FASTER, PLEASE: Donors and Drug Makers Offer $500 Million to Control Global Epidemics. “Stung by the lack of vaccines to fight the West African Ebola epidemic, a group of prominent donors announced Wednesday that they had raised almost $500 million for a new partnership to stop epidemics before they spiral out of control. The partnership, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, will initially develop and stockpile vaccines against three known viral threats, and also push the development of technology to brew large amounts of vaccine quickly when new threats, like the Zika virus, arise.”

AND THUS SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE BECOMES THE KITSCH* VARIETY SHOW IT ONCE MOCKED: SNL Sings ‘To Sir With Love’ In Honor of President Obama: “At the end of the song, the two of them presented [a poster of Obama in the background] with a present: a tea mug saying ‘world’s greatest president.’ The two offered their last goodbyes, though Zamata couldn’t help but slip in a ‘don’t go’ amid the thank-you’s.”

Compare that to the show’s first season, which brutally mocked Gerald Ford via his press secretary, who stupidly agreed to host the show, not knowing what he was in for, with one of the writers admitting afterwards, “The President’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”

As Sean Davis of the Federalist quipped on Twitter today, “Guys, I think DPRK News [the parody North Korean propaganda Twitter feed] might have hacked SNL.” Twitchy accurately concludes that “Between attacking a 10-year-old kid and this LAME Obama tribute, SNL really just sucks.”  Just as its surprisingly funny sketch immediately after the election predicted, SNL has retreated deep into the safe space woobie known as The Bubble.

* In every sense of the word.

DISEASES: These are the 3 diseases scientists say we really need to worry about becoming epidemics.

IN DALLAS, “ANARCHISTS” HANG TRUMP IN EFFIGY.

I guess in the post-Obama era, nooses are no longer always and everywhere about racism.

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BECKET ADAMS: It has been a really bad week for journalism.

It has been a particularly embarrassing week for the press, and it’s only Saturday.

For an industry that’s as disliked and distrusted as Congress, there’s a lot of work that media need to do to win back viewers’ trust. There’s no room for error, especially now that there’s a subgenre of “news” that has zero basis in fact, and is created from thin air for the sole purpose of generating cash.

But learning to be more careful and even-handed is apparently difficult for some in media, and this week was especially rough for newsrooms that are already struggling to regain credibility.

In no particular order, here are some of the most embarrassing media moments from this week.

Read the whole thing. Plus:

ROGER SIMON: The Pointless Paranoia of the Women’s Marches. “The success of the demonstrations in terms of size attests to the power of mutually reinforced paranoia.” The Democrats are always trying to paint Republicans as the preacher in Footloose, but that’s never been as ridiculous as when talking about Donald Trump.

What’s the motivation? Well, Tom Hayden started the anti-nuclear movement quite consciously as a way to preserve the infrastructure built up in the anti-Vietnam War protests. I suspect that this is about keeping up Hillary’s woman-card machinery for the post-election era, just as the Black Lives Matter protests are mostly about keeping up the position of the urban black wing of the Democrat coalition in the post-Obama era. In both cases, the real point is intra-Democratic Party positioning.

Well, that and the travails of entitled women with MFA’s who were comfortably supported by their political-appointee husbands until — unexpectedly! — Democratic hegemony didn’t turn out to be as stable as they thought. As a friend on Facebook notes, this story seems calculated to reinforce Trump supporters’ views about who’s marching and why, and it’s not pretty.

The New York Times’ lack of self-awareness is easy to mock, but impossible to top.

SCOTT SHACKFORD: Hey Progressives: You Can Fight DeVos, but You Can’t Stop School Choice: Ignoring this populist movement does not help the left with families.

It’s telling that a lot of criticism of Betsy DeVos as Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Education are about things like the fact that she didn’t send her children to public schools and that she’s not terribly familiar with the vast federal legal bureaucracy overseeing public education.

These are critiques that come also entirely from those who are embedded within the entrenched public education system and who have a stake in maintaining and expanding the status quo. Some senators seem aghast at the idea that DeVos was unfamiliar with all sorts of federal laws about how local schools are required to behave in order to receive federal funding.

But this just puts DeVos on the same footing as everybody outside the education system who have to interact with it and feel little control. While there are indeed parents who are familiar with these federal regulations because they have kids with special needs, this approach on DeVos feels very much like an attempt to keep the Department of Education under the control of insiders.

