YESTERDAY: IRS payment site crashes hours before Tax Day filing deadline.

POLITICO SPIN: “Republicans jumped on the glitch” after “years of budget cuts.”

BYRON YORK: On James Comey and what the FBI thought about Michael Flynn.

In his ABC interview, fired FBI Director James Comey was asked about reports that he told Congress, in March 2017, that the FBI agents who interviewed Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn did not think Flynn had lied to them — even though Flynn, several months later, pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI.

Did Comey tell lawmakers that? Here is the exchange between Comey and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: There’s been some reporting that — at —at — at one point you told the Congress that the agents who interviewed Mike Flynn didn’t believe that he had lied.

COMEY: Yeah, I saw that. And that — I don’t know where that’s coming from. That — unless I’m — I — I — said something that people misunderstood, I don’t remember even intending to say that. So my recollection is I never said that to anybody.

Comey’s statement directly contradicts this report, by me, from Feb. 12.

He’s not trustworthy.

JUXTAPOSED: Verbatim: Weinstein Pulitzer Praise … and Kendrick Lamar Lyrics. Ouch!

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: New high school history textbook teaches Trump is mentally ill and his supporters are racists.

DAVID HOGG’S MAIN CONSTITUENCY IS MEDIA MATTERS, AND MEDIA MATTERS’ MAIN CONSTITUENCY IS LEFTY JOURNALISTS: The Hill: Ingraham’s ratings spike a wake-up for advertisers.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuelan farms have begun feeding their workers — so they don’t faint from hunger.

“I have to make the decision between buying gallons of gas for my tractors or having enough food for my guys,” said Arzola, wearing a large-brimmed straw hat in the midday heat.

“They started to come to work so hungry they were almost fainting,” he said.

In a country where hunger has become so commonplace that Venezuelans have lost an average of 11 kilos, or about 24 pounds, the idea of farmers reducing their production sounds counter-intuitive and even inhumane.

But with Venezuela in a steep economic crisis — and no end in sight — farmers and farmworkers have found themselves making that difficult calculation as the cost of running a farm has jumped. Back in November, Arzola had to pay 80,000 bolivares — at that time, about 75 cents — for a liter of oil. Last month, the price shot to a staggering 1.6 million bolivares, or about $7. That means Arzola cannot afford to expand his business. If he does, he would not be able to feed his own workers.

If the workers are too weak to keep up the pace, Arzola’s farm would yield much less. In addition, the hungry workers, in order to survive, would look for work at a different farm that would feed them.

Socialism is about protecting the little guy from fat cats.

I REMEMBER WHEN HIS TWEETS WERE GOING TO BRING ABOUT WORLD WAR III: South Korean President Credits Trump With Bringing North Korea To The Table.

UNPOSSIBLE, HE USES NONE OF THE APPROVED STOCK PHRASES: Roger Simon: Trump Vastly Better than Obama at Foreign Policy.

Now that we have learned CIA director and secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jung-un over Easter, it is time to acknowledge the obvious: the foreign policy of political novice Donald Trump has been vastly more successful that that of the supposedly experienced Barack Obama.

And vastly is an understatement. Obama’s foreign policy was a disaster, beginning with the peculiar apology tour that mystified much of its Middle Eastern audience, through the yet more peculiar (misspelled) reset button with Russia that further mystified Sergei Lavrov, on to Obama’s overheard whisper to Medvedev telling Putin he would be more accommodating on missile defense after the election (imagine the apoplectic reaction of our media if Trump did that!) to the Libyan war leading to the assassination of Qaddafi (the only Arab leader to voluntarily denuclearize) that created a failed state and a raft of refugees to Italy and elsewhere, and, of course, the rapid exit from Iraq that gave rise to ISIS.

And this omits the equally egregious examples – the failure to enforce the red line on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, about which he naively believed Putin, and the never-signed, never published Iran Deal itself, which has done nothing but enrich the mullahs who wreak havoc from Venezuela to Yemen. This duplicitous and unverifiable non-agreement prolonged the monstrous Syrian civil war, causing the greatest refugee crisis since World War II and changing the character of Europe possibly forever.

There’s more but you get the point. Not even Jimmy Carter had that bad a record. And this is without Obama’s sickening lack of response to the freedom demonstrators in Iran. (“Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?” Well, we know.)

