TIM BLAIR: Today’s noticeboard is brought to you the enduring mystery of woke sports reporters.

Theory: sports reporters feel ashamed because they’re wasting their lives writing about inconsequential games, so turn political to compensate.

If so, they are mistaken. Sports reporting is an honourable calling. Politics, not so much.

American journalists frequently refer to the sports department as the equivalent of working in a candy or toy store, compared with the hard news sections (or what passes for such things these days). When the late Mike Wallace interviewed Bill Parcells for 60 Minutes in 2004, he even used that metaphor on Parcells. After describing the 14 hour days Parcells put in as a head coach, Parcells told Wallace, “If you want to stay competitive, this is one of the most competitive businesses there is.” Wallace replied with an incredulous tone, “This is the toy department!”, confusing his own profession’s view of sports journalists, with the people they cover. It’s an insulting metaphor to say to a man who had spent nearly his entire adult life coaching college and professional football.

HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG?

● Manhattan led US in population loss during year of pandemic.

—The New York Post, yesterday.

● L.A.’s population dropped by 176,000 in 1st full year of pandemic, 2nd largest drop nationwide.

—L.A.’s ABC-7 yesterday.

There’s another issue that’s very likely playing a factor. As the Wall Street Journal noted in June of 2020: Liberal Cities, Radical Mayhem: Democratic mayors and governors seem unable to stop the destruction of their own cities.

The “broken-windows” school of policing says that you can help maintain public order by taking care of even small examples of disorder—such as fixing broken windows. Liberals scorned that policy in the last decade as somehow racist. Well, in recent days we’ve learned that America’s left does have a broken-windows policy: Let rioters break enough windows and loot enough stores and maybe their righteous anger will be satisfied.

That’s certainly how it looked when the June sun rose Tuesday over the broken glass, looted storefronts, burnt-out cars, and vandalized buildings in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Madison and other American cities. Public officials let rioters exploiting the memory of George Floyd run wild in the streets. Even after nearly a week of violence, these and other liberal Democratic cities let lawless radicals harass and plunder almost at will.

* * * * * * * *

This isn’t merely about damage to property. It’s about destroying the order required for city life. Non-criminals are afraid to go into these cities to make a living. The police pull back from active policing, which creates more opportunity for criminals, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods. Businesses that are finally starting to emerge from government lockdowns have new costs to absorb and more reasons for customers not to return.

What all these cities have in common is that they are led by Democrats who seem to have bought into the belief that the police are a bigger problem than rampant disorder. They are either cowed by their party’s left, or they agree that America is systemically racist and rioting is a justified expression of anger against it. They offer pro forma disapproval of law breakers but refuse to act to stop them.

CTRL-F “Riot” brings up zero results from both articles, curiously enough.

Related: From AP yesterday: LA police: Wearing expensive jewelry could make you a target.

OKAY, GROOMER: Disney Launching Task Force to Make More LGBTQ+ Content for Children and Families.

Chapek and his senior leaders say they will now embark on a global listening tour and meet with employees in the United States and internationally as an act of contrition for their actions.

He promised more apologies on more sites and in more countries until staff are satisfied.

Disney also said it has established an LGBTQ+ task force to be led by Paul Roeder, senior vice president of communications for the Studios, and Lisa Becket, senior vice president of global marketing for Disney Parks, Experiences and Products.

The company said the task force will seek out experts to develop a concrete plan to ensure Disney is “a force for good” for LGBTQ+ communities, especially children and family.

Offer void in China, however: What’s Holding Disney Back From More LGBT Characters Like Loki? Chinese Censors.

BIDEN WARNS OF FOOD SHORTAGES IN WAKE OF RUSSIA–UKRAINE WAR: ‘It’s Going to Be Real.’

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a press conference earlier this week that the U.S. is itself not expecting a food shortage for Americans.

“While we’re not expecting a food shortage here at home, we do anticipate that higher energy, fertilizer, wheat, and corn prices could impact the price of growing and purchasing critical . . . food supplies for countries around the world,” Psaki told reporters.

Flashback: Biden warns of ‘winter of severe illness and death’ for the unvaccinated.

