BDS IS ANTI-SEMITIC. REALLY ANTI-SEMITIC: This won’t surprise Instapundit readers, but The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz documents the fundamentally anti-semitic character underlying the Far Left’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that is aiming straight at the heart of Israel and indeed Jews everywhere.

WHERE WAS TOM? Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsak, that is, who was a chairman of the Biden Administration “whole-of-government” Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force formed to end the supply chain crisis in 2021. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and months of ensuing litigation were required to answer the question.

And, as it turns out, documents obtained by a new watchdog group, the Functional Government Initiative (FGI), indicate that Vilsak was present for exactly none of the task force’s meetings. Does this mean Vilsak can no longer be described as a government official who is outstanding in his field?

MSM’S SANTOS OBSESSION EXPLAINED: If you are wondering why the Mainstream Media is so fixated on a guy like George Santos, who otherwise would just be another face in the crowd, Issues & Insights explains everything.

THE HOUSE GOP’S 7-WEEK AGENDA TO SAVE AMERICA: If you read nothing else this week, this month, this year, read former FTC chairman Daniel Oliver’s American Greatness column today. This is How to Leverage 101 and it needs to be required reading for every member of the House GOP, starting with the Speaker. There will be a test.

THE MOST VIP THING ABOUT YOUR CAREER IS NOT YOUR CAREER: Funny how things work. Several weeks ago as I was preparing to hear a speaker tomorrow, I bought his book, which was written in 1994. I think Amazon said there were only, like, five copies left and they weren’t sure where to find them.

But they did locate one copy of “Walking the Tightrope” by Tom Barrett and shipped it to me. Boy, do I wish I had found this one a long time ago. He worked on the Hill and came away a better man. I worked on the Hill and didn’t begin to recover until years later. Check it out on HillFaith, even if you don’t work on Capitol Hill and wouldn’t be caught dead working in any government office.

NO ROOM FOR JESUS AT MALL OF AMERICA: Two words you cannot say at Mall of America – “Jesus Saves” – if you say it with your T-shirt, at least according to the security guards on the cellphone video posted by The Blaze.

Remember way back when in cinema and daily life whenever people heard somebody say something they didn’t like, their response was “hey, it’s a free country.”

WORST BOSSES ON CAPITOL HILL: Just in case anybody here on Instapundit is thinking about seeking a position as a congressional aide, or knows somebody who is, here are the 10 Senate and 10 House offices you may want to think twice about before accepting an offer, as compiled by Legistorm and reported by HillFaith.

CAN MR. MUSK PLEASE BUY LINKEDIN NEXT? Here’s headline on my latest column over on PJ Media: “Censorious Cowards at Linkedin Refuse to Explain Their Trashing of First Amendment, Free Speech.” This time it’s personal.

COMER DEMANDS VISITOR LOGS FOR BIDEN’S DELAWARE HOME: House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is demanding that the visitor logs for President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., residence be made public.

That log is vital to gaining an understanding of who may have had access to the dozens of classified documents found thus far, and because Hunter Biden, the Chief Executive’s son, who has extensive financial links to the Chinese Communist Party, claimed the residence as his own while reportedly paying $50,000 a month in rent.

Comer is also demanding that the committee be given all documents related to the presence of classified documents at that location and the PennBiden Center. A Special Counsel was appointed last week by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the situation.

WHAT ARE THE ODDS: Gambling isn’t my thing, but if it’s yours and you want to put some cash on where the next batch of Joe Biden’s classified documents are found, this site is taking bets, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

BET HE STAYS OUT OF VIRAL MEETINGS FROM NOW ON! An Arizona Democrat remotely attended a recent meeting of the Pima County, Arizona, Board of Supervisors. Suddenly in the background, according to the Washington Free Beacon, a second man appeared, wearing panties and a bra. Perhaps it could now be said Supervisor Matt Heinz’ political future has been stripped down to almost nothing?

IF SANTOS SHOULD RESIGN, SHOULDN’T THE WASHINGTON POST AT LEAST APOLOGIZE? The Mainstream Media is working up a frenzy demanding the resignation of newly elected Rep. George Santos (R-NY) for misrepresenting, or to put it less delicately, lying, about the past.

So, I ask in my latest PJ Media column, now that six academic data wonks analyzed the evidence and concluded the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election was an abject failure, shouldn’t the Post, which got a Pulitzer for its Russiagate coverage, and all the rest of the Mainstream Media that inflicted years of Russiagate-based lies on the American public, return the awards and apologize to America?

DR. PHIL SHOULD KNOW BETTER: Over at the Daily Gouge, today’s edition opens with a look at Dr. Phil’s pathetic response to a liberal guest’s claim that we wouldn’t need police if we just spent more money people’s basic needs, including food, housing, transportation, etc.

BIPARTISAN HOUSE VOTE CREATES NEW CHINA PANEL: It may well be the last bipartisan vote in the House during the 118th Congress, so there will now be established the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

JOE JUST DOESN’T GET IT: President Joe Biden promised he would refill America’s Petroleum Reserve and even make a little profit in the process. Well, economics being economics, that won’t happen any time soon, Washington Free Beacon reports.

