FUNNY, I DON’T THINK MIKE ROWE HAS EVER DONE A DIRTY JOBS EPISODE ON THIS PROFESSION: Megan Rapinoe Calls Playing For U.S. Team ‘Worst Job In The World.’

“POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM FROM CULTURE,” Andrew Breitbart liked to say. But sometimes it isn’t, as when a political worldview has a distinct impact on the pop culture a city gets to enjoy: Sports: the latest victim of DC’s crimewave. The departure of the city’s pro basketball and hockey teams to Alexandria was so avoidable.

[DC Mayor Muriel] Bowser has done a U-turn in recent months after multiple botched reform efforts that were killed by Congress and even opposed by fellow Democrats, but even her “drug-free zone” proposals are receiving pushback from progressives on the council. And those policy changes won’t solve the disastrous state of DC policing, which has seen a net loss of 500 officers since 2020. In the past, the city offered nearly thirty officers to Capital One Arena during events to keep order — now, they only offer three.

The underlying problems driving this crime wave are obvious. Unemployment, which is particularly high among black residents, is a major problem. But so is chronic absenteeism in DC schools, which has never returned to pre-pandemic levels: it’s 43 percent for students in general, and 60 percent among high-schoolers.

It turns out that offering free tracking devices for when you’re carjacked isn’t enough to satisfy the demands of workers, citizens and visitors who want to be safe when having dinner a stone’s throw from the White House and Capitol Hill — or if they want to spend the high prices necessary to go out to a game at night with their family in the increasingly unsafe Chinatown area.

There are fundamental problems that the city faces beyond crime as it relates to the arena, which was built in the mid-1990s. The trend in the NBA in recent years has been that owners want to own not just an arena, but the surrounding area as well — the retail, restaurants, hotel and residences in an area that will offer far more income than games alone.

In his remarks at the announcement ceremony, the owner spoke of the positioning of the Alexandria site, located between Ronald Reagan Airport and right by a new Metro site, as “romantic,” with the appeal of starting on “seventy acres, and the ability to start with a clean slate.” No amount of money the city could offer could compete with that.

Meanwhile on the opposite coast, there’s another leftist-monopoly city with crime rates its local government isn’t willing to face: San Francisco Giants Lost Out on Shohei Ohtani in Part Due to Rampant Crime, Homelessness.

San Francisco’s struggles with rising crime, rampant drug use, and sprawling homeless camps have kept tourists away and led to businesses and residents fleeing the city.

Now, the downtown disorder is being blamed for deterring a big name from relocating to the Golden Gate City: Major League Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani.

Ohtani, a rare two-way talent who is both an elite hitter and pitcher, made news over the weekend when he announced he was signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He signed a record-breaking ten-year, $700 million contract with the team this week.

But news reports have indicated that the San Francisco Giants — the Dodgers’ biggest rival — were also all-in on trying to land Ohtani, and, in fact, offered him the exact same deal.

In an interview with the Athletic on Tuesday, one-time Giants All-Star catcher Buster Posey, who is now a member of the team’s executive board, suggested that San Francisco’s struggles with downtown degradation and lawlessness have played a role in preventing star players, including Ohtani, from signing with the team.

Posey said that Giants leaders tried to sell Ohtani on being part of the team’s storied history, and what joining the Giants could mean for the city. “I just feel that him coming to the Giants could have been transformative, obviously for the baseball team but it also would’ve given the city a boost that we’ve all been looking for,” Posey said.

While Ohtani never personally expressed concerns about the state of the city, there were some reservations in his camp, according to the Athletic. The Bay Area, according to the outlets, is perceived by many as damaged goods.

Former Power Line contributor Paul Mirengoff adds: Decline has consequences.

Some of the commentary about the move seems to assume that D.C. — the nation’s capital, after all — is entitled to host sports teams, or at least an NBA team given the city’s great affinity for basketball. Think again.

The basketball and hockey teams spent two decades in Maryland before moving to D.C. The football team has played its games in Maryland for more than 25 years. The entire D.C. area was without baseball for 35 long years.

Like every other jurisdiction in America, Washington, D.C. must compete to attract and retain businesses and taxpayers. Sure, D.C. has an enormous permanent industry — the federal government — but that’s not enough. Moreover, D.C. must even compete to keep some federal agencies from heading to the suburbs.

Every year is an audition. Washington, D.C., like so many other jurisdictions run by left-liberals (including neighboring Maryland), is failing its auditions. It is declining rapidly. And, as we can see from what’s almost certain to happen in Chinatown, the consequence of that decline will be more decline.

Both cities could tackle crime if they wanted to. But DC’s last Republican leader left office in 1961, and San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left in early 1964. As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 when Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer,” no matter what ancillary losses such decisions bring to those cities.

