NOTE THE NBC HEADLINE: First measles death reported in Texas as Kennedy downplays outbreak.

What’s going on:

DRAIN THE SWAMP: Researchers Discover Sen. Ruben Gallego Benefited from ‘Smurfing’ Contributions.

Some election integrity researchers are expanding their investigation of politicians who benefitted from questionable “Smurfing” campaign contributions and discovered that Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) received many of them. Smurfing refers to using straw donors to make campaign contributions; usually, elderly and unemployed people are unaware their identities are being used for money laundering. Many contributions are made under one name, sometimes thousands of them, and they are usually small amounts, often around $10 each, to escape detection.

Peter Bernegger, one of the key researchers who discovered the Smurfing phenomenon, posted on X on Tuesday, “Arizona @SenRubenGallego caught Smurfing, i.e. criminally laundering money into his campaign! Note that this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is a ‘quick’ data run of the top Smurfs found to have had their identities stolen by Gallego’s campaign. Smurfing found by Chris Gleason @immutablechrist Phillip Allison @TheTVConsPiracy , myself and others exposing Smurfing. This is another form of election fraud. We are running all 100 US Senators, Tom Cotton and Jon Ossoff already ran – see the tweets below.”

More daylight, please — Congress needs some serious disinfecting.

MY THURSDAY VIP ESSAY AT VODKAPUNDIT: Ding-Dong the Witch Is (Almost) Dead.

If Kathleen Kennedy had been made chief of all of Disney instead of just Lucasfilm, she’d have done a “reimagining” of “The Wizard of Oz,” featuring a misunderstood lesbian Wicked Witch, and the Munchkins would all have been genderfluid.

Pause for a moment here, not to imagine 30 tiny trannies dancing around Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, but in silent prayer that the one-woman wrecking ball of beloved movie franchises is finally exiting stage left. “After more than a decade in a galaxy far, far away, Kathleen Kennedy is charting a course toward retirement,” I read in Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday.

Neither Kennedy nor Disney/Lucasfilm have commented.

There have been countless rumors over the years — wishful thinking, really — that Kennedy might finally release her death grip on Lucasfilm. But this week’s reports are well-sourced and widespread enough that I think we can almost breathe a sigh of relief.

But only almost. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Let’s survey the damage, starting with Indiana Jones.

Much more at the link.

AND THE NEWS JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER:

Exit question: Might?

HOWEVER MUCH YOU HATE THE MEDIA…

…it still isn’t enough.

SPACE: The Moon’s next robotic visitor is lining up for landing this weekend.

Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.

These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.

Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities—spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket—to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.

From a business perspective, Firefly’s foray into lunar transportation has been worth the effort. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has awarded the company three contracts to deliver experiments to the Moon’s surface. Under the first deal, NASA is paying Firefly about $101 million to transport 10 payloads to the Moon on the company’s first Blue Ghost lander.

Now, Firefly is about to find out if its lunar program is a technical success.

Godspeed…

JOHN NOLTE: More Video Unearthed of Jake Tapper Covering up Biden’s Decline.

Tapper must think it’s still 2013, a time when the regime media’s snooty hubris could power them through any hypocrisy. Well, those days are over. Social Media and New Media are both blistering Tapper with multiple exhibits proving he actively engaged in covering up, dismissing, downplaying, and shutting down discussion of Biden’s obvious-Obvious-OBVIOUS mental and physical collapse.

But now, because he’s a prisoner of arrogance and a velvet bubble dated 2013, after four years of being an active member of the conspiracy to sweep the fact that Biden hardly knew who or where he was under the rug, Tapper has coauthored a book titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

Yep, the criminal is going to investigate his own crime.

If I Did It … by O.Jake. Tapper.

On Wednesday, Breitbart News reported on two instances (one from 2024) where Tapper is on the record covering up for a man the whole world could see had no business running a cash register, much less the country.

Since then, more video has been unearthed. Watch for yourself:

As you can see, some of those clips are from 2024.

Of course they are. Ace of Spades adds: One Media Hero Steps Forward to Blow the Lid Off the Biden Dementia Cover-Up. That Hero? Biden Defender Fake Jake Tapper.

This book is Tapper’s attempt to save the media from the public’s accurate assessment that they covered up Biden’s dementia to rig an(other) election.

His searing investigation will put the blame squarely on Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, Frank Biden, plus the five or six top aides to Biden.

Note that none of these people have any future in elective politics. They were part of a failed and fraudulent presidency; the Democrat Party will not be making use of their services in the future.

Charles Cooke asks: Which Way, American Journalist?

At this stage, the only person in America who believes that the media faithfully follows a series of neutral rules is Brian Stelter — and he’s paid to say as much.

