July 28, 2026

REAGAN BACKSTORY ON TRUMP ANTI-FRAUD PUSH: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says his department is now computer-matching proposed expenditures with the Death Master File (DMF) to ensure tax dollars stop going to dead people. But one of President Ronald Reagan’s “junkyard dogs” did the same thing beginning in 1981, so why did it take 45 years for Treasury to catch up?

Posted at 9:53 am by Mark Tapscott

IT’S A DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN DONATION LAUNDERING OPERATION: ActBlue faces scrutiny over Michigan woman’s $100K+ in donations.

The story caught national attention after Michigan Enjoyer reporter Charlie LeDuff posted a video interviewing Elizabeth Waffle of Milan, Michigan.

“I doubt it,” Waffle said when asked by LeDuff if she’s made 14,696 donations totaling more than $150,000 in the past five years, which are the totals reported by Michigan Enjoyer.

Living in a trailer, Waffle said she didn’t think it was possible she’d donated that much.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

ActBlue is an online platform used nationally by Democratic candidates and progressive organizations to raise funds.

According to Federal Election Commission records pulled by The Center Square, Waffle’s name shows $100,295 in contributions processed through ActBlue across the 2021-2022, 2023-2024 and the 2025-2026 election cycles. That is a total of 12,900 donations ranging from $0.24 to $107.50.

Seems legit.

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE OCCUPIED ZONES:

Posted at 9:21 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Turns Out Fauci Is an Even Bigger Donkey’s Derrière Than We Thought. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another edition of, ‘Gosh, We Were Right Again.’ While it’s true that American conservatives have been able to say that all along, we’ve really been on a roll since the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu Pandemic and Tyranny Festival of 2020.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green

A MINI SAVE ACT: House Administration Committee chairman doesn’t rule out mail-in ballot restrictions in third party-line bill. “The House Administration Committee was allotted $10 billion in the House’s budget resolution for election law reforms, as the committee has oversight authority of federal elections. House GOP leadership has previously said they hope to include as much of the SAVE America Act, Republicans’ voter ID and proof of citizenship bill, into the budget bill ‘as possible’ with the committee’s portion of the legislation.”

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Back to the ’70s in Burnham’s Britain?

He has talked positively about introducing a land value tax (LVT) to replace the local government council tax, which is levied on an outdated valuation of real estate, and stamp duty on house sales. But LVT would create losers as well as winners. It would also be complicated and costly to administer and might raise little in the short term.

Britain’s fundamental problem, everyone agrees, is the lack of economic growth. Increasing GDP is the only way to pay for better public services, reduce welfare dependency and increase remuneration for those in work. But we have yet to discover where this wealth creation is to come from under Burnham’s not-so-new deal. The public sector is maxed out and the private sector is flatlining, thanks to the recent increases in corporate taxes, the national minimum wage, and employers’ National Insurance.

Meanwhile, the cost of servicing Britain’s £3 trillion of public debt remains an immense burden. Commentators on the right say that Burnham is taking Britain back to the 1970s, when a previous Labour government had to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund to manage a sovereign debt crisis. We are not quite there yet. But keen observers of fashion trends may have noticed that flared trousers and wide lapels are coming back.

In his recent appearance on the Triggernometry podcast, Peter Hitchens, age 74, had this exchange with his much younger hosts:

HITCHENS: Predictions are easy in general, but they’re hard in terms of how it’s going to take.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What I’m getting at something else, which is my hope, and I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what’s likely to happen, is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the conditions for recovery. Not necessarily recovery, but the conditions from which recovery is possible.

HITCHENS: That’s very Marxist.

KISIN: Tell me more.

HITCHENS: All my comrades in the late 60s and early 70s were rather hoping for a collapse out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right. Kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions and so nothing worked. Blackouts? Fantastic! He was great; I remember that the recruits pouring into the international socialists in the early 70s about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism and Leninism, but in the end, he let us all down, by losing an election.

KISIN: I mean, I am not hoping for [this].

HITCHENS: No, no, no, I know. I’m just telling you, this is the formula. I don’t myself believe that the catastrophe is justifiable, Or desirable or even, or even, conscionable. I think you have to say, if it looks as there’s going to be a catastrophe, do whatever you can to prevent it and warn against it.

KISIN: But Peter, you and I have to be honest, we have all been making these arguments. We’ve been trying to say, we’re heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they’re much more comfortable spending money we don’t have. So they’re not going to listen to us — we are going off the cliff.

HITCHENS: I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it by some kind of baptism of a fire a better world than the one that was before.

Speaking of which, just as leftist New Yorkers yearned for the bad old days of Fun City in the 1970s during the reforms of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg (and thus, hizzoner Mamdani), leftist Brits like Andy Burnham want to take their entire nation back to its postwar nadir in the 1970s. True socialism has never been tried before!

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION? TOO SOON TO SAY:

As Jim Geraghty wrote on Sunday, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

ISWYDT:

Posted at 8:19 am by Stephen Green

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE WAS LAST SEEN FILLING OUT HUNDRED OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS: Thune pours cold water on canceling recess to pass SAVE America Act. “The marquis voter ID legislation has languished in the Senate due to the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Thune has declined to alter Senate rules or fire the parliamentarian to sneak voter ID in through the reconciliation process, which is limited to budget matters.”

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green

THIS IS FAUCI’S LEGACY:

Posted at 7:17 am by Stephen Green

TAPPER TO GO VETCON ONE?

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll