Major corrections on Giuliani raid and other commentary

Media watch: Major Corrections on Rudy Raid

“The Washington Post, New York Times, and NBC News all issued corrections over the weekend, saying that Rudy Giuliani did not receive a direct warning from the FBI that he was a target of a Russian disinformation campaign,” reports Slate’s Daniel Politi. All three had made the claim in stories of last week’s FBI raids on the ex-mayor’s home and office, all citing anonymous sources. In response, “Giuliani is now calling on the media outlets to ‘reveal their sources who lied and targeted an American Citizen.’ ”

Budget expert: Joe’s Spending Deception

President Biden is using accounting gimmicks to make his proposed spending “look smaller” and tax revenue “larger,” cautions ex-Treasury official Bruce Thompson at the Washington Examiner. The actual cost of his American Jobs Plan over 10 years is “at least $3.5 trillion,” not the advertised $2 trillion; its revenue, after tax hikes, $1.7 trillion. So “only about half” the spending is paid for. In all, “the real projected cost of the three Biden spending plans is at least $7.2 trillion” over 10 years, less than half covered by tax hikes. And that doesn’t include interest on the higher deficits, likely “hundreds of billions” more.

Gadfly: So Now Travel Bans Are OK?

National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes that liberal media were initially hostile to President Donald Trump’s travel bans starting Jan. 31, 2020. Ron Klain, a top Joe Biden associate who’s now White House chief of staff, called banning Chinese travel to the US “premature.” “In his speeches in January, February, and March of 2020,” Biden “kept denouncing Trump’s ‘xenophobia’ during this period.” And “on March 12, 2020, Biden tweeted: ‘A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.’ ” His campaign started endorsing the bans in April, and travel from China, South Africa, most of Europe, Brazil and now India is banned under the new prez. Bottom line: “You can’t say: ‘Travel bans are okay when my guy enacts them, but represent paranoid xenophobia when your guy enacts them.’ ”

Libertarian: No ‘Equity’ in Prez’s School Policy

“Despite their professed goals, Democrats’ pandemic policies have widened disparities between races,” notes Reason’s Matt Welch. Take education: President Biden’s Centers for Disease Control head, Rochelle Walensky, said data suggest “schools can safely reopen,” but then was obliged to meet with the two top teachers’ union chiefs, who insist schools can’t reopen without extra federal funding. Rather than follow the science and release recommendations to “scrap the 6-foot rule and delink school-reopening from community spread,” the CDC instead claimed schools “operating under a 3-foot standard were objectively unsafe” and set a community-spread standard for full reopening that “disqualified more than 90 percent of American schools.” Yet a McKinsey study estimates “the shift to remote learning just from mid-March to June last year cost students of color three to five months of education and white students one to three months.” And white-majority districts are three times as likely to have some in-person learning than minority-majority districts.

Conservative: The Future With Biden

“After a hundred days of President Biden,” most Americans have figured out that he “needs as many fabricated enemies as he can find; otherwise, his speeches, his demeanor, his agenda are little more than absurdities” that “cannot stand or fall on their own merits,” argues Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. Biden will try “to ram through the hardest left-wing agenda in nearly 90 years, to call it bipartisanship and to demonize any who object as infrastructure racists, climate racists, immigration racists, voting racists and stimulus racists.” And he’ll rail that it’s “legions of Russian colluders, racists, insurrectionists and Jim Crow revivalists under every American bed” who are the “impediments to fundamental transformation” because “that is the Biden way.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board