Which is to say that my view of the affair remains exactly the same as it was in the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate that tore away the curtain: There is simply no way of looking at this “failure” that does not indict everyone involved. If the press genuinely did not know, then it is staffed by people who cannot see what is in front of their noses. If the press had suspicions but did not want to investigate them for fear that it would help Donald Trump, then it is staffed by people who are corrupt and who ought never to work again as a result. And if the press knew, but felt pressured or obliged to stay quiet about it, then we are dealing with a conspiracy of world-historic proportions. I do not know what is in Tapper and Thompson’s book, but if it is not primarily an indictment of the media — coupled with some white-hot rage at the federal government for having orchestrated such a dastardly conspiracy — then it will represent a missed opportunity. At present, the media’s approval rating is about 20 percent. If, over the next two years, the press elects to forget its complicity in the ruse and dispassionately cash in on its own failure, I suspect that its popularity will soon be pushing single digits — if that.

In December of 2020, Katya Sedgewick wrote of “Biden’s Brezhnev vibes,” which was printed in the various local versions of the London Spectator, including its American spinoff:

At least nobody in the Soviet Union voted for Brezhnev — the elections were a sham with Communist party candidates running unopposed. Everything was a sham, actually. In his mumbling, robotic tones, the general secretary delivered long-winded, heavy on Marxist cliches and utterly incomprehensible televised speeches. The economy flattered, dissidents were subjected to psychiatric torture, corruption proliferated, and the rate of substance abuse skyrocketed. That period of Soviet history is known as zastoi, or stagnation. It only made sense that the man on top was some sort of sclerotic.

Like Brezhnev, Biden’s rhetoric is ridden with clichés, but of a different, folksy kind. At the time when political slogans are catchy and provocative — Make America Great Again, Black Lives Matter — Biden’s yard signs read ‘Our best days are still ahead’, and ‘Build back better’. His Twitter account is full of platitudes like ‘This is our moment — ours together — to write a newer, bolder, more compassionate chapter in the life of our nation.’ He’s just a boring ordinary guy — until he lashes out at a voter, or bites on his wife’s finger.

Is Biden the candidate of American stagnation? His cognitive and physical decline is increasingly difficult to hide and it’s highly disturbing to witness it become a subject of speculation. I’ve lived through it before and it gives me the creeps. Free citizens of a free republic shouldn’t need a Kremlinologist to decipher what’s wrong with their president.

I don’t know if Tapper responded to her column, but as we can see from the above tweet, we know precisely what his reaction would have been from 2020 until most of last year.

Glasnost may have arrived in America with Trump 2.0, but it’s going to be a while though, before the staffers at Pravda begin to understand that the party is over. Or as Kira Davis concludes: Here Lies the Legacy Media: RIP.

I’ve not had a lot of love for Tapper, but I have had respect for him up to this point. I only ever had him pegged as a sycophant Democrat apologist, but not as a liar. This new book has put a decisive end to whatever vestiges of respect anyone ever had for Tapper.

But it’s more than that. Tapper’s book marks the final nail in the coffin of the mainstream, legacy press. Conservative Americans have known for years that the legacy media is hopelessly biased and corrupt. The broader spectrum of Americans began to see the questionable practices during Trump’s New York trial. That mugshot made a lot of people- people who previously had not been paying attention -think twice. At the very least, some eyebrows were raised.

* * * * * * * *

There is nowhere for his antics to hide. Alternative media has been religiously chronicling the last five years (at least) and their viewership numbers dwarf anything Tapper could ever dream of achieving in his CNN perch. More people know the part he played in all of this than don’t.

It is a blatant lie of the highest order, made worse by the fact that he’s literally sold it for a handful of silver coins.

No matter. The jig is up. He got his money, but he sacrificed his respectability and reputation for it, and at the end of the day, that’s all any man really has.

Exit quote: “Tapper is bankrupt and so is the legacy media. His new book jacket will serve as the program for their funeral. The pall bearers will be the American media consumers who have had enough of the elitists telling us not to believe our lying eyes.”

Look at the percentage of Americans who trust the media “not very much” or “none at all.” Those are rookie numbers; Tapper should be able to pump them up much higher when his book debuts.

MONICA LEWINSKY SAYS BILL CLINTON SHOULD HAVE RESIGNED AFTER AFFAIR IN FRESH INTERVIEW:

Monica Lewinsky believes former President Bill Clinton should have resigned from the White House after their affair.

Lewinsky, appearing on Alex Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy, said Clinton did not handle himself appropriately when news broke that the two had an affair while she was a 22-year-old intern in the White House.