MEET THE TOTALLY BADASS REPUBLICAN MOM OF SEVEN RUNNING FOR THAT SANTOS SEAT.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? California’s latest insane gender policy takes effect next month.

Parts of California are so downtrodden that people need to consult “ poop maps ” to avoid human feces while walking outside, homelessness is rampant in major cities, and the cost of living is out of control. But California’s state government thinks now is the time to … regulate Toys “R” Us.

A law passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in 2021 is set to take effect in the new year , mandating “gender-neutral” toy sections in large toy retail stores. As the Washington Examiner reported after Newsom signed the bill, “Retail stores that fail to comply with the mandate risk being penalized with $250 fines for initial violations and $500 fines for all subsequent violations.”

Hey, remember last year, when the Orwellian Newsom tried to gaslight potential voters that California was “the freedom state?” Good times, good times.

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME THAT STATUES WERE JUST PROPERTY IN 2020: Christian Veteran Knocks Down, BEHEADS Statue to Satan in Iowa.

I hope he used methods that were approved by pro-statue toppling Popular Mechanics(!) in 2020: How to Topple a Statue Using Science.

And by pro-statue toppling historians back then as well: Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.

In 2021, the Washington Post assured its readers: Why knocking down statues is a tradition around the world. “Statues are hulking barometers of the values of society around them. In authoritarian countries those values are imposed from above. But in a democracy, von Tunzelmann makes clear, the public has the right to continually reassess and judge them, and perhaps find them wanting.”

Kurt Schlichter tried to warn the left in 2015: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules.

OUT ON A LIMB: Bill Clinton: Hillary’s 2016 campaign ‘could not sell p—y on a troop train:’ book.

YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Former NYT editor James Bennet: When the New York Times lost its way.

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

Of course, it’s not like there weren’t previous signs of the Gray Lady’s increasingly unconstrained relationship with the truth: NY Times editor after blaming Sarah Palin for incitement in the Tucson shooting: ‘The right is coming after us.’

Then, sometime shortly before midnight, Bennet sent an email to [Elizabeth] Williamson: “Are you up? The right is coming after us…” He must not have slept much that night because the following morning he had sent an email to his team at 5:08 am: “Hey guys — We’re taking a lot of criticism for saying that the attack on Giffords was in any way connected to incitement.… I don’t know what the truth is here, but we may have relied too heavily on our early editorials and other early coverage of that attack. If so, I’m very sorry for my own failure on this yesterday. … I’d like to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible this morning and correct the piece if needed.”

So if you’re following this closely, Bennet went from not knowing what was true in the early afternoon, to knowing in the evening that Palin was responsible as he rewrote the editorial, and then back to not knowing the following morning. The Times’ lawyers want to say that this proves it was all a mistake, i.e. he didn’t know he was wrong. But how can that be so if he stated he didn’t know the truth before the rewrite? Once he’d admitted that, wasn’t it his responsibility to research the connection before stating categorically that it existed? But Bennet claimed in his deposition that he never looked at any of the links provided to him, including the one Williamson had buried in her draft.

And note this quote from Bennet himself at the beginning of his essay:

“Are we truly so precious?” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020. I was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. America’s conscience had been shocked days before by images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, until he died. It was a frenzied time in America, assaulted by covid-19, scalded by police barbarism. Throughout the country protesters were on the march. Substantive reform of the police, so long delayed, suddenly seemed like a real possibility, but so did violence and political backlash. In some cities rioting and looting had broken out.

It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides.

“It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions.” If only the staffers manning the Times’ newsroom weren’t so woefully unprepared for fulfilling that mission brief by the spring of 2020.

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW, PART DEUX: Oakland menorah destroyed, thrown into Lake Merritt.

Why are cities that are monopolized by the party of tolerance for diversity such cesspits of bigotry?

SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW: Oakland business seeing surge in requests for bulletproof glass due to city’s crime.

An Oakland business is seeing an enormous uptick in business from customers requesting bulletproof glass. They say it’s due in part to crime in the city.

At East Bay Glass‘ warehouse in Oakland, the varieties of glass seem endless. But one item that’s not currently in stock due to it’s high cost – is bullet-resistant, ballistic glass.

“The bulletproof glass is 3/8th inch all the way to 2.5 inches, points out Joshua Pratchard, the general manager.

Video from manufacturer Armitek, which provides glass to Easy Bay Glass and installers across the country, shows how multiple shots aren’t enough to penetrate the product.

In recent months, ABC7 News has covered a number of stories involving stray bullets going into homes.

Gooder and harder, California: Oakland NAACP Blames ‘Defund the Police’ for Rampant Crime in City.

(Classical — and NSFW — reference in headline.)

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Harvard Announces Claudine Gay Will Remain As University Führer.

