that’s damning to the DNC. Just perhaps.

TOOK THEM THAT LONG, HUH? Report: Democrat Donors Aware of Biden’s ‘Frighteningly Awful’ Cognitive Issues As Early as June 2023.

Author and Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward’s word is often considered sacrosanct in leftist/media circles. But he’s thrown them for a bit of a loop in a new book called “War,” released October 15th, which gives fresh insight into what some Democrat movers and shakers knew about Biden’s cognitive issues and when they knew it.

In the book, Woodward quotes some donors on and off the record talking about how Biden looked and sounded “frighteningly awful” when they saw him, with others comparing him to “your 87-year-old senile grandfather” who complimented women’s eyes as he walked around the room:

The first fundraiser hosted by Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft, at his home in Los Gatos on June 19 [2023], was attended by 38 guests, including some of the most serious Democratic donors in [Silicon Valley]. The event raised $2.7 million for Biden’s re-election fund. Guests, however, said that Biden was “frighteningly awful.” It was “like your 87-year-old senile grandfather” wandering around the room, saying to women guests, “your eyes are so beautiful.”

[…]

And after a small “meet the president” fundraiser attended by about 20 people at the home of philanthroposts Susie and Michael Gelman in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on June 27, 2023, guests described their interactions with Biden as “painful.”

“He never completed a sentence ” said Bill Reichblum , cofounder and president of Liberties Journal Foundation, who attended with his wife and father-in-law, a former U.S. ambassador to Romania. “He would start to talk about something, jump somewhere else. He told the same story three times in exactly the same way and it meandered so much. … It was striking.

For anyone not invested in keeping Joe’s mortal remains propped up, his decline was visible years earlier (and like Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes in the 1990s, the DNC-MSM all knew about Biden’s decline as early as 2019, but chose not to report it.)

I ran my first “Trunalimunumaprzure!” headline near the end of the 2020 election. Prior to that, for years, my recurring headline for Joe’s innumerable gaffes was “Super Gaffe-O-Matic ’76,” a takeoff on Dan Akroyd’s classic Saturday Night Live TV commercial parody. But it was obvious by the 2020 election cycle that the pilot light was beginning to dim on Biden, which is why I retired that headline, with my first reference to the T-word on October 31^st, 2020, in reference to this infamous moment, in which brain, mouth and teleprompter reading skills all failed miserably for Biden.

And now we’re in the Schrodinger’s President phase of the Weimar Republic:

Flashbacks:

● Documented: Biden’s memory loss dates to 2015, 25th Amendment territory.

● The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

VDH: A Media Beyond Caricature.

CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024.

Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why?

Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop (then in the possession of the FBI) was authentic—and authentically damning to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.

Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.

Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.

Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.

More recently, CBS got caught selectively editing the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cutting and pasting an incoherent Harris response to lessen her embarrassing word salad. And in a subsequent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the network once again edited and pruned his answers, but in contrast, on this occasion, to make him seem far less persuasive.

In yet another current CBS interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, network host Tony Dokoupil honestly questioned Coates about his new, one-sided, anti-Israeli book The Message. The result was that the left-wing icon Coates was almost immediately revealed to be abjectly ignorant of the Middle East, unapologetically biased, and completely uninterested in any viewpoint other than his own partisan prejudices.

Yet what followed proved yet another network embarrassment. An internal CBS division with the eerie Orwellian title of “CBS News Race and Culture Unit” attacked Dokoupil for not providing “context” for Coates’s self-condemnatory and embarrassing interview. The subtext was that CBS, under pressure from woke zealots, simply disowned Dokoupil and sought to subject him to correct thought training. His apparent crime was not insisting on different—softball—journalistic standards for woke black authors like Coates. In other words, CBS blamed Dokoupil for revealing Coates to be a fool on the air.

The network further diminished its eroding reputation yet again through the unprofessional conduct of recent moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan during the J.D. Vance/Tim Walz vice presidential debate.

