GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When the Bad Guys Became the Good Guys.

Here in 2023, everyone knows that Richard Nixon resigned because he engaged in a massive cover-up of his administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, a story revealed by the reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein. But to watch ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN is to understand that in 1972 the connection between the break-in and the Nixon Government was never obvious, that the outcome of the story was by no means assured. In the beginning, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t have any idea what they had. They started with a weird penny-ante crime story and slowly and methodically followed it all the way to the White House. The result was a best-selling book and one of the greatest movies ever made.

Now compare that with the way our Media Coporations and Big Tech handled the Hunter Biden laptop story. No honest broker would suggest that the details revealed by the release of the laptop’s contents were any less suggestive of massive governmental corruption than was the initial fact pattern surrounding the Watergate break-in. Quite the contrary… the laptop arrived in the Media’s collective in-box with all the dots already connected. But we all know in our hearts that there will never be a big budget studio movie about The Hunter Biden laptop featuring an ensemble of the biggest movie stars of our time, no matter where that story leads.

Because the Bad Guys have become the Good Guys.

Read the whole thing.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Prosecutor Who Indicted Trump as a Political Stunt Calls House Panel Investigation a ‘Political Stunt.’

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Reporter Grills Jean-Pierre On Why Biden Won’t Hold Press Conferences.

Jean-Pierre spoke during Monday’s press briefing about Biden’s lack of interaction with reporters ahead of his trip to the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“The second question has to do with the lack of a press conference during the president’s upcoming trip, and the lack of a press conference that we see in general from this White House,” the reporter began. “I represent a news organization that owns 113 television stations, and a question that I’m often asked, and I don’t know the answer to, so I’ll ask you that question: Is the administration trying to protect the president from our questions? Please –”

“Absolutely not!” Jean-Pierre said. “Absolutely not.”

“So why the lack of any interaction in a formal setting, to have a press conference?” the reporter pressed.

For the same reason he campaigned from a basement in 2020: He isn’t up to the rigors of the job.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: The Democrats Don’t Want You to Read This Article About Their (Alleged) Ginormous Money Laundering Scam. “While the DOJ spends its time chasing ‘terrorist’ parents who attend school board meetings and mother-daughter ‘insurrection’ teams, individual straw donors are — apparently unwittingly — being used to make thousands of donations every year worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.”

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: U.S. Not Ready to Quickly Produce and Ship Weapon Systems, Panel Says. “The United States no longer has the capacity to quickly produce needed wartime assets, like 155 mm artillery shells, or to repair vital sophisticated systems, like radar, rapidly in theater, a panel of expert logisticians said last week.”

Better to discover this shortfall during somebody else’s shooting war, but the question remains whether we’re still serious enough to devote the resources to correct it.

BANANA REPUBLIC: Bombshell Docs Show Biden White House Directly Coordinated With FBI to Set up Trump Raid.

WITH LIES AND A COMPLIANT PRESS. NEXT QUESTION? Why Do Democrats Think They Can ‘Win’ the Crime Issue?

More seriously:

Research by John R. Lott Jr. highlights just how geographically concentrated the murder problem is in the United States. Of the more than 3,000 counties in the country, 52 percent had zero murders in 2020, while the 31 counties with the highest murder rates (the worst 1 percent) had 42 percent of the nation’s murders. Expand the focus to the worst 2 percent (62 counties), and these accounted for more than half (56 percent) of U.S. murders in 2020. Lott concluded: “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas …”

Yes, but what about “gun violence”? What about the inflammatory rhetoric of Democrats demonizing the National Rifle Association (NRA) as somehow to blame for America’s crime problem? Among other things, Lott took into account rates of firearm ownership, and found an inverse relationship between the prevalence of murder and rates of gun ownership: “According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, the household gun ownership rate in rural areas was 79% higher than in urban areas. Suburban households are 37.9% more likely to own guns than urban households. Despite lower gun ownership, urban areas experience much higher murder rates.”

So much for the correlation between gun ownership and crime. What do we know about the correlation between politics and crime? The five U.S. cities with the highest per capita murder rates are St. Louis (69.4 per 100,000 population), Baltimore (51.1), New Orleans (40.6), Detroit (39.7), and Cleveland (33.7). In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden got 82 percent of the vote in St. Louis, 87 percent in Baltimore, 83 percent in New Orleans, 94 percent in Detroit and 80 percent in Cleveland. In other words, the most dangerous cities in America are all Democratic Party strongholds.

Plus: “These facts are not difficult to discover, if anyone is willing to do a few Google searches, but you would probably have no idea about any of this if your source for news was ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Associated Press.”

As I said, Democrats will lie and the press will cover for them.

NO: Corporate Media Encourages COVID Slaves to ‘Forget Much of the Pandemic’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: FBI comes right out and says it: Don’t plug your phone in at airports. “The reason for this is ‘juice jacking,’ a hacking method that uses illegally altered USB outlets to skim smartphone data. Today, an official FBI Twitter account tweeted out a warning to travelers: ‘Avoid using free charging stations in airports, hotels, or shopping centers.'”

I have a power brick I bring for travel, just big enough for one good top-off. But battery life on most phones is so good now that I can’t remember the last time I used it, or anyone asked to borrow it.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: AOC’s ‘Small Brain/Big Mouth’ Syndrome Gets Worse Every Day. “America’s Dumbest Bartender has been given a platform to espouse her commie nonsense and never be challenged. That reinforces in her mind that she’s right, which she never is. Her farther than far left ideology is a freedom-choking weed that keeps on growing no matter what the weather is like.”

