Not Secret: In a political break for President Joe Biden, classified documents have been found at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence. It’s beginning to look like a trend.

 A Pence representative told The National Archives in a letter that the documents were “inadvertently boxed and transported” to the former vice president’s home at the end of the Trump administration. The letter said Pence didn’t know about the existence of the documents.

  Pence has previously said he was “confident” that he had no secret documents in his possession. He told ABC News in November, “There’d be no reason to have classified documents, particularly if they were in an unprotected area.”

  Biden is under fire for having secret documents in his home and a former private office. And, of course, Donald Trump is under investigation for deliberately taking documents and refusing for a year to return them. Regardless of motive, it’s clear that the National Archives and The White House do not have a reliable tracking system for sensitive documents.

The War Room: In a breakthrough for Ukraine, Germany says it will send in 14 Leopard tanks. This opens the door for other European countries to give Ukraine some of their own Leopards barely in time for an expected spring offensive by the Russians. Ukraine has been using Soviet-era tanks.

  “This decision follows our well-known line of supporting Ukraine to the best of our ability,” German Chancellor Scholz said in Berlin. “We are acting internationally in a closely coordinated and concerted fashion.”

  Anonymous US sources are telling the press that the  Pentagon will also send M1 tanks, making an announcement as soon as today.

  Ukraine’s military commander, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, has said that his army needs about 300 Western tanks and 600 armored fighting vehicles to make a difference.

  These modern tanks can make a big difference for Ukraine, but they are not something that can be just driven off the lot into combat. Training for use of the Leopard 2 is said to take about three months, the more complicated M1, about six months.

Twister: Damage from a tornado in Pasadena, Texas outside Houston is said to be “catastrophic.” The twister ripped open houses, tossed cars, trucks and trees, and even turned a freight train on its side. Tens of thousands of people are reported to be without power this morning.

Swifties United: Evidently someone on the Senate Judiciary Committee couldn’t get tickets to the Taylor Swift Concert tour because the committee held a hearing yesterday on the ticketing industry, particularly Ticketmaster, which presided over the Swift ticket chaos last year.

  Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which put on more than 40,000 events around the world in pre-pandemic 2019 and sold 485 million tickets. In November, millions of Swift fans overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s website, causing outages, dropped connections, randomly emptied “carts,” and waits lasting hours.

  Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said to Joe Berchtold, president of Live Nation Entertainment, “Mr. Berchtold, I’m not against big, per se. I’m against dumb. The way your company handled the ticket sales with Ms. Swift was a debacle.”

  The committee is questioning whether Ticketmaster is so big and dominant that they thought they could get away without upgrading their system to handle something as massive as the Taylor Swift phenomenon.

  Live Nation has been before Congress before. They are operating under a consent decree — a kind of probation — they were placed under when they merged with Ticketmaster in 2010. What they have is a vertical monopoly, something once forbidden, in which they control the product  — the concerts — and the outlet through which they are sold.

  Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said, “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.”

Google This: The Justice Department and eight states have sued Google, accusing the company of being a monopoly and demanding a breakup of the search giant’s ad-technology business.  It’s the Biden administration’s first major legal challenge to one of the tech giants.

  “Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches,” the Justice Department said in its complaint, filed in federal court in Virginia. New York, California, and Virginia are among the states that joined the suit.

Statuary: The Oscar nominations are out along with the annual gossip and commentary. Tom Cruise was snubbed for a Best Actor nomination for his Top Gun sequel and Ana DeArmas is nominated for the universally panned Marilyn Monroe pic, “Blonde.”

  “Till,” the film about the 1955 murder of a teenager that sparked the civil rights movement, was ignored. And the sci-fi hit “Everything Everywhere All at Once” got the most nominations, 11 of them.

  And the Best Picture nominees are …

“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Avatar: The Way of Water”
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
“Elvis”
“Everything Everywhere All at Once”
“The Fabelmans”
“Tár”
“Top Gun: Maverick”
“Triangle of Sadness”
“Women Talking”

Slopeside: American skier Mikaela Shiffrin yesterday broke Lindsey Vonn’s record, winning her 83rd World Cup race in Kronplatz, Italy.

  Shiffrin is now the most decorated woman in the history of competitive skiing. With a few more wins, she could be the winningest skier of all time. She has won two Olympic gold medals and has been world champion six times. Yesterday Shiffrin beat Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami by just .45 seconds in the giant slalom. 

  “It might take me a little bit to figure out what to say,” she said after the race. “I don’t know what to say right now.”   

Below the Fold: In response to all the controversy about secret documents in private possession, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said, “You got Trump, you got Pence, you got Biden … the only thing I think you’ll find in my house is a bunch of Chick-Fil-A bags on the floor.”

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