But it’s not just CBS; NBC are fully onboard Team Kamala:

And prior to that, look who moderated her “predetermined” take no new questions “town hall:”

And of course, the entire DNC-MSM has gone all-in this week on its roadshow version of The Producers, as Steve noted earlier:

And then they see trendlines such as these and pretend to not know why they’re occurring:

SISTER OF DECEASED SOLDIER BLASTS THE ATLANTIC FOR LATEST ANTI-TRUMP FABRICATIONS:

“As someone who was present in the room with President Trump during that meeting on December 4, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice,” Patel’s statement to Goldberg said. “In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”

Theo Wold, yet another official who was actually in the room came out publicly to debunk Goldberg’s claims, saying “[Mayra] was poised and confident in advocating for her sister then and she’s right again today: The Atlantic hit piece is a lie.”

“I was at President Trump’s meeting with the Guillén family because I assisted with translation that day. President Trump was genuinely concerned about Vanessa Guillén and appalled by the tragedy the Guillén Family were enduring,” said Wold, former acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice and deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. “For example, President Trump had zero interest in the cameras. He met with the Guillén family privately for twenty minutes and offered the press gaggle solely if it would assist them in honoring Army Specialist Guillén and raising awareness about her case.”

“He even told them that day that the press are vipers,” Wold concluded. “Boy was President Trump right.”

The Trump campaign also denied the “f-cking Mexican” comment, which was included in Goldberg’s diatribe: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election,” Alex Pfeiffer, a Trump campaign adviser, said.

Goldberg then turned to more unnamed sources, apparently “two people who heard [Trump] say,” “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Pfeiffer once again denied the comment: “This is absolutely false. President Trump never said this.”

And right on cue, Kamala repeats Goldberg’s smear:

Unexpectedly — every Republican candidate for president has been compared to Hitler by Democrats since 1944.

UPDATE: Desperate Much? Yes, Kamala Harris Really Held a Press Conference Just to Call Donald Trump ‘Hitler.’

MORE: Barry gets the answer to his question:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Democrats Explain Trump Was Going To Be Hitler During His First Term, But He Forgot.

Related: You should see all the times leading up to his first term that he forgot to be Hitler as well! Donald Adolf Hitler Trump throughout the years.

WARREN BUFFETT REVEALS HE WON’T BACK ANY CANDIDATE IN 2024 AFTER FAKE INSTAGRAM POST: “That stands in stark contrast to 2016, when he endorsed Hillary Clinton over Trump, as well as his backing of Barack Obama during his 2008 and 2012 runs.”

Buffett also apparently didn’t endorse a candidate in 2020, either.

PENNSYLVANIA MCDONALD’S FRANCHISE RETAINS SECURITY AFTER TRUMP’S VISIT LEADS TO THREATS:

The owner of a Pennsylvania McDonald’s that went made news over the weekend after former President Donald Trump visited and served up fries to customers has retained private security following threats made to the location. Trump’s visit, during which he was seen working the fry station and serving customers at the drive-thru in Bucks County, attracted both attention and threats, prompting the franchise owner, Derek Giacomantonio, to take action.

Jim Worthington, a key organizer of Trump’s visit and leader of Pennsylvania’s delegation at the Republican National Convention, told the Daily Caller that the McDonald’s has received threatening phone calls and social media messages after the former president’s appearance. In response, Giacomantonio, who had already hired private security ahead of the event, retained their services to protect his employees.

Stay safe — Tim Walz supporters could act like Tim Walz supporters yet again:

DISPATCHES FROM BIZARRO WORLD FAHRENHEIT 451: Electric emergency vehicle fire burns down fire station, destroys millions of dollars in equipment.

YOU’RE REALLY GOING TO NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: A short list of things and people Democrats have told you are Nazis and/or Hitler.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The Atlantic’s newest hit piece on Trump is why we can’t trust media.

