DISASTER: Cyber attack would leave East Coast dazed, Energy Dept. says. “A cyber attack on the East Coast’s energy system would result in widespread public confusion as everything from electricity to gasoline supplies would be cut off for as much as several weeks, the Energy Department said Tuesday. The agency released a report outlining the results of a major cyber-attack simulation conducted in December called ‘Liberty Eclipse.'”

You’ll want a generator, an inverter, a solar battery charger — and plenty of storable food, water, and water filtration.

CNN HARDEST HIT: Malaysia Airlines to track planes with satellites.

Smart safety move, but how will CNN ever fill the empty hours?

BUILDING BRAND LOYALTY, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Area Man Tells ESPN to Eff Off.

TWITCHY: Auburn takes Berkeley to school as police unmask anti-fascists outside Richard Spencer speech.

Auburn probably doesn’t bother with symbolic arrests, either.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A BAD IDEA: A Helicopter That Costs More Than The F-35.

ONE WAS CLUTCHING A DRAFT COPY OF BERNIE SANDERS’ ECONOMIC PLAN: Egypt unearths 8 mummies in 3,500-year-old tombs.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Obama Political Spying Scandal: Trump Associates Were Not the First Targets. This list includes Dennis Kucinich and investigative journalists.

SHOT: Despite talk of a military strike, Trump’s ‘armada’ actually sailed away from Korea.

CHASER: Trump’s missing ‘armada’ finally heading to Korea — and may stay a while.

Both these headlines are from Washington Post stories, filed just hours apart.

Are you getting the feeling that WaPo was trying to make the Administration look like liars, even if only for a few hours?

HAPPILY EVER AFTER: Researchers Say Couples Who Get Drunk Together Stay Together Longer.

The VodkaWife and I are coming up on our 15th anniversary. Just sayin’.

AND JUST IMAGINE HOW SHE WOULD HAVE GOVERNED: Hillary ran the worst presidential campaign ever:

Campaign chairman Bob Teeter called Bush’s speechwriters into a meeting in June 1992.

Teeter set before them a chart that looked like the layout of “Hollywood Squares” or the “Brady Bunch” title sequence. Each of the nine boxes had a message the speechwriters were to use in crafting their work — things like “I have been president for 3½ years: Major accomplishments/record.”

There was nothing else in the box. “What I want from you,” Teeter said, “is to help me fill this empty box.”

After nearly four years as president, eight years as vice president and nearly 20 years in public life before that, Bush and his closest advisers could come up with no simple reason to give the voters for presenting him with a second term.

So, too, Hillary Clinton. Whatever Trump’s manifold weaknesses, that is what he had in abundance — Make America Great Again.

And Hillary? It was the empty box all over again.

Really? “I’m With Her” and “Ready for Hillary” and H with an arrow through it (that took three months to design) weren’t enough to put her over the top? But she had top men working for her behind the scenes. Top men.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, PERPETUATING-INEQUALITY EDITION: Why Do Ivy League Schools Get Tax Breaks? How The Richest US Colleges Get Richer.

Given that inequality is the worst problem facing American society, except maybe for climate change and misgendering, there’s only one thing to do: Abolish the Ivy League!

TRANSPARENCY: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discusses USAFacts, his “10-K for government”

GeekWire: Your new project is called USAFacts. You’ve described it as a 10-K for government. Can you explain what it is?

Steve Ballmer: USAFacts is an initiative, if you will — which we’ll publish in PDF, we’ve got a nice website, a lot of different things — but it’s an initiative designed to really simplify and give clear focus to what’s going on with our government. How much money do we take in? How much money do we spend? Against what set of goals? And what kind of outcomes does government get? We take a whole new perspective. We innovated in a number of ways. You won’t find anything like it on the web. We innovated in terms of taking a decision-maker focus — being goal-oriented, not program-oriented.

We looked at the Constitution and said, “what’s the mission of government? Let’s break it down by mission and ask how we’re doing.” The 10-K analogy isn’t bad, but unlike a business, it’s about what you achieve for the citizens first and then how you pay for it as opposed to making money, if you will, or making a profit. We are very citizen-oriented, so it’s not just what the government does for citizens overall, but it’s what the government actually does for specific groups of citizens. And so we look at 10 different groups of citizens and we say, “How does what government do impact a variety of different citizen types?” And that’s kind of what we are.

Now if only Washington would look at the Constitution and say, “What’s the mission of government?”

NEW YORK MAGAZINE: FOX NEWS HAS DECIDED BILL O’REILLY HAS TO GO.

No word yet when O’Reilly becomes a member of the Kennedy or Clinton clans, however.

WHAT… WHAT? Boys Punching Girls: Feminism’s Big Win.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1441: Lois Lerner Remains Relevant On Tax Day.

U.S. DIPLOMATIC STRATEGY FOR DENUCLEARIZING NORTH KOREA: My latest Creators Syndicate column. (Yes, it has a credible military spine, to include Trump’s cruise missile strike in Syria.)