The Biden administration sure is a font of good news. But hey, as Bloomberg told its Biden-supporting readers this past Saturday, “Nobody said this would be fun.”

THIS IS THE VERY FIRST TIME THAT THE PHILADELPHIA CITY COUNCIL HAS TAKEN A LIBERTARIAN STANCE ON ANYTHING: Philadelphia City Council votes against calling for no-fly zone in Ukraine.

If the vote had gone the other way though, it would have made perfect sense for World War III to have begun in modern day Philly.

JIM TREACHER: Twitter Bans Biology. “Liberals claim to be anti-authoritarian, but they sure do love flexing their authority to silence dissent. You will shut up, or you will be shut up. As Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals: ‘Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.’ Twitter suppressed satire that hurt their feelings, the dissenters made sarcastic jokes about it, and Twitter suppressed them too. Liberals hate to be ridiculed for behaving exactly like the sort of people they claim to oppose. Pretending men can become women, or vice versa, won’t make it happen. Ever. That’s just science, bro. (Or, if you insist, sis.) You can ban anybody you want from any platform under the sun, but it doesn’t change human biology.”

DEMOCRACY DIES IN RIDICULOUS JUXTAPOSITIONS: Washington Post Says Asking KBJ Questions About Her Legal Rulings Is Worse Than Falsely Accusing Kavanaugh Of Rape.

CHANGE:

Related: News you can use, from America’s Newspaper of Record: Are You A Woman? 12 Signs To Look For.

OLD AND BUSTED: Follow the Science.

The New Hotness? NYC Mayor Eric Adams says professional athletes, performers now exempt from vaccine mandate. “That means Nets fans could soon see Kyrie Irving play home games and the news came down right before Major League Baseball starts its new season, CBS2’s John Dias reported Thursday. Adams said the exemptions take effect immediately, regardless of the performers’ and players’ COVID vaccine status.”

AIRBRUSH ALERT: Photog Speaks Out After She Says NBC Edited Her Photos To ‘Soften’ Look Of Trans Swimmer Lia Thomas.

AIRLINE CEOS CALL ON BIDEN TO LIFT MASK MANDATE, COVID-TEST REQUIREMENT FOR AIR TRAVEL.

VDH: The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming.

The woke revolution in the West was supposed to teach us that the “white male”-dominated Western world is toxic. Its origins, ascendence, and current leisure and affluence were supposedly due only to systemic exploitation, racism, and sexism.

Elites introduced cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, and social ostracism to shame these supposed exploiters and to destroy their lives and careers.

Few asked how a supposedly noxious West of some 2,500 years duration became the number one destination of millions of global non-Western migrants and offered the greatest degree of global prosperity and freedom for its citizens.

So a reset reckoning is coming — in reaction to the “new orders” championed by Biden and the Davos set.

In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility — as well as arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.

What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.

Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the “color our skin.”

The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.

The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.

Faster, please.

OUT OF VOGUE: Kamala unhappy over seated White House greeting?

Even more petty was Harris’ complaint about getting the celebrity treatment at Vogue. The most prominent fashion magazine in the world gave Kamala Harris the glamour treatment, but the cover annoyed Harris so much that she had her press secretary complain directly to Anna Wintour, according to Martin and Burns:

Wintour defended the chosen photo of Harris in Converse sneakers and skinny pants as “relatable” in a conversation with incoming Harris press secretary Symone Sanders*, according to excerpts of the upcoming book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.”

“Harris was wounded. She felt belittled by the magazine, asking aides: Would Vogue depict another world leader this way?” the book states, according to the excerpts, which were obtained by Politico.

Harris had apparently favored a photo of her in a more formal powder blue suit, which ended up as a limited edition alternative to the sneakers-and-skinny-pants pic, which leaked ahead of the release of the February 2021 issue.

Biden’s team apparently couldn’t believe Harris wanted to start a feud with Wintour as her debut in office:

Incoming chief of staff TINA FLOURNOY** was caught “off-guard by the anger in Harris’ circle” and contacted a senior Biden campaign official. Given the country’s myriad crises and the recent January 6th riot at the Capitol, “[t]he Biden adviser told Flournoy that this was not the time to be going to war with Vogue over a comparatively trivial aesthetic issue. Tina, the adviser said, these are first-world problems,” according to the excerpt.

