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Rep. Matt Gaetz is requesting a meeting with Israel's ambassador to the US, Gilad Erdan, to discuss the alleged extortion plot of the Gaetz family, according to a letter obtained by The Spectator. As previously reported, days before news broke that the FBI was investigating the Florida congressman for sex trafficking allegations, Jake Novak at the Israeli consulate in New York told Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams about the probe. 'I come as a friend to Israel. Supporting the US-Israel relationship is very important to me and to my constituents,' Gaetz writes in the letter. 'Jake Novak is the Broadcast Media Relations Director at Israel's Consulate in New York.

The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, delivered another major blow to President Joe Biden's domestic agenda this week, ruling that Democrats may not include a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants in their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The parliamentarian's decision was based on the 'Byrd rule', proposed by Sen. Robert Byrd and adopted by the Senate in the 1980s, which limits what can be passed under the reconciliation process. Under the Byrd rule, laws must be 'more than incidental' in their impact on spending or the budget in order to be included in a reconciliation package.

There is a spot of Washington DC, a few blocks of downtown not far from the White House, where a cigarette is your only hope. The buildings are garish blocks of glass — 'like someone overturned a giant ice cube tray,' as one wag put it — while the color palette runs from charcoal gray to navy gray. The place can feel like ennui embodied, and all the worse when rain darkens the air and the streets fill with the soulless din of tires swishing through puddles. It can wear on you, this drab slice of middle-managerial noir. But at least for me, there is one thing that can brighten it up: cigarette smoke. I might catch it off a passerby or light up a Marlboro myself. But either way I feel paradoxically improved. I think, at least someone here is having a good time.

A coup by any other name and maybe even a little light treason. Those are the accusations flying over revelations in a new Bob Woodward book about what Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley did after the January 6 Capitol riots. Milley reportedly held several phone calls shortly after January 6, with both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and with his counterpart in China. According to Woodward, the general gave assurances to Gen. Li Zuocheng that he would alert the Chinese to any possible coming attack, nuclear or otherwise. There is no evidence President Trump was planning any kind of strike against China, or Iran, or Florida. No battle plans were being drawn. Miller supposedly took these actions after Trump signed an executive order removing US forces from Afghanistan.

In August, polls showed that Gavin Newsom’s chances of surviving a recall were slipping away. Many Democrats were so apathetic and Republicans so fired up that in a low-turnout election, the nation’s largest Blue State might indeed oust its liberal governor. Democrats went to work. Leading Democrats from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris to Sen. Bernie Sanders all painted the recall as a 'life or death’ battle to preserve liberal values and fight 'Trumpism’ and extremism. Larry Elder, the leading Republican in the simultaneous election to pick a successor to Newsom should the recall succeed, was turned into a boogeyman with a Los Angeles Times columnist actually calling him 'the black face of white supremacy’. The strategy worked.

The California dream turned into a nightmare for Republicans on Tuesday night after a blowout victory saved the formerly embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom. Instead of licking their wounds in silence, however, Republicans are eating their own. From the day he took office in 2018, conservatives were seeking to oust Newsom. The former mayor of San Francisco's lockdown orders gave life to their efforts. Out of all the scandals in which elected officials broke their own quarantine mandates, Newsom's power meal at the French Laundry restaurant with state lobbyists in Napa Valley was by far the most infamous. It gave Republicans enough ammo to push the recall over the 1.5 million signature requirement, thanks also in part to a four-month extension to the deadline.

Oscar Wilde said, of the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, that ‘you would have to have a heart of stone to read...without laughing.’ It was hard not to feel the same way today, as pictures of last night’s Met Gala were released to a curious international public. The point of the event, where tickets sell for a suitably jaw-dropping $30,000, is nominally to raise money for selected good causes, and to mark the opening of the museum’s major costume exhibition. Yet every year, the invited celebrities become more absurd, and their outfits more demonstrative and performative.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looked radiant on the red carpet at the Met Gala. She looked elegant too, at least until she turned around. But this is show business. And that, after the last 18 months, is reassuring: this is still America. Also still American is the message that she delivered at the Met through the medium of a decorated wedding dress. It’s an important one, about class and the future of this country. And no one in politics since Donald Trump is better placed to deliver it. Ocasio-Cortez is proof that the prosperity gospel lives. Like an old-time starlet equipped only with moxie and a major in Theater Studies, she has risen to the top. It is only right that she shares her success with her public, just as the stars of the Depression years shared theirs.

Some conservatives did themselves no favors by exaggerating the threat of election irregularities in California’s Tuesday recall election. Tomi Lahren of Fox Nation claimed on air that: 'The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud.’ A New York Times news story promptly labeled concerns about the election as 'baseless allegations’. But regardless of the recall outcome — which Gov. Newsom is favored to survive — we shouldn’t dismiss concerns about the shift California and other states have made to all mail-in elections at the expense of the traditional secret ballot. Two elec­torates in places with some 40 mil­lion peo­ple each — Cal­i­for­nia and Canada — will vote this month.

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 having come and gone, many have turned to reflection. Some meditate on the solidarity and sense of national purpose that act of terror engendered; others view it as a dramatic opening to our miserable 21st century. What comes to my mind are the images of our hasty retreat from Afghanistan over the last month. As is often the case, my best thinking has already been articulated by the late Charles Krauthammer. In the introduction of his best-selling collection of essays Things That Matter, Krauthammer explains his evolution from psychiatrist to public intellectual.

Last week, President Joe Biden announced a blizzard of new executive orders. He effectively mandated COVID vaccines for the entire federal workforce as well as all federal contractors and anyone who works at a company that has more than 100 employees. He didn't consult Congress on any of this even though — and this is what truly separates the boys from the caudillos — both Houses are controlled by his own party. So while we still technically live in a free country, it looks a bit different than it did before. The executive branch is Joe Biden, the legislative branch is the multiple Joe Bidens Joe Biden sees in the mirror just after taking his prescription Zestril, and the judicial branch is when Joe Biden lurches awake at 3 a.m. barking 'I am the law!