GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Downtown SF Whole Foods Made Weekly Emergency Calls Ahead of Closure.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Biden Officials to Attend ‘Ethics Summit’ With TikTok Exec Involved In Surveillance of American Journalists.

Also: Obama’s Man in China Now Beijing’s Man in Washington.

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND: Inverse Jim Cramer Curse Strikes Again: This Time It’s Boeing.

SHOCKER: The Liberal Media’s Narrative on the Classified Docs Leaker Already Got Torched.

Pretty much every part of our establishment is made up of people who are highly politicized and also terrible at their alleged jobs.

APOLOGY LIGHT: Anheuser-Busch CEO offers flat apology following Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney backlash.

Anheuser-Busch’s top executive on Friday offered an apology flatter than a day-old Bud Light as the beer giant reels from the backlash over its sponsorship deal with controversial transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth said in press release titled “Our Responsibility To America.”

“We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”

Whitworth finally broke his silence over the brewing controversy but made no mention of the sponsorship deal with Mulvaney — which has led to calls for a boycott of the nation’s largest beer company.

He also didn’t address reports that senior executives were kept in the dark about the Mulvaney rollout.

Instead, Whitworth said he was “focused on building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage.”

“Moving forward, I will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation,” said Whitworth, a Harvard Business School graduate who served in the Marines and was a CIA officer.

The $132 billion beer company has seen its market value plummet by some $5 billion since the campaign was launched April 1.

As Matt Walsh tweeted in response to Whitworth’s non-apology apology:

The statement won’t satisfy their conservative customers because there is no apology or acknowledgment of wrong. And it won’t satisfy the Left because it doesn’t affirm transgenderism and admits at least (without using the word) that the trans issue “divides people.” They had a few options in dealing with this PR crisis. Out of all the options, they chose the one with the biggest downside and no upside. Geniuses.

The result was a spectacular ratio on Twitter last night: Bud Light resumes tweeting but gets majorly ratioed as Twitter users dunk on the woke beer brand.

GLENN GREENWALD: The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations.

On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post‘s long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks — which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws — that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now — in a new and genuinely shocking escalation — it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI’s work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves.

I’m so old, I can remember when whistleblowers and leakers were the stuff of legend in the media:

WELL, SURE, THE ELECTION IS STILL OVER A YEAR AWAY: Bird flu: Scientists find mutations, say threat is still low.

I DON’T THINK THE PEOPLE DEFENDING THE TRANS TEACHERS WOULD SUPPORT THIS:

As a 3rd grade teacher, I often talk about Jesus with my students, they are so excited to hear about my faith. They point to the cross on wall and ask me about the resurrection.

Some have gotten baptized in the sink, as long as they don’t tell their parents. It’s our secret.

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) April 13, 2023

MARK HEMINGWAY ON THE WEIRD LEFTIST CAMPAIGN AGAINST SUMMER JOBS: Teen Employment Isn’t Exploitation, But It Might Keep You From Becoming A Helpless Adult.

I guess that’s why they’re against it.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST ARE IN CHARGE: Great news: Pentagon still can’t explain “jackthedripper’s” access to leaked material. “None of the rest of us could explain how an enlistee in the Air National Guard got his hands on highly classified military and diplomatic intelligence leaked over the past few months. Now it turns out that the Pentagon doesn’t have a good answer for that question, either.”

RENEWABLES STRESS GRIDS: US grid interconnection backlog jumps 40%, with wait times expected to grow as IRA spurs more renewables.

OPEN THREAD: Comment away!

VASTLY OUTPERFORMING DESIGN EXPECTATIONS: 50 flights on Mars! Ingenuity helicopter’s record-setting hop is a giant leap for exploration.

TROUBLE CAN BE A GOOD THING: “Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Labor is in trouble.”

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Mike Pompeo Announces He’s Not Running for President in 2024, ‘Personal Decision.’

I THINK STEPHEN GREEN ALREADY HAS THIS: Experimental Probiotic May Prevent Organ Damage From Alcohol, Scientists Say.

WELL: Leaked Secret Documents Detail Up to Four Additional Chinese Spy Balloons.

BIDEN’S MALARKEY TOUR: “The world is going to hell with handbaskets handed out by the Biden administration and President Biden is making a fool of himself and the United States on tour in Ireland.”

Plus: “The reemergence of Hunter is an extravagant touch. You have to think he’s trolling us or putting his belief in his invulnerability on public display.”