It was an early indication that members of the Biden-Harris teams were on different pages with different priorities. The dynamic didn’t improve from there.

Assuming that these accounts from Martin and Burns are accurate, it’s pretty clear why Biden’s team is leaking these stories. They’re stuck with an addled president and a bumbling VP whose focus [is] so far off the ball that she may as well not even be in the same stadium. The shot selection for the cover of Vogue isn’t a “first world problem” as much as it is an “entitled elite” problem. For an administration that wanted to sell a “Scranton Joe” narrative, the Vogue cover might have already been more of a headache than it was worth even without the feud.

How bad is Harris? For the first time ever, I’m feeling sympathetic to Anna Wintour, who for once comes across as the good witch in a story.

* Sanders has since bailed out on Harris, and gone to work as a weekend MSNBC host.

** “Harris’ team is experiencing low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials. Much of the frustration internally is directed at Tina Flournoy, Harris’ chief of staff, a veteran of Democratic politics who began working for her earlier this year.”

UPDATE: Question asked and answered:

Analysis: True. Flashback: James Clyburn wants Joe Biden to pick an African American woman for vice president. “The big picture: Clyburn is widely credited with saving Biden’s campaign following his endorsement in the South Carolina Democratic primaries. ‘I’ll never tell you who I’m going to advise him,’ Clyburn said in the interview, ‘but I would advise him that we need to have a woman on the ticket, and I prefer an African American woman.’”

Clyburn’s obsession with identity politics also influenced Biden’s SCOTUS choice: ‘Don’t you dare leave this stage without doing it:’ Biden was forced to publicly vow to appoint a black woman to SCOTUS by Rep. Jim Clyburn in return for his endorsement during 2020 South Carolina primary.

(Updated and bumped.)

GOODER AND HARDER: LAPD: You probably shouldn’t wear expensive jewelry anymore. “How warped has the world become when we see the police telling people that it’s not safe to simply walk the sidewalks and go about their normal affairs? The police shouldn’t have to sound these sorts of alarms. They should be putting criminals behind bars. But thanks to California’s legislative efforts such as Proposition 47 (hilariously named the ‘Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act’), that’s not as easy as it used to be. Literally tens of thousands of felons had their crimes redefined as misdemeanors and were cut loose from the jails early. For many other criminals that the police somehow manage to catch, they will serve little to no jail time for robberies that would have previously seen them doing a lengthy stretch in the Crowbar Motel.”

JOHN NOLTE: Academy’s Woke Movie Museum Snubs Jews Who Founded Hollywood.

A Hollywood museum without Jews is like a Holocaust museum without Jews or an electric lightbulb museum without Edison or a telephone museum without Don Ameche.

Jews invented Hollywood! They didn’t just work there. They didn’t just thrive there. Jews created Hollywood. Jews gave us the film business, the art of the motion picture. Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Adolph Zucker, David O. Selznick…  Why not just open a museum about water and leave out the wet?

How about a jazz museum with no black people?

How about a hockey museum with no Canadians?

How about a country music museum with no one from Appalachia?

The Woke Gestapo are so broken, so desperate to rewrite history, they’ve gone beyond Orwell. What did they put in those 300,000 square feet instead? I’ll bet there’s a whole wing devoted to Lizzo. Well, she’d probably need a whole wing.

It’s not just that these Jews created the motion picture business, it is that they created an entirely new art form that was as uniquely American as jazz. And they did it to flee the bigotry of the times. Way out west in a little place called Hollywoodland, they could create a thing of their own.

And now that same bigotry is erasing them.

What a joke.

Indeed. In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the American public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars.

But controlling how the past is viewed is a huge part of the “Woke” project on both coasts.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Texas’ AG Writes Letter to Austin School District Telling Them That Their Elementary School Gay Pride Marches and Gender Theory Indoctrination Is Against the Law.

FOR A YEAR TOMMY JAMES WAS BIGGER THAN THE BEATLES. THEN THE MAFIA RUINED EVERYTHING:

On Saturday July 15, 1972 American rock legend Tommy James played a gig at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn. After the show, James and his friends from the group Grass Roots were driving to a party in their stretch limousine.