The first thing to remember is that Goldberg could literally make up any quote from an alleged “anonymous” source, and he would face no repercussions. No major outlet will challenge the veracity of his shoddy work, which breaks numerous journalistic norms, because his accusations are aimed at the right target. The media, after all, is now the democracy-saving business.

The owner of the famed magazine certainly doesn’t give one wit about its integrity either. The Atlantic, which loses tens of millions of dollars every year, is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who isn’t worried about the magazine’s 164-year tradition of “challenging assumptions and pursuing truth.” Rather, as she explained to her ”close” and “genuine” friend, Vice President Kamala Harris, at an event not long ago, she wants to lift up “cultural narratives” that will create “a more just and equal society.”

Goldberg’s 2024 narrative is suffering from the same problems his 2020 “suckers and losers” hit piece did. Anonymous sources make claims that a bunch of on-the-record people contradict. There’s a 0% chance that any reputable newspaper, 10-20 years ago, would have run a story about a president demeaning fallen American servicemen based on an anonymous source without any corroboration.

Read the whole thing.

TWO KARINE JEAN-PIERRES IN ONE!

Shot: Karine Jean-Pierre Clarifies President Biden Didn’t Really Mean Trump Had to Be Locked Up.

—Twitchy, today.

Chaser: White House Press Secretary Says Biden Thinks Trump Is a ‘Fascist.’

Thus invalidating her previous comments, and worse, keeping the Bat-Signal flashing for more wannabe assassins.

LOOK AT THEM GO:

On October 22nd at 6:54AM, Benjamin Glutton claimed it was Republicans making the Trump McDonald's appearance a three-day story. Let's see what's happened *just* since his claim yesterday. 🧵 https://t.co/XhSrvBvTnA

— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) October 23, 2024

LISTEN SUG, DON’T FORGET TO SAY YOUR PRAYERS: The Critical Drinker on Threads (Video).

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: 10 More Images Of Trump That ‘Newsweek’ Is Warning Might Be A.I.-Generated. “Despite what this image may have you believe, Newsweek cannot confirm that Donald Trump is Batman.”

Actually, this is one we can confirm. Trump is indeed Batman:

NO WORD YET IF THEY’RE ALSO UPGRADING TO WINDOWS ME: San Francisco Muni Will Spend $212M to Move Train Control Off of Floppy Disks.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: ‘Frighteningly awful’ Biden struggled to complete sentences for over a year before dropping out, book reveals: ‘Like your senile grandfather.’

Joe Biden struggled to remember basic words or even stand up at campaign fundraisers over a year prior to dropping out of the presidential race, with witnesses describing him as “frighteningly awful and a “senile grandfather” Bob Woodward’s bombshell book “War” reveals.

At a Silicon Valley fundraiser in September 2023 guests were extremely concerned by Biden’s appearance as the then-presidential candidate struggled to remain upright and only took two pre-arranged questions.

“He could not wait to sit down,” a donor at the event, hosted by Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, recounted.

Despite bringing a stack of note cards with pre-written answers, the 81-year-old president struggled to stay on point and frequently meandered in his speech, attendees claimed.

Attendees said “[He was] like your 87-year-old senile grandfather,” and called him “frighteningly awful.”

At a different event at the New York City Four Season in June 2023, Biden could not recall the word for “veteran,” and pleaded with the crowd for help describing a person who has “served in the military,” Woodward writes.

But what did the vice president know, and when did she know it?

GRAY LADY DOWN: Meet the New York Times Source Who Claims Kamala Harris’s Late Mother Told Her That Her Daughter Worked at McDonald’s. She’s a Harris Campaign Surrogate Who’s Visited the White House.

TWO CBS NEWS IN ONE!

Shot: Fake news headlines are going viral. Here’s what to know.

—CBS News headline, yesterday.

Chaser:

RIP: Los Angeles Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela dies at age 63.