Complete with her own Charlottesville tiki torch!

nothing says “i’m not anti-Semitic” than standing in a crowd holding a TIKI TORCH https://t.co/Ruy44z1uHB

— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) December 14, 2023

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Panama Canal backlog risks chardonnay shortage.

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Defiant Hunter Biden Blows Off Subpoena, Bails on Congressional Testimony.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE, AMERICA: Drink your Doritos? Nacho cheese-flavored liquor is now a thing.

RIP: Andre Braugher, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Homicide: Life on the Street Star, Dies at 61.

OLD AND BUSTED: Journalists should learn to code.

The new hotness? Coders learn to create journalists!

See the highest quality AI footage in the world.

🤯 – Our generated anchors deliver stories that are informative, heartfelt and entertaining.

Watch the showcase episode of our upcoming news network now. pic.twitter.com/61TaG6Kix3

— Channel 1 (@channel1_ai) December 12, 2023

Max Headroom, call your office!

GERMAN SPORTSWEAR MANUFACTURER PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939: Sportswear giant Puma ends sponsorship of Israel national team.

“A WHITE MALE WOULD PROBABLY ALREADY BE GONE:” Former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain discusses the situation of Harvard president Claudine Gay.

SKYNET SMILES, WONDERS WHEN HE’LL BECOME PRESIDENT OF HARVARD: Sports Illustrated publisher fires CEO Ross Levinsohn in latest round of exec terminations following AI scandal.

Sports Illustrated fell into hot water in November after an article on science and tech news site Futurism accused the former sports news giant of using AI-generated content and author headshots without disclosing it to their readers.

The author’s names and bios did not connect to real people, Futurism reported.

Is that really all that important in 2023 Blue State America?

MISSOURI AG INVESTIGATING MEDIA MATTERS TARGETING TWITTER ADVERTISERS.

BUNKER TIME: Harvard Board Announces President Claudine Gay Will Stay in Role amid Backlash to Antisemitism Hearing.

During a congressional hearing last week, Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) confronted Gay over the chants of “intifada” that can be heard on Harvard’s campus, Gay said that such speech does not breach the university’s code of conduct.

“At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” Stefanik asked.

“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay responded. She later said, “Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action.”

After her congressional testimony, Gay apologized for her comments.

“I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with the Harvard student-run publication, The Crimson. “Words matter.”

They matter enough that they can be cut and pasted into a doctoral thesis without attribution: Harvard Board: Gay’s Plagiarism Is a Concern. Also, We’re Keeping Her.

And they matter enough to look away the enormous financial loss they’ve helped fuel: Harvard confirms Claudine Gay will remain prez— despite reported $1B loss over antisemitism scandal.

I BLAME ALL THOSE INTERSTELLAR CHEVROLET TAHOES: Hole the size of 60 Earths opens on sun.

The size of the void is unfathomable for some, equating to about 60 Earths, Space.com reported.

It is called a coronal hole and it started to form on Dec. 2, hitting its maximum width of about 497,000 miles in 24 hours.

NASA shared a video loop of the massive hole on its Solar Dynamics Observatory website on Saturday. By Wednesday, the hole was no longer pointing toward Earth.

The good news is, the hole is temporary, according to Space.com. But it could have caused some issues until it closed including creating a geomagnetic storm that could disrupt radio signals and produce strong auroral displays.

Of course, we all know what will be found on the other side of the hole:

WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXISM? Judge Allows 9,000 Women to Sue Disney for Pay Disparity.

No wonder Bob Iger is so obsessed with Elon Musk these days.

‘THIS IS DEFINITELY PLAGIARISM:’ Harvard University President Claudine Gay Copied Entire Paragraphs From Others’ Academic Work and Claimed Them as Her Own.

Harvard University president Claudine Gay plagiarized numerous academics over the course of her academic career, at times airlifting entire paragraphs and claiming them as her own work, according to reviews by several scholars.

In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.

The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”

Rather, scholars are expected to cite the sources of their work, including when paraphrasing, and to use quotation marks when quoting directly from others. But in at least 10 instances, Gay lifted full sentences—even entire paragraphs—with just a word or two tweaked.

I don’t know if Gay has visions of being the next Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama and parlaying a career in higher learning into a seat in the Oval Office, but both Joe Biden and Neil Kinnock assure me that no person legitimately accused of plagiarism has ever made it to the US presidency.

In the interim, as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: Harvard President Claudine Gay In Hot Water For Plagiarizing Large Sections Of Mein Kampf.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

WATCH: Imagine if @EliseStefanik's questioning of the university presidents was about other groups instead of "Jews." Someone did that using AI voice generation.

How much rage would there be?

Video by https://t.co/9iexNOiRj5 pic.twitter.com/ntpYf99vIG

— Sia Kordestani (@SiaKordestani) December 12, 2023

THE NORTH POLE’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Children On Best Behavior After Santa Announces Naughty Kids Now Receive The Marvels On Blu-Ray.