At exactly the same time, six blocks away, Thomas ‘Tommy Ryan’ Eboli, the acting boss of the Genovese crime family, was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment when an assassin pumped six bullets into his head and chest from point-blank range. That would be the last time he ever screwed up on a heroin deal.

The afternoon before, James and Eboli had been slapping shoulders in the off-Broadway offices of Roulette Records, James’s label. Roulette boss Morris ‘Moshe’ Levy looked on and smiled. High on drugs and dollar bills, everyone seemed hunky dory, unless you knew that Levy was ‘the Godfather of the Music Business’, a man so feared it was said there were six major crime families in New York City: Gambino, Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese, Bonanno and Moshe’s Roulette.

Levy was the nastiest person in show business. He had a radioactive personality inside a Teflon overcoat. Moshe made latter-day managers like Peter Grant and Don Arden look like wusses. If a major label had a problem with a distributor, they’d call up Mo. Radio stations playing hardball? Call Morris. For an appropriate fee, Levy and his accomplice, record exec Nate McCalla, would gather baseball bats and, whack!

Don’t mess with Morris. He was the architect behind the payola scandal that sank American DJ Alan Freed, the man who’d invented the term ‘rock’n’roll’. Back in the day, Morris’s brother Irving had been shot dead in a gambling dispute at the notorious Birdland jazz club, which they ran. Levy bided his time, then visited his brother’s killer and disembowelled him with a butcher’s knife.

And speaking of the Beatles:

John Lennon was another visitor to Levy’s farm. In 1973 Levy and Lennon had become friends, but that didn’t stop the Roulette owner from serving the former Beatle with a plagiarism writ. Lennon’s 1969 song Come Together, on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album, began with the line ‘Here come old flat top, he come grooving up slowly,’ which had been appropriated from Chuck Berry’s 1956 single You Can’t Catch Me.

Levy owned the publishing on the original. He sued Lennon and won. As part of an ad-hoc settlement, Lennon gave Morris rough mixes of a rock’n’roll album he’d worked up with Phil Spector during his ‘lost weekend’ phase. The tapes were crap, but Levy put them out anyway, with Lennon’s permission, as a shoddy mail order LP called Roots, on subsidiary label Adam V111, named after his son.

Lennon was secretly delighted at the arrangement. He thought he’d make some easy money. Capitol didn’t see it that way and counter-sued Levy. The case dragged on for two years while Lennon, who was still getting off his heroin addiction by taking vast amounts of novocaine, slumped into his habitual depression.

During a particularly nasty stage in the trial, Levy invited Lennon to his farm, ostensibly to enjoy some quality rehearsal time for the unstable musician’s Walls And Bridges album. When Lennon arrived with May Pang (Yoko Ono’s replacement at that time), Levy threatened his life in no uncertain terms.

Read the whole thing, which reads like a cross between Scorsese’s Goodfellas and his HBO series, Vinyl.

WHEN DOES TWITTER BAN ZELENSKYY? Ukraine Blocks Trans Women Refugees: “They Are Men, Must Go Back and Fight.”

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Hunter Biden, the protected third rail of journalism:

So, to unpack this in retrospect, these former intel heads admitted they did not “have evidence of Russian involvement,” but all were in total agreement because of their suspicions from afar? And like seagulls at the beach, most of the press ate it up.

We heard a lot about collusion during the Trump era, but the real collusion happened between broadcast, print and social media all working together to either squash or dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Twitter and Facebook handled the squashing part, with the former locking the personal accounts of anyone who even shared the New York Post story in October 2020. The Post’s own account was locked, as was then-White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany‘s and the official handle of the Trump campaign. Again, these Pyongyang tactics all occurred just a few weeks before a presidential election.

Related: Democratic staffer on Jan. 6 committee was part of intel effort to help Biden out of Hunter jam.

UPDATE: Via W. Joseph Campbell, the origin of the “seagulls on the beach” phrase.

(Updated and bumped.)

GLORY DAYS: Andrew Cuomo’s Macabre Pandemic Nostalgia.