BALANCE: China Eases Capital Controls As Dollar Weakens.

This first easing of capital flight measures comes as “China’s leaders and financial markets feel more confident that pressure on the yuan and the country’s foreign exchange reserves has diminished, thanks largely to a pullback in the surging U.S. dollar.” It also comes at a time when increasingly more Chinese companies have complained they are unable to consummate offshore M&A due to the PBOC’s limit on how much capital they can park offshore.

In March the U.S. owner of Dick Clark Productions Inc said that one of its affiliates terminated an agreement to sell assets to Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, with Reuters reporting earlier the deal was under pressure amid tight scrutiny by Beijing on outbound deals.

Facilitating Beijing’s decision has been the steep drop in the US Dollar in 2017. As a reminder, the yuan slumped around 6.5% against the USD last year, but has since firmed nearly 1% in 2017, defying many analysts’ expectations of further depreciation, and benefiting from Trump’s recent attempt to talk down the dollar, no matter how hard Mnuchin may try to deny it. Suggesting that Yuan appreciation may just be getting started, a Reuters poll earlier this month indicated investors likely increased their bullish bets on the yuan to the most since July 2015.

China had reportedly dug deep into its multi-trillion dollar foreign reserves to keep the yuan propped up.

FAILURE TO ASSIMILATE: Europe’s Discontented Turks.

About 1.4 million expatriate Turks voted in Turkey’s referendum to grant President Erdogan near-dictatorial powers, with three quarters of them residing in Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. These Turkish voters, living in some of Europe’s most liberal countries, overwhelming cast their ballots for Erdogan’s illiberal reforms of Turkish society. . . .

Not only did these European Turks vote far more heavily in favor of Yes than their countrymen back home (the domestic vote was 51.18% Yes, 48.82% No), they also voted more heavily Yes than just about any other Turkish expatriate community. In the U.S. and U.K. Turks voted No by about 84% and 80%, respectively.

Life in liberal Europe is not having the impact people hoped—Turks in Europe are not any less nationalistic, less authoritarian or less Islamist than their compatriots at home—rather they are more of all these things. The Turkish minority in Germany is one of the longest established Islamic minorities in Europe, going back to the 1960s when labor shortages first led Germany to recruit workers from Turkey. And modern Turkey has long had significantly higher levels of education and affluence than most of the North African states from which many other Islamic immigrants to Europe have come. If assimilation is failing with long established Turks in affluent, full employment Germany, what can we expect with other communities in less prosperous European countries?

Nothing good.

CHANGEMENT: Le Pen Vows to Quit the EU, End Mass-Migration.

Defending her campaign promise to take France out of the European Union, Le Pen said, “France has the right to regain its national sovereignty, its freedom to decide for itself.”

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, most polls show Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron running neck-and-neck with each candidate securing between 22 and 24 percent of the votes. Meanwhile, conservative François Fillon and communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon have consolidated their positions and could cross the 20-percent mark.

According to French election rules, if no candidate manages to get 50 percent of the votes in the first round, which is most likely this time, the top two candidates face each other in a second run-off. Le Pen and the centrist Macron are expected to make it to the second round of the presidential election scheduled for May 7.

This doesn’t seem like the year for centrists.

BANNED AT SEA: Venezuela’s crude-stained oil tankers.

In the scorching heat of the Caribbean Sea, workers in scuba suits scrub crude oil by hand from the hull of the Caspian Galaxy, a tanker so filthy it can’t set sail in international waters.

The vessel is among many that are constantly contaminated at two major export terminals where they load crude from Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA. The water here has an oily sheen from leaks in the rusty pipelines under the surface.

That means the tankers have to be cleaned before traveling to many foreign ports, which won’t admit crude-stained ships for fear of environmental damage to their harbors, port facilities or other vessels.

The laborious hand-cleaning operation is one of many causes of chronic delays for dozens of tankers that deliver Venezuela’s principle export to customers worldwide, according to three executives of the state-run firm, eight employees of maritime firms that contract with PDVSA and Thomson Reuters vessel-tracking data. Other reasons include delayed repairs and impoundments by service providers that are owed money by cash-strapped PDVSA.

There is absolutely nothing socialism doesn’t leave worse than it found, including the very oil tankers which (barely) keep Venezuela’s socialist regime afloat.

RACE IN AMERICA: A White Cop’s Experience Policing a Black New Jersey Neighborhood.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases Freshly Updated Each Hour.

Plus, Save Big on Amazon Bestsellers by Category.

And don’t miss Big Savings in the Kindle Daily Deals.

Also, fresh savings on Today’s Digital Deals.

CHANGE: Trump signs executive order tightening rules on H1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers.

CAIR, DOING ITS JOB: Council on American Islamic Relations, Unindicted Co-Conspirator in Terror Financing, Opposes Mark Green Nomination.