“I think that the right way to handle a situation like that would have been to probably say it was, you know, nobody’s business and to resign,” Lewinsky told Cooper, the most-listened to female podcaster in the world.

“Or, to find a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus,” she added.

Clinton famously lied about the affair, telling America he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” in 1998. Clinton was later impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate and remained in office.

Bill Clinton resign? All the best people in the 1990s assured me that of course heads of state have affairs; it’s all consensual stuff. Europeans take this sort of thing for granted. Why are Americans so prudish about it?

Related: The Bill Clinton interview we’d like to see.

HE’S HAVING FUN DOING IT, TOO, AND IT SHOWS:

TRUMP FINALLY CANCELLED THE WATERGATE SHOW: The return of the American Caesar.

Nixon is having his revenge. The Supreme Court’s ruling last year asserting broad presidential immunity is a kind of posthumous vindication of Nixon’s presidential defense; had the ruling been issued in 1973, it would have shipwrecked the Watergate special prosecution. The high court read the law — and the national mood — correctly. Voters don’t want lawfare to harass former presidents, nor to paralyse presidents in office. They do want an effective and decisive executive. The model of personal power that presidents from FDR to Nixon embodied is back in style.

This changes the terms of American politics. Back in the Seventies, Nixon realised that the fundamental political conflict facing America was not that between liberals and conservatives, but between those who wanted the bureaucracies to exercise institutional autonomy and those who wanted them subordinated to the elected officials. That remains true today. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks (RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth) had liberal critics, but particularly vehement conservative ones. This was because they swore to take back control of entrenched scientific, intelligence, or military bureaucracies. Just like liberals, conservatives have their favourite bureaucracies.

This was why movement conservatism was never at peace with Nixon, and why it will likely never be at peace with Trump. The electoral appetite is for restoring competence and efficiency in government, as well as purging the state apparatus of ideological absurdities. It doesn’t exist to realise movement conservatism’s visions of a small, shrunken government.

Finally, if the resurgence of American Caesarism is “red” and Nixonian at the moment, another “blue” Caesar is certainly possible in a country that remains so narrowly divided. Caesarism isn’t the product of a stable constitutional system; it is always a volatile phenomenon, its trajectory is difficult to predict or control. The Roman emperors were great not because of their steady hand, but because they went further than anyone else in good or evil.

So far, Trump’s impact lies with demolition, not creation. Whatever the future holds, he has brought an end to a lingering national myth. The elite obsession with Nixon, as it appears in op-eds and lawfare, has never been less effective. For decades, the Watergate script was endlessly rerun and rebooted. But Trump has pulled the plug.

Read the whole thing.

THIS IS CNN: Watch: Scott Jennings Should Get Hazard Pay After Having to Deal With Insane Claims About Trump.

[SCOTT] JENNINGS: How is Trump shredding the Constition?

[ABBY] JOHNSON: My God, uh, look at what, should we go through the list?

(Johnson turns and looks at Toure to save her)

TOURE [NEBLETT]: I mean, seriously? Do we have to give you a civics lesson? That we’ve, we’ve put all the power in the executive branch. The legislative branch, the FBI, now we’re in control of the military, silencing media. This is what you do in a dictatorship.

(Crosstalk)

JENNINGS: Are you suggesting that the president is not the commander in chief of the military?

TOURE: I’m suggesting that the president is going to put in charge somebody who is going to contravine the Constitution, and in some near point, this conversation will look very silly for you because it will be obvious. Right now, you’re gaslighting, but when we get to actual rubber of the road, it will be clear.

JENNINGS: I’m interested in this conversation. He’s going to put someone in charge who will contravine the Constitution? Like who? What do you mean by that? The president is in charge of the military, is he not? You said he’s going to put someone in charge.

PHILLIP: I mean, the president is in charge of the military. That is how it works.

Trump has certainly not commandeered control of the legislative branch, as Toure claims. Still, he does control the FBI and military because that’s exactly how our constitutional government works. This is a common theme among left-wingers. They take completely normal actions by Trump and spin them as gross power grabs that threaten democracy. It is Trump’s job to control the FBI, the military, and every single bureaucratic agency. He is not “shredding the Constitution” by exerting power over those entities, and only a moron would suggest otherwise.

I’m not sure what credentials Toure brings to the table, but it’s an argument against credentialism. He is clearly out of his league when it comes to discussing even the basics of the United States government. He’s lucky Abby Phillip was there to call a timeout and save him from the rhetorical decapitating Jennings was performing.

How deep underwater was Toure during this discussion? This deep:

UPDATE: I’m so old, I can remember when Seven Days in May was a warning made by Hollywood lefties…

…Not a how-to guide for good government:

Related: Glenn’s 2016 paper: Of Coups and the Constitution.