In reality, many, many parents want to make the same choices for their children as DeVos did, and it has nothing to do with them being rich or overly Christian. School unions and the politicians they bankroll may be able to stop DeVos’ nomination, but they can’t stop the growth of school choice and what it means, because parents love it.

And we’ve got the numbers to show it. The Reason Foundation’s report on school choice and privatization for 2016 shows yet another major increase in the number of families sending their kids into charter school programs.

Progressives depend on teachers’ unions, and giving parents choice will speed up the K-12 Implosion.

WELL, THAT’S DIFFERENT: Majority of 230 protesters arrested on Inauguration Day will face 10 years in prison and $25k fine as US attorney says they will be charged with felony rioting. Check out the photos.

More here from CBS.

JOE BATTENFELD: Donald Trump ushers in age of people first, pols second. “The network anchors and pundits were mortified — seemingly stunned by Trump’s refusal to deliver empty promises like healing the nation and reaching out to Democrats and those who opposed him. But Trump didn’t reach out to Republicans either, which no doubt infuriated more than a few GOP lifers in Congress.”

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MICHAEL BARONE: Trump’s Inauguration Is Not Without Precedent.

Jackson was regarded as a wild man, impetuous, unfit for the presidency, by Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. Each surely preferred the scholarly, internationally experienced Adams.

Similarly, all of Trump’s three eight-year predecessors — Clinton, Bush, Obama — take a similar view of Trump, though all three accepted invitations to his inauguration. But many other presidents — Lincoln, both Roosevelts, plus some duds — had no support from living predecessors. Trump is not quite so unprecedented as many of those unversed in history think.

Nope.

WHY NOT? IT’S BEEN VERY SUCCESSFUL IN THE U.S. AND BRITAIN, AND THE EUROPEAN MEDIA SCENE IS EVEN MORE STAGNANT: Breitbart to open bureaus in Berlin and Paris.

Right-wing website Breitbart News is opening up shop in Berlin and Paris, according to an Axios report.

The move could broaden the website’s political reach at a time of growing nationalist sentiment in Europe and the U.S.

In Germany, Breitbart will seek to criticize Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open borders policy and its role in admitting refugees into Europe, according to Axios.

And in France, the controversial news organization will throw its support behind nationalist presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, according to the report.

Breitbart already has a bureau in London, using the installation to promote and support the Brexit movement last year.

And, of course, the more stagnant and PC the media scene is, the more power a new entrant that’s different will possess. There’s a lesson there. . . .

IT’S JUST CALLED FASCISM: Beware The Rise Of Left-Wing Authoritarianism.

There were punches thrown, limos set ablaze, and windows smashed amid violent protests in D.C. the day of President Trump’s inauguration. But in Seattle the fury led to a shooting, as leftist radicals tried to shut down a speech by Breitbart.com tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos. A 34-year-old man suffered what sources described as a “life-threatening” gunshot wound to the abdomen. He was taken to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center in critical condition.

A suspect has been arrested, but police have yet to say anything about his background or the context of the shooting. (Early reports described the shooter as a 50-year-old Asian male.) The bloodshed occurred when crowds that had been protesting Trump converged on the University of Washington campus to redirect their rage at Yiannopolous. A heavy police presence ensured that the speaking event went ahead, as protests continued outside. Yiannopolous interrupted his talk when word of the shooting broke. Then he resumed, saying, “If we don’t continue, they have won.”

Whether the shooting was politically motivated or simply a spontaneous act inspired by the charged atmosphere of the protests, the radicals who have created these conditions should pause to think about blowback. Sensible progressives and middle-of-the-road liberals should also ask themselves some tough questions about whether they oppose political violence and censorship half as much as they abjure Trump. If they do, they should be even more quick than conservatives to condemn what has been happening from D.C. to Seattle.

There is an obvious irony in the use of brownshirt tactics by people who think of themselves as “anti-fascist.”

Oh, it’s more than ironic. But yeah.

NONSENSE, LEFTY VIOLENCE IS ALWAYS JUSTIFIED: Alt-Right Leader Richard Spencer Got Punched in the Face, and That’s Wrong. “Spencer holds truly reprehensible views, and he deserves less of the media’s attention. But he doesn’t deserve what he got today. Violence is never okay, no matter how despicable its target. Striking Spencer isn’t just morally wrong—it’s tactically foolish. It allows him to play the victim. It directs the spotlight toward him. And, inevitably, it grants him sympathy. Don’t fight fascism by acting like a fascist.”

They don’t want to fight fascism. They just want to be sure that it’s their fascism that comes out on top.