What but personal gratification explains Cuomo’s otherwise inexplicable dredging up of his disastrous final year in office over the other nine? After all, his conduct during the pandemic remains a drag on his political prospects.

As recently as last week, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an internal audit that confirmed the Cuomo administration had undercounted Covid deaths in nursing homes by more than 4,000. “The audit details how health officials undercounted deaths in nursing homes by more than 50% at certain points during the height of the crisis,” the New York Daily News reported. The findings underscore the conclusions New York Attorney General Letitia James revealed in a January 2021 report alleging that the Cuomo administration covered up the true death toll and its contributions to the body count. Albany’s “guidance requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes” put long-term care facility residents “at increased risk of harm,” that report revealed. All this only corroborates the many independent journalistic probes into how the governor’s administration contributed to the pandemic’s death toll and subsequently covered it up.

“In politics, like in life, you stand on your record,” Cuomo brazenly insists at the close of his comeback pitch. But Cuomo had more than a record. He had a cult of personality around him, and he loved every minute of it. What he wants isn’t just his name cleared and his career back. He wants the “Cuomosexuals” to fall back in love with the erstwhile object of their affections. Toward that end, Andrew Cuomo is dwelling on what for him must have been one of the best times of his life. That it was also the very worst of times for the rest of us seems to have escaped him.

Read the whole thing.

RIP: Madeleine Albright dies of cancer at 84.

UPDATE:

(Updated and bumped.)

SENATOR KENNEDY STUMPS SUPREME COURT NOMINEE WITH ONE QUESTION:

“When does life begin, in your opinion,” Senator Kennedy asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for starters.

“Senator… um… I don’t… know,” Judge Jackson replied, followed by an uneasy, awkward laugh.

“Do you have a belief?” Kennedy pressed.

“I have, um, personal religious and otherwise beliefs that have nothing to do with the law in terms of when life begins,” Jackson responded.

“Do you have a personal belief though about when life begins?” Kennedy probed.

“I have a religious view that I set aside when I am ruling on cases,” Jackson evaded again.

Senator Kennedy pushed further on the point, asking Judge Jackson an important follow-up, “When does equal protection of the laws attach to a human being?”

“Well Senator, um… I believe that the Supreme Court… um… actually I, I actually don’t know the answer to that question — I’m sorry — I don’t,” Judge Jackson responded, again with an ill-timed grin on her face as her initially confident answer turned to another know-nothing response.

And as a follow-up to Jackson’s showstopper last night, “Democrats don’t understand that, for better or worse, every candidate this cycle, and maybe even in 2024, is going to be asked ‘How do you define the term ‘woman’?’ And [their] candidates won’t have an answer,” Pradheep J. Shanker tweets.

DON’T GET COCKY: Joel Kotkin: The coming bloodbath of the Democrats. Joe Biden’s woke, green agenda will cost him dearly at the ballot box.

SOMETIMES THE LEFT HAND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING: Or, two NBCs in one!

Shot: CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese.

—CNBC, March 9^th, 2021.

Chaser: Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme — literally. White supremacists’ latest scheme to valorize violence and hypermasculinity has gone digital.

Earlier this month, researchers reported that a network of online “fascist fitness” chat groups on the encrypted platform Telegram are recruiting and radicalizing young men with neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist ideologies. Initially lured with health tips and strategies for positive physical changes, new recruits are later invited to closed chat groups where far-right content is shared.

Physical fitness has always been central to the far right*. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler fixated on boxing and jujitsu, believing they could help him create an army of millions whose aggressive spirit and impeccably trained bodies, combined with “fanatical love of the fatherland,” would do more for the German nation than any “mediocre” tactical weapons training.

—MSNBC, yesterday.

* How odd that a TV channel that wished to spread socialism nationally and believed that “your kids are not your own” would see those impulses occurring on the American libertarian “far right.”

LA ANTI-HOMELESSNESS PROGRAM SPENDING THIS ABSURD AMOUNT PER PERSON, AUDIT REVEALS: “Los Angeles has dedicated $1.2 billion to a new program fighting homelessness, but instead of maximizing the budget’s impact, the city is spending up to $837,000 per unit to house homeless people.”

As the president