HMM: Russia posted a $29 billion deficit in the first quarter as energy revenue plummets — and it could spell trouble for the country’s military bills.

Russia’s finance ministry did not quantify the impact of the ban and price cap on Russian crude but the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finnish think tank, estimated in January that the ban and price cap was costing the Kremlin over $170 million a day.

In sharp contrast, Russia’s expenditure has seen a massive jump — the country’s spending jumped 34% to 8.1 trillion rubles over the same first quarter period, per the finance ministry data.

The Russian finance ministry did not explain why expenditures spiked so sharply, but the country’s defense spending went over budget by 54% in 2022, according to Gaidar Institute, an independent Moscow-based think tank, Reuters reported on April 4.

The country is likely to continue plowing money into defense and security, with combined spending expected to hit 9.4 trillion rubles in 2023, according to a Reuters budget analysis in November. That’s nearly one-third of the national budget.

But: Ukraine’s air defence could be ‘out of ammunition this week’ leaked US documents suggest.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I believe there’s a line in Jim Dunnigan’s How To Make War about how the least-appreciated thing about modern warfare is how wildly, crushingly expensive it is.

And, from the comments: “Just think, it is very likely that had Donald Trump been reelected in 2020 our petroleum producers would have driven Russia bankrupt without sanctions or any other horse shit like them, but simply by out competing Putin. It would been glorious for the US economy and citizens, and could have conceivably prevented Putin from invading Ukraine due to lack of funds. All that money and war machinery we are pissing down a rat hole in Ukraine could be doing something more productive and useful.”

Yep. I think it’s worth funding Ukraine to weaken Putin, but we could have done a better job of it via deterrence and drilling.

HE REALLY DOES: Steven Van Zandt Is Bruce Springsteen’s Guitarist. He Hates You. He Wants You Dead.

SHUT UP, PROLES: Very last week for German nuclear power enters, but most Germans consider nuclear exit a mistake. “No later than Saturday, April 15, the time has come: then Germany’s last three nuclear power plants will also close. This will make the nuclear exit decided in 2011 a reality. An opinion poll shows that the majority of Germans consider the exit a bad decision.”

AT THIS POINT, I’D BE SHOCKED IF THEY HADN’T: Explosive Revelation: Feds Potentially Instigated in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Violence.

TYLER O’NEIL: Transgender Hormones, Surgery Made Life Worse for These Men. They Back Florida’s Medicaid Rule to Protect Others.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: The Louisville Shooter’s Inconvenient Social Media Being Conveniently Scrubbed

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: The Mysterious Underground City Found in a Man’s Basement.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: BLM, Eco-harpies, Trans Loons, and Femi-nags Are All Marxists, But Christianity Is the Cure.

THE STASI NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD: Hundreds Of Former Feds Have Flocked To Jobs In Big Tech. “Google hired 130 former DOJ, DHS, CIA and FBI employees, the Daily Caller’s key term cursory search on LinkedIn found. Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, employed 47 people for those three entities who were previously at the DOJ, FBI or DHS. TikTok, the Chinese-based app embattled with national security concerns, employed 25 former DOJ, FBI, DHS or CIA employees. Twitter had 46 executives who had previously spent time working for the three-letter agencies.”

SLOW ROLL: Biden Reveals 2024 Plans — Sort of?

STRATEGERY: How Putin saved NATO.

When Finland cleared the last hurdle for NATO membership last week, major Western newspapers buried the story. Yet Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto justly celebrated ‘these historic days’—the end of 75 years of neutrality. As of this week, Finland is formally in, and Sweden, another eternal neutral, will soon follow, once Turkey stops blocking its membership.

Why would these two countries throng into an alliance that French President Emmanuel Macron diagnosed as being ‘brain dead’ only four years ago, and which former US President Donald Trump saw as ‘obsolete’ in 2017? The wisdom of the 18th-century British wit Samuel Johnson offers a broad answer here: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’

But there is an even pithier answer to this question: Vladimir Putin. The man who would be king of Europe has given NATO a new brain and a new lease on life.

What an irony! One of Putin’s many pretexts for subduing Ukraine was to stop NATO enlargement once and for all. Instead, by pushing two neutral Nordic countries into the alliance, he has achieved the opposite. NATO, now, has not been in better health for decades.

It isn’t just membership increasing. Poland is on track to have the largest (outside of Russia and Ukraine) and most modern military in Europe.

GO AWAY: Fauci Warns ‘Another Pandemic’ Could Come Just in Time for the 2024 Election.

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: New Details on Intelligence Leak Show It Circulated for Weeks Before Raising Alarm.

Sometime in January, seemingly unnoticed by the outside world, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post files—many labeled as top secret—providing details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about U.S. allies, such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics.

The documents, which appear to have numbered in the hundreds, stayed among the members of the tiny group on the Discord messaging platform until early March, when another user reposted several dozen of them to another group with a larger audience. From there, at least 10 files migrated to a much bigger community focused on the Minecraft computer game.

On Wednesday, with the U.S. government apparently still unaware, a Russian propaganda account on Telegram posted a crudely doctored version of one of the documents, alongside a few unedited ones.

It sure would be nice if we had an intelligence community more interested in gathering and protecting actual intelligence than in suppressing domestic “dissent.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Why Bud Light’s Woke Rebranding Will Probably Succeed.

BREAKING: Multiple Fatalities After Mass Shooting in Louisville, Kentucky.