DID YOU HEAR ABOUT BIDEN’S REAL MEETING WITH AN ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER? President Joe Biden has talked recently of a meeting he claims to have had with former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz provides “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey once often said:

“Twice since the Israeli war with Hamas began, Joe Biden falsely claimed that he met with Golda Meir just before the 1967 Six-Day War. However, Biden’s story was a lie. Levi Eshkol was Prime Minister until Feb. 1969, when he had a fatal heart attack. Golda Meir became PM a month later, in March 1969, a year and 8 months after the Six-Day War. President Biden got his law degree in 1968 and was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1969, almost two years after the Six-Day War.”

But Biden did actually meet with an Israeli Prime Minister, but it was not a pleasant meeting, as Dunetz explains.

HOW MANY WAYS CAN US FUND ITS ENEMIES? House subcommittee hears all about the many ways foreign criminal and terrorists hackers, many linked to China and other U.S. adversaries, fraudulently obtain billions of dollars in federal benefit programs intended to provide COVID relief.

REMEMBER THAT SECRET CHINESE BIOLAB IN CALIFORNIA? You won’t find a more in-depth reporting on what was really going on there and who was behind it than this report from the Epoch Times.

JOE BIDEN, MEET ALI AKBAR VELAYATI: You are President of the United States. Velayati is a close adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. You need to know that the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports the Velayati told Hamas leaders in a Monday meeting in Tehran that the Jewish state “will be gone soon and the Palestinian nation will be victorious in the final battle.” This is one tiny sliver of the massive evidence that Iran is behind everything Hamas does, including murdering Israeli men and women in their beds, beheading infants, and making hostages of elderly Jews who survived the Holocaust.

HOMELAND SECURITY CLOCK TICKING ON MAYORKAS: The Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) who has repeatedly claimed the U.S. border with Mexico is “secure” and “closed” has until Friday to cough up documents House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) has been demanding since June. If the run-around and bureaucratic BS doesn’t end by Friday COB, according to The Epoch Times, there almost certainly will be subpoenas and it won’t just be one for Mayorkas; there will also be subpoenas for subordinates.

The documents in question concern the cyber-security and lack thereof of that CBP One cell phone app that Mayorkas told Congress in July “cut out” the Mexican drug cartels from the process of scheduling individuals seeking to schedule entrance from Northern Mexico into the U.S. at a port of entry.

Committee investigators have reason to believe the cartels figured out how to hack the app and use it to add yet another income stream from the chaos at the border. There are also huge concerns that the cartels are partnering with terrorist outfits to help them infiltrate highly-trained operatives into this country who don’t show up on the government’s multiple terrorist watch-lists.

YES, PLEASE! REPLACE THE ‘CIVIL’ SERVICE! If you read nothing else today or this week, take the few minutes required to read Glenn’s Substack column on “Rethinking the Civil Service.” If you worry about the intrusive Deep State or the oppressive regulatory power of the Administrative State, the heart of both are the 2.1 million career civil servants working as the executive branch bureaucracy.

“The modern civil service system (post-Pendleton Act) – like so many calamities of the 20^th Century – sprang from the brain of Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist before he was president, who wrote of the importance of separating politics from administration.  In his view, cool, technocratic administrators would execute the policies chosen by politics – though with the suggestion that politics should generally defer to their expertise.  That theory may have seemed beguiling in the late 19^th Century, but by the 21^st Century it has become clear that that’s not how any of this works,” Glenn explains.

Prior to my journalism career, I spent nearly three years (1982-85) as a Reagan political appointee at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which “manages” the civil service. There were some successes, including especially reforming the pension system from a defined benefit to a defined contribution basis. But the fundamentally unaccountable nature of bureaucracy was only counter-acted by the determined efforts of political appointees seeking to carry out the Reagan policy agenda endorsed by the electorate.

