Earlier this week, Jack published “The To The Point Rebel Alliance.” You should certainly read it if you haven’t. It starts with a clip of the Galactic Senate giving Palpatine thunderous applause as he declares himself emperor.

Across the Atlantic, two branches of a very real empire collided a couple of weeks ago. Barack Obama threatened Britain with draconian consequences should it vote to leave the European Union (or as it’s more fondly known, the EUSR). Boris Johnson’s rejoinder was an instant classic, demonstrating that he, not David Cameron, is Margaret Thatcher’s true heir.

Continuing to confound expectations of his certain doom, this week Donald Trump pulled ahead of or even with Hillary Clinton in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Quinnipiac has Trump 4 points ahead (43-39) in life-and-death Ohio, and just 1 point down (43-42) in the other two.

Hillary's mistakes just keep piling up, as virtually everything she does seems to reinforce the Trump brand. Indeed the campaign is so tone-deaf that everyone’s earlier worries about Trump being a ringer for Hillary increasingly look backward: if anything, it’s Hillary who’s working to elect Trump.

All this, plus Admiral Akbar, America’s own Emperor Palpatine, and the most encouraging Jimmy Kimmel segment you’ve ever seen, all in this week’s Half Full Report.

It’s hard to feel very “half full” in a week like this one, with conservative champion Ted Cruz vanquished by The Donald in an Indiana blow-out.

But let’s start with this. If at the beginning of the race anyone was more written off than Donald Trump, it was surely Ted Cruz, who was universally derided, indeed generally expected to tie the now-nominee for 17th out of 17. In reality, he came 2nd, and had he not withdrawn Tuesday there is still a good chance that at a contested convention, he might have ended up 1st.

That is remarkable for what it says about a Republican Party in which, just one year ago, Jeb Bush was not merely the prohibitive favorite but so thoroughly “inevitable” that even Mitt Romney chickened out of a race against him. GOP voters this year wiped out an entire generation of Republican leaders. Indeed, in the end, Ted lost in no small part because Trump successfully painted him as the last Establishment candidate, however nonsensical that was.

I happen to be a big fan of Carly Fiorina. I thought she was scapegoated at HP. I thought she was about as good a U.S. Senate candidate as anyone could reasonably ask of a first-timer, especially running in California. She has shown herself remarkably knowledgeable on an extraordinary range of issues, right on most of them, and courageous throughout.

But it’s not my job to tell you what I want to be true: I’m here to tell you what I honestly think. And Ted’s picking Carly for VP just one day after his Northeastern nightmare gives me enormous pause.

On a more positive note, fears have run high that the #NeverTrump movement and those Trump supporters who say they’ll never vote Republican if he’s not the nominee are in a GOP suicide pact. But there’s a factor everyone’s leaving out that makes all of this irrelevant, and greatly improves the eventual Republican nominee’s chances.

Speaking of Trump, his assault on the delegate system — which so far has provided him with 200 more delegates than he would have under the proportional system he claims to prefer — is growing into an assault on the American Constitutional order. This has…consequences. 

Oh, and Obama’s bare-knuckled threat against Britain? It’s backfiring, big time.