New York Magazine literally cropped all the black people out of this cover photo and then complained that “the entire room is white” https://t.co/gCatY1lZzG pic.twitter.com/VhoaiJhqg1
— Christopher Barnard (@ChrisBarnardDL) January 27, 2025
But wait, there's more! Ex-CNN, ex-MSNBC, ex-WaPo pundit Chris Cillizza has a mea culpa.
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— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) January 28, 2025
1/ I screwed up.
Back in May 2020, I wrote how Anthony Fauci had "crushed" Donald Trump's lab-leak theory for how Covid-19 originated
The CIA said over the weekend that they now believed the virus leaked from a lab.
So....a few thoughts: pic.twitter.com/2erhpTzquv
It's a 15-part twitter thread, I recommend you read it, and I think Cillizza deserves some credit for recognizing that he did, in fact, "screw up". Summary: back in the day, he participated in the MSM gang-bang on politicians (Trump, Tom Cotton) and others who thought (accurately, it turned out) that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Cillizza's "debunking" was based in his selective skepticism: he disliked Trump et. al., thought Fauci and his gang of puppets were credible.
And now he's sorry. But:
As far as I can tell, he hasn't done an "I screwed up" confession about (for example) his 2021 "debunking" of pols and pundits who were raising the alarm about Joe Biden's increasing decrepitude. He deemed that sort of thing "gross, lowest-common-denominator politics".
Cillizza says he's learned his "lesson". I'm not so sure. But I think the lesson we need to learn (or reinforce) is right up there in the headline.
Also of note:
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On a related matter… C. Bradley Thompson has a long, unpaywalled, retrospective on Covid: The Man-Made Assault on Civilization.
Covid was not an “act of God,” nor was it an act of Mother Nature. Covid was a man-made disaster. We know that now. It was created in a lab in Wuhan China, which received funding from U.S. taxpayers.
This man-made plague killed millions of people. This man-made crisis almost broke the world economy. This man-made catastrophe almost broke Western civilization. In a moment of mass hysteria (and that’s exactly what happened), the West lost its mind.
I have one question for you: if you knew in 2020 what you know now about Covid-19, its source, the effectiveness of masks, the vaccines, alternative medications, the lockdowns and the long-term effects of the lockdowns (including the propaganda and censorship that went with the lockdowns), would you do anything differently? If a similar kind of virus hit the United States again (and there is a likely chance of that happening), would you act as you did in 2020 or would you behave differently?
CBT has tons of links, check 'em out. Including a number of independent minds attempting to rebut the lab-leak hypothesis.
But to answer his "one question": I don't think I would have done anything much differently. I think taking the Moderna vaccine mitigated my Covid risk. I masked up at the store, but mostly to keep Mrs. Salad happy.
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The answer may surprise you! Tyler Cowen plugs his Bloomberg column: Is it a problem if Wall Street buys up homes?
The simpler point is this: If large financial firms can buy your home, you are better off. You will have more money to retire on, and presumably selling your home will be easier and quicker, removing what for many homeowners is a major source of stress.
And all of this makes it easier to buy a home in the first place, knowing you will have a straightforward set of exit options. You don’t have to worry about whether your buyer can get a mortgage. Homeowners tend to be forward-looking, and a home’s value as an investment is typically a major consideration in a purchase decision.
Tyler's entire column is apparently only readable if you create an account, which subscribes you to Bloomberg's newsletter. But the excerpts he posts are good.
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Skepticism is always warranted. And Dominic Pino supplies Some Reasons for Skepticism about Trump’s Colombia ‘Win’. It's in response to Jeffrey Blehar's favorable take. And (if you weren't paying attention, like me) it was about Trump's threat to place massive tariffs on Colombia's exports to us, in order to "encourage" Colombian president Gustavo Petro to accept the Colombian aliens we were attempting to return. He makes six points, here's number two:
The U.S. has a trade agreement with Colombia, signed in 2006. This agreement was one in a wave of similar agreements between the U.S. and countries in South and Central America. Since the end of the Bush administration, the U.S. has let its commercial relationships within its own hemisphere languish, and China has taken the opportunity to burnish its trading ties with those countries. The U.S. should be seeking to undo China’s advances and deepen its ties with Latin America, and the appointment of a secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is fluent in Spanish and prioritized Latin America during his time in the Senate, is an encouraging sign on that front. But if the U.S. is going to treat Colombia this way, despite a long-standing trade agreement and official status as a major non-NATO ally, it could deter other Latin American countries from taking any U.S. commitments seriously.
But as Jeff Blehar noted, carrying a big stick is kind of an American tradition in dealing with countries to our south.
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Nine days into Trump II, and eggs are still way expensive! What the hell, Orange Man? Joe Lancaster talks us down from the partisan edge: Like Biden, Trump does not control the price of eggs. (And it's a good thing he doesn't.)
Just this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), along with 20 other House and Senate Democrats, sent Trump a letter complaining that he had not focused on food prices in his first week in office: "You have tools you can use to lower grocery costs and crack down on corporate profiteering, and we write to ask if you will commit to using those tools to make good on your promises to the American people."
Republicans, on the other hand, solely blamed Biden for rising costs. Granted, the massive increase in federal spending during the COVID-19 pandemic did contribute to the 2022 spike in inflation—one analysis found that 42 percent of the inflation could be attributed to government spending—but plenty of that spending happened under Trump, as well.
Collectively, the Trump and Biden stimulus bills "amounted to something like 20% of GDP," Desmond Lachman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told USA Today. "That is the largest fiscal stimulus we've had in peacetime. That, I think, is a big part of the story."
Besides, inflation alone can't explain the price of eggs: According to the Consumer Price Index, the price of food as a whole increased 2.5 percent during 2024 while eggs rose a whopping 36.8 percent. Federal spending alone would not cause the price of eggs to so heavily outstrip all other food.
Eggsactly right.
But I couldn't help but grin at Senator Warren's demand that Trump "crack down" to lower egg prices. Unfortunately her letter did not follow that up with "(no pun intended)".
Senator Liz really likes cracking down. See the relevant Google hits.