There were surveys at the time that suggested Reagan actually carried a majority of votes among that generation of civil servants. Boy, has that changed! Contemporary studies of campaign contributions by donors who identify themselves as federal workers routinely show 90-95 percent giving to Democratic candidates and causes.

Civil service reform has never been a top-10 public policy issue, but it should be because it is at the root of factors that shape the responsiveness and accountability, and lack thereof, the public gets from federal departments and agencies. Glenn’s analysis is the most perceptive I’ve read in a long time and should be shared widely among everybody who cares about the future of this country as a solid first step toward getting civil service reform front and center in the 2024 campaign.

RECENT HISTORY TRIPS UP ‘MODERATE’ TEXAS DEM: Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) wants President Joe Biden to refreeze that $6 billion in Iranian assets. But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who Allred is challenging in 2024 election, reminds voters about 2021 U.S. aid that the Democrat pushed may well have aided Hamas.

TERRORISTS, DRUG CARTELS AND THE OPEN BORDER: Josh Phillips, host of Epoch TV’s “Crossroads,” describes the multiple connections between street gangs, organized crime and global terrorism. Those connections, combined with the open border of the U.S., is a national security threat that is not sufficiently appreciated at the highest levels.

QUANTUM THEORY AND THEOLOGY: Maybe they’re not so different after all, according to this latest “What Would You Say?” video on HillFaith and from the Colson Center.

NO, THE HOUSE ISN’T PARALYZED: Contrary to the Mainstream Media, the absence of a Speaker elected by the majority of the House of Representatives did not bring the lower chamber of Congress to a complete halt. As I explain in my latest Epoch Times analysis. the work continues as the deliberations and debate among GOP factions moves to an inevitable compromise.

AI AND CORRELATION: A fundamental rule in data analysis is “correlation is not causation.” Professor Gary Smith, writing in Mind Matters, sees an interesting implication of that rule to understanding the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

MAYORKAS LIED TO CONGRESS? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly told Congress the border is secure. In fact, as Issues & Insights points out, Mayorkas has made that claim during congressional testimony seven times since March 17, 2021.

There are laws against lying to Congress. Will Congress demand that Attorney General Merrick Garland enforce them? And then do something concrete — say, just for starters, eliminate every tenth position in the Department of Justice — when he declines to do so?

IF HE KNOWS EVERYTHING: Why are there verses in scripture that say God doesn’t know something?

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE: Those Hamas terrorists had to blow their way through Israel’s border wall and fence in order to attack and slaughter hundreds of innocent civilians, including infants who were beheaded. As horrendous as such attacks are, it may be easier for terrorists to commit even worse atrocities here because of the open border with Mexico.

TIME FOR SOME HONEST HINDSIGHT: Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers is “sickened” by the failure of the elite school’s leadership to condemn both Hamas terrorism against Israeli civilians and the statement of 30 Harvard student groups that blames Israel for everything, reports the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman.

“The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” tweeted Summers, who also served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton.

It’s encouraging, even if only a little, any time a prominent member of the liberal elite publicly expresses a glimmer of dissent from some aspect of the dominant leftist narrative on American campuses. That said, one wonders why Summers didn’t see this coming long ago when he was in a position to do something about it.

WILL GAETZ MOVE TO SUPPLANT TRUMP? Writing in American Greatness, Thaddeus McCotter predicts the Florida Republican will be so emboldened by his success in forcing Kevin McCarthy out of the House Speakership that he will come to see himself as Donald Trump’s successor. And act accordingly.

CHEAP JESUS? It’s a staple of the “Jesus Seminar” brand of skepticism that Jesus was a really solid teacher but was in no way God. That’s become for many the standard assumption. But what if the skeptics miss the reality? The latest “What Would You Say” video on HillFaith from the Colson Center offers three quick, solid reasons to conclude theirs is a cheap Jesus, not the real one.

