SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

WHAA..? – FROM THE POLITICO:   Joe Biden is at the top of the internal short list Hillary Clinton’s transition team is preparing for her pick to be secretary of state, a source familiar with the planning tells POLITICO.  This would be the first major Cabinet candidate to go public for a campaign that’s insisted its focus remains on winning the election, and perhaps the most central choice for a potential president who was a secretary of state herself.  Neither Clinton, nor her aides have yet told Biden. According to the source, they’re strategizing about how to make the approach to the vice president, who almost ran against her in the Democratic primaries but has since been campaigning for her at a breakneck pace all over the country in these final months.  "He'd be great, and they are spending a lot of time figuring out the best way to try to persuade him to do it if she wins,” said the source familiar with the transition planning.  I have no idea what the thinking behind this would be.  Appease Obama?  Appoint a figurehead so Hillary can be her own secretary of state?  Biden has been wrong on every major foreign-policy issue of our time.  Maybe Hillary believes it will take Joe almost four years to find the State Department.

SICKENING – FROM THE HILL:   A woman is claiming that Justice Clarence Thomas groped her when she was a young scholar in 1999, an allegation the justice denies.  Moira Smith claims Thomas squeezed her on the buttocks several times at a dinner party when she was a Truman Foundation Scholar, according to the National Law Journal, which first reported the allegations.  In a statement through a Supreme Court spokeswoman, Thomas denied Smith's allegations.   “This claim is preposterous and it never happened,” the spokeswoman said.  The woman making the charge is a Democratic Party activist (shock).  The timing is suspicious, to put it mildly.  She has also made similar charges against men in the past.  Justice Thomas has a long record of working with women, like law clerks, in private surroundings.  There has never been a charge against him in the years he's been on the Court.  Obviously, I can't say absolutely that it never happened, but the story is wobbly on many levels.

THE WONDERFUL FOLKS WHO GIVE YOU THE NEWS – FROM AP:   SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (AP) — Donald Trump repeatedly rages that the media is biased against him, putting claims of press prejudice at the center of his campaign for president. Most voters — and not just those who are backing the Republican nominee — agree with him, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.  Overall, 56 percent of likely voters say the media is biased against Trump, just 5 percent say it's biased in his favor and 37 percent say coverage is mostly balanced.  Eighty-seven percent of Trump's supporters see the media as biased against him, and even Hillary Clinton's supporters are more likely to see bias against Trump than bias in his favor, 30 percent to 8 percent. Sixty percent of Clinton's supporters see no bias in either direction.  The people are catching on.  The mainstream media is a cheering squad for the Democratic Party.

October 27,  2016