TV REPORTER STRUCK BY BULLET FRAGMENT AT CAMPAIGN EVENT FOR JOSH HAWLEY’S OPPONENT:

A Kansas City TV news reporter was hit by a piece of shrapnel Tuesday at a campaign event for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Lucas Kunce.

According to NBC affiliate KSHB, reporter Ryan Gamboa was covering the event at a gun range near Kansas City.

Kunce was firing an AR-15 style weapon at the time Gamboa was struck. A piece of shrapnel ricocheted off a metal target and hit the reporter’s arm. Kunce was later seen wrapping a bandage around Gamboa’s injured arm.

* * * * * * * * *

Republican incumbent Josh Hawley responded to the incident with a post on social media platform X, saying “I condemn all acts of violence against reporters and call on Kunce to never shoot another one.”

Great moments in shooting sports:

First Dick Cheney, now Kunce. What is it with Kamala’s endorsements and shooting incidents? Or as Doug Powers joked on Twitter, “This is why they didn’t give Tim Walz a gun that was loaded.”

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, this story is catnip to the London Daily Mail: Democrat accidentally ‘SHOOTS’ reporter with an AR-15 at campaign event.

The last two paragraphs explain Kunce’s sudden need for all of the commando cosplay: “Kunce won’t have any easy time trying to oust Hawley, who is seeking a second term in the U.S. Senate. An Emerson College/The Hill poll from September shows Hawley with 51 percent support to Kunce’s 40 percent.”

MORE: Bullet dodged, perhaps quite literally!

THIS REMAKE OF MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR IS EVEN WORSE THAN THE FIRST VERSION: We Are All on the Bus.

A single usage of “star-studded” was simply not enough to portray the majesty of a Kamala Harris campaign event with Oprah Winfrey, according to a Sept. 20 article in The Washington Post. “A star-studded online rally designed to showcase the enthusiasm and energy behind Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign turned somber as host Oprah Winfrey introduced the mother of a woman who died after waiting for health care in a state that has banned most abortions,” the report began. Several paragraphs later, readers learned that the event kicked off with “a star-studded opening as Winfrey called out other celebrities who were joining virtually—Jennifer Lopez, Bryan Cranston, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Meryl Streep among them.” The average age of the aforementioned stars is 64, once Oprah is factored in.

After leaving the undignifying grind of daily television way back in 2011, Oprah has remained at the rarefied upper summit of senior cultural figures, where she continues to embody national conscience and moral authority. She is the Eleos of the American Olympus, dispenser of compassion and mercy at the steep price of a full and honest public reckoning. Tim Walz, who has repeatedly stretched the truth about his military career and his travels in China, would have been an awesome Oprah guest. The same goes for Walz’s boss, who during her four months as a presidential candidate has carefully evaded any hazardous unscripted moments with the press. In the midst of their breathless coverage of a fake Oprah interview, The Washington Post writers—the article somehow carries the credits of two reporters—were too awestruck or subservient to note its obvious fakeness.

Would it really make that much of a difference if the paper took some other, less fawning approach, or showed even the slightest bit of skepticism about an overly stage-managed Democrat’s internet pageant of Clinton-era celebrities? In The Boys on the Bus, the classic 1972 study of that year’s campaign press, Rolling Stone writer Tim Crouse recounted the media’s powerlessness, and its interrelated lack of self-awareness and basic curiosity, in the face of a Nixon-level image-making operation. Today The Boys on the Bus is often remembered as a nostalgic chronicle of the fading glory days of American journalism. But it is really about the political media’s discovery that it might not really matter that much—that it isn’t a mighty tribune of democratic accountability, but a submissive player in someone else’s drama.

The media of the 1960s and 1970s at least pretended occasionally to have the aura of the penumbra of being objective. Beginning with the 2008 election (and arguably the preceding election), that’s all been entirely abandoned:

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-ASSESSMENT:

Barack Obama: "I don't understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter." pic.twitter.com/OWj3uicQ1o

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 22, 2024

Yes, how indeed? As Jon Gabriel explored at the beginning 2017: President Obama’s Disastrous Record on Race.