JORDAN APPEARS TO LEAD SPEAKER’S RACE: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is “sure to get the nod” according to one of the House GOPers speaking on background with The Epoch Times about who should succeed Kevin McCarthy. Others interviewed enthusiastically agreed.

ABORTION, TRANSGENDERING AND PLANNED PARENTHOOD: Bet you’ve not previously thought to group that trio together in the same sentence. What the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium found when he started asking PP questions exposed some horrifying new items on the lengthy list of reasons no tax dollars should ever go to benefit the group in any way.

THERE THEY GO, AGAIN: How many times in the past have the Republicans snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory? Issues & Insights sees it happening yet again.

HERE’S THE BACKSTORY ON MCCARTHY OUSTER: It all came down to a question of who do you trust.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Excerpt:

Kevin McCarthy became the first-ever speaker of the House of Representatives to be ousted, after eight of the most conservative Republicans on Tuesday gave up on the California Republican’s leadership, saying he failed to deliver on promises he made in January, including especially to fight for cutting federal spending back to pre-COVID pandemic levels. . . .

Key to understanding why the day’s events came about as they did is found in one word, “trust,” according to multiple Republican House members interviewed by The Epoch Times, most of whom spoke on background.

“The reason we got to this point was a failure of Kevin McCarthy. All he had to do to avoid where we are was keep his word, keep his commitment and at least fight for that, but he did not do that in August,” one of the McCarthy opponents told The Epoch Times before the vote.

“He dillied and he dallied and stopped and started and couldn’t decide. He was a feckless leader who didn’t cast a vision to drive us to do that, to get those spending bills through. That’s what he should have done, that’s what he promised to do but he didn’t,” the representative said.

He was referring to Mr. McCarthy’s promises when he was elected speaker in January to cut federal spending back to pre-COVID levels, to avoid at all costs resorting to continuing resolutions (CRs) or omnibus spending bills, and instead return the House to “regular order.”

The regular order of both chambers in Congress is to write a dozen major spending bills in committees during the spring, then debate, amend, and finally pass them in the summer and early fall before the Sept. 30 end of the federal government’s fiscal year.

Regular order and budgetary constraint would be nice.

IF YOU WONDERED WHERE I’VE BEEN: I’ve been in a dry place and it had nothing to do with Burning Man. It’s good to be back.

ABOUT THAT IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY: Democrats devoted the six+ hours of the hearing to mocking, insulting, and demagoguing allegations by Republicans of Biden family influence-peddling, based on $24 million paid by at least 23 foreign entities.

WHY WASHINGTON IS ‘AWASH IN CORRUPTION:’ Professor Jonathan Turley told yesterday’s first House Impeachment Inquiry hearing that the nation’s capital “is awash in corruption,” referring to the millions of dollars paid by nearly two dozen foreign entities to the Biden family’s influence-peddling enterprise specifically and more generally to the access selling that is such a familiar feature of the governing political culture. The indictment of Sen. Robert “Gold Bar” Menendez (D-N.J.) also comes to mind.

But the bigger point is made by Issue & Insights in the context of former First Lady Michelle Obama being paid “an obscenely large amount for a speech in Germany on diversity.” Obama received $741,000 for a 60-minute oration, or $12,350 per minute. And let’s not forget the continuing worldwide grifting of Bill and Hillary Clinton with their foundation.

That bigger point is this: “These are all variations on a theme. Call it bribery, or extortion, or abuse of power, or whatever you want. This is how Democrats get rich these days. They expand the size and power of the federal government, then sell access and favors to the highest bidders.”

Call it Grifter Government. But don’t call it government of, by and for the people.

THEY NEED MORE TIME, CAPTAIN: Members of Congress, that is, who are responsible for deciding how to spend trillions of tax dollars without having to plunge the nation so deep into debt that the country goes down the drain.

One suggestion from a guy who knows a thing or three about how Washington is supposed to function, as well as the realities behind Leviathan’s deep dysfunctions, is to stretch the budget cycle from one to two years.