And Trump?

To begin with, there’s the near-annihilation of ISIS. Then there’s the renewed alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States without, miracle of miracles, the ostracism of Israel. Indeed, while announcing the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem (with little protest by ME standards), the Israeli-Saudi alliance has flourished. Does this mean an solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is imminent? Probably not. But at least the decades of moribund unchanging policy since Oslo have finally been bypassed and new perspectives made possible.

Read the whole thing.

BLUE STATE BLUES: Trump’s tax cut not for everyone: 1 million Californians will owe $12 billion more next year.

They’re the Californians who will lose a collective $12 billion because the new law caps a deduction they have been able to take for paying their state and local taxes, according to a new analysis by the Franchise Tax Board.

Very wealthy Californians earning more than $1 million a year will pay the lion’s share of that money, with 43,000 of them paying a combined $9 billion.

But some middle-class Californians will pay more, too.

About 751,000 households with incomes under $250,000 probably will owe more tax. All together, they’ll owe an extra $1.1 billion.

They need to take their complaints to Sacramento, because the rest of us are done with subsidizing Californians’ tax-and-spend lifestyle.

THE THING IS, THEY’RE NOT TRUMP’S WAR POWERS, THEY’RE THE PRESIDENT’S. Gene Healy and John Glaser: Repeal, Don’t Replace, Trump’s War Powers. And presidents have had them for a long time because Congress went along. Trump’s own employment of them so far has been rather modest by recent historical standards.

THAT NEW CAR SMELLS: Tesla idling Model 3 shows Musk unable to make fixes.

The hiatus is another setback for the first model Musk has tried to mass-manufacture. In addition to trying to bring electric vehicles to the mainstream, the chief executive officer had sought to build a competitive advantage over established automakers by installing more robots to quickly produce vehicles. Last week, he acknowledged “excessive” automation at Tesla was a mistake.

“Traditional automakers adjust bottlenecks on the fly during a launch,” Dave Sullivan, an analyst at AutoPacific Inc., said in an email. “This is totally out of the ordinary.”

“Shutting down for days on end during ramp is far from normal,” Kristin Dziczek, director of the industry, labor and economics group at the Center for Automotive Research, wrote in an email.

Eventually, the 400,000-plus people who put $1,000 deposits down on the Model 3 are going to want to take delivery of their cars — or of refund checks.

MEGAN FOX: Starbucks to CLOSE DOWN for Racial Training after Viral Video.

JOHN HINDERAKER: MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO: ANATOMY OF A SMEAR. “I was not surprised to get an email from Solvejg Wastvedt, a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, on March 5. Ms. Wastvedt said that she wanted to interview me. . . . She came to my office and interviewed me for around 16 minutes. It is my practice to record interviews with reporters. This is our conversation in its entirety.”

YEAH, I DO WANT THIS BOOK.  UNFORTUNATELY UNLIKE ALMA, I NO LONGER READ GERMAN EASILY:  Yep, Probably not an Accident…

THAT’S BECAUSE THE POST PARKLAND ACTIVISM WAS LARGELY MEMOREX:  Despite Post-Parkland Activism, Youth Not Registering To Vote.

OH, DON’T WORRY. THEY’LL EXPECT US TO MAKE IT UP TO THEM:  The Cost of “The Resistance”: For CA, It’s $12 Billion.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  Schumer Virtue Signals While Hollywood Diversity Burns.

WAIT, WHAT?  21st century exorcists learn to cast out demons with a cellphone.

BECAUSE HE’S THE CRAZY ONE… TOTALLY!  Comedian wants restraining order against Trump over nuke threats.

WITH 2 BILLION FB USERS, DOUBLING MONITORS TO 20K MEANS EACH IS MONITORING 100,000 USERS (FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY?):   Why Zuckerberg’s testimony doesn’t add up.

NEWS FROM 1950:  Divorce is contagious — and it happened to me.

WHEN THE ZUCK CLOSES THE DOOR HE OPENS A LITTLE WINDOW:  This is how easy it is to flout Facebook’s new privacy rules.

THIS IS CNN: Millions Fall for Fake CNN Death Hoax Reporting Barbara Bush’s Passing a Day Early.

AT AMAZON, Deals On Most Wished For Items.