MCCARTHY VOTE WAS DEMOCRACY, NOT CONFUSION: It’s not something that happens with any frequency these days, but experts on the Left and Right interviewed by The Epoch Times agree last week’s 15-roll call marathon was the kind of deliberative process the founders envisioned as the heart of the American republic, not the chaos and confusion it was dubbed by the Mainstream Media.

FAITH ON THE HILL: Big majority of the Members of Congress claim affiliation with one of the many Protestant or Catholic denominational congregations, according to Pew Research Center, but a wide variety of other religious views are also represented, including one Messianic Jew (accepts Jesus as the Messiah).

HERE COMES THE NEW COVID SCARE: The Hill, one of the most reliable weathervanes of the Establishment Media’s evolving narratives, looks to be taking up the latest COVID fear-mongering.

They’ve got a scary new name for the alleged latest variant, the XBB.1.5 and the panicky headline: “What We Know About the XBB.1.5 COVID Variant Sweeping the Northeast.” Reports The Hill’s Joseph Choi:

“The XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant is raising concerns of a potential surge in COVID-19 cases as it sweeps across the Northeast. Officials have warned in recent weeks that the strain is highly transmissible, can more easily evade the immunity offered by vaccines or prior infections than past variants — and is likely to drive cases up around the country.”

One thing you might note in the story – the absence of actual case data. Nowhere does Choi quote the latest CDC case data, perhaps because as of December 31, 2022, there were only 5,522 new cases and the seven-day weekly average was 52,879, down from the 87,414 on September 1, 2022, and way down from the 700,000+ average in January 2022.

PROFITS ON UKRAINE AID: Daily Caller’s Micaela Burrow reports on Members of Congress who bought defense industry stocks and voted for more U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

HOUSE DEMS MUST GET PERMISSION FOR BATHROOM BREAKS: This morning’s update from the office of the House Democratic Whip includes this instruction:

**Members should report absences of any length to the Whip’s office via email … or by phone at x5-2020.

**Members must remain on the Floor until the Election for Speaker of the House is completed and until directed otherwise by the Whip’s office. Members should contact the Whip’s office immediately if they expect to be absent at any time.

UPDATE:

AND THE GOP WHIP’S MORNING NOTICE:

Good Friday morning. The House will meet at 12:00 p.m. for legislative business to continue the Election of the Speaker of the House.

Additional votes are possible. Please stay tuned for future alerts.

RECONSIDERING MOSHE DAYAN: Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, is getting grief from many, including Joe Biden, as a result of his stroll through the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Gvir isn’t the culprit, though, according to Jeff Dunetz at The Lid. That would be Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War in 1967.

REVISITING A STAN EVANS RULE: There is a particular relevance these days to M. Stanton Evans’ Law of Inadequate Paranoia – No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer, you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” Issues & Insights picks it up from there with regard those Twitters Files and much else.

THE HOUSE GOP, THE DEBT CEILING AND BIDEN: Daniel Oliver was Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan years and has been a thoughtful and wise editor and columnist in the years since. His current piece in American Greatness is entitled “Courage Time in the House of Representatives.”

Oliver points to the Twitter Files revelations as making clear the 2020 election was manipulated (not the same thing as “stolen,” though not unrelated) by agents of the government on behalf of a corrupt president and his family and associates. That is the essence of an illegitimate presidency.

But what to do about it now? Impeachment, Oliver notes, is not going to happen, but the Founders did not leave us without recourse in such a profoundly serious situation:

“There is another possible solution. It would require bravery — almost always in short supply. But maybe not this time. This is a time for reckoning. This is a time for choosing. Another time for choosing.

“Here’s how the problem could be solved:

“Because the U.S. government doesn’t live within its means (it spends far more than it collects in taxes), it has to borrow money. Congress has to authorize how much money the government can borrow. The maximum amount the government can borrow, legislated by Congress, is called the ‘debt ceiling.’

“At some point this year, the government will reach that maximum amount. Failure to raise that amount would lead (at least in theory) to the government defaulting on its obligations.

“What would happen then? No one knows. It could create chaos in the United States and the global economy. Nevertheless, that situation presents an opportunity to the Republicans to rectify the theft of the presidential election in 2020.

“After the new Congress convenes this week, the Republicans should ….” Click here for the rest of the story. Be assured it will be worth your while.

AND THEN THERE WAS NONE: Rodney Scott may well have been the only honest man in the current administration when President Joe Biden kept him onboard from the Trump team as head of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), according to Just the News’ Aaron Kliegman. Scott has has “Former” prior to that title.

“When the Biden administration went against the recommendations of experienced career border security professionals, terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols, canceled the Asylum Cooperative Agreements, and lowered the bar for credible fear determinations,” Scott said, “they sent a message worldwide and opened the flood gates for anyone that could make up a sad story or recite the one that was provided to them by the cartel and so-called migrant aid organizations operating in Mexico.”

That’s about as succinct a summary of how the border crisis reached its current stage as you are likely to find anywhere. Kliegman also provides an excellent summary at three recent analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) on the explosion of immigration cases.

IS PUTIN A MEDICAL MEGALOMANIAC? There is evidence that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a product in part of his treatments for thyroid cancer, according to Danish military intelligence sources quoted by The Lid.