On Election Day 2008, many Democrats welcomed a new post-racial America. The hideous blight of slavery and Jim Crow could never be forgotten, but our first African-American President would in some small way help atone for those sins and ultimately transcend them. Even Republicans shared the emotions of Grant Park, where thousands crying elderly blacks finally saw that America could elect a person of color.

Despite these bipartisan hopes, the nation is more racially obsessed than it has been in 25 years. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 63 percent of Americans think race relations are “generally bad.” Shortly after Obama took office, that number was 22 percent. In the same time period, those who think race relations are “generally good” plummeted from 66 percent to 32 percent.

Of course, Obama fans assert that this increase in racial division is due to white contempt for a black president. This is illogical since months after he took office, the American people thought racial harmony was higher than it had ever been. So what changed?

Watching Ferguson, MO go up in flames, I ironically remarked, “My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.” Little did I know how many times people would republish that line in the years that followed.

Eric Garner’s death created racial unrest in New York City. Baltimore was racked with days of violence following Freddie Gray’s death. Five officers were murdered by a black separatist in Dallas. Other law enforcement officers were ambushed in Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Mississippi. The police-involved shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile sparked more violent protests in New York City, Chicago, St. Paul, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere. In each case, the major media misreported the facts, stoked the literal fires, and characterized the rampages as “mostly peaceful.”

* * * * * * * * *

Before getting into politics, Barack Obama was a community organizer. This anodyne term was created by Chicago leftist Saul Alinsky who created the position to “rub raw the sores of discontent.” Many thought Obama’s moderate sounding speeches meant he had tossed Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in the dustbin. Instead, upon entering the White House, Obama created Organizing for Action, which has trained 5 million Americans in Alinsky tactics.

Occupy Wall Street, Wisconsin’s anti-Walker protests, and Black Lives Matter didn’t arise of their own accord. They were the bitter fruit intentionally cultivated by OfA.

Which is why we now have a nearly annual riots in America. Or as Gabriel wrote in June: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

UPDATE: In accordance with the prophecy:

TULSI GABBARD JOINS GOP:

As Glenn noted when Gabbard headlined CPAC in 2022, “Hey, she got more Democratic delegates than Kamala. And this is more evidence of the political realignment that’s going on.”

‘NEW ANONYMOUS HORSES**T JUST DROPPED:’ Pathetic Atlantic Anti-Trump Hit Piece Gets Absolutely Wrecked.

Related:

On the left: I sent Atlantic a comment saying President Trump “absolutely did not say that,” referring to the alleged comments about Ms. Guillen they printed.

On the right: Atlantic translated that comment to “didn’t hear Trump say it.”

Treat this dishonest piece accordingly. pic.twitter.com/pM1o1c9fEm

— Ben Williamson (@_WilliamsonBen) October 22, 2024

As Ben Shapiro notes:

It's election time again, so that means it's also Jeffrey Goldberg Unverified Trash From Anonymous Sources Time™! Barack Obama's favorite stenographer is nothing if not predictable. pic.twitter.com/VJLxYxUQrR

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 22, 2024

Flashback to 2014, when in order to prop up Obama’s base, Goldberg claimed that a” senior Obama administration official recently described” Benjamin Netanyahu as “chickenshit,” using his patented anonymous sources technique of inventing timely quotes.

UPDATE: Mr. Goldberg’s Profession.

VOTE ACCORDINGLY: Kamala Harris Once Suggested It ‘Would Be Great’ To Ban All Gun Ownership.

Related: Kamala Flip Flops on Fracking Pledge Just Weeks Before Polling Day.

Combine those issues and: Houston? She Has a Problem. “Perhaps we’ll get surprised by the results, but this looks like a very bizarre campaign strategy. Harris is losing where she needs to win and campaigning where she doesn’t as the clock runs out. I’d bet this gets a big mention in the post-mortems after November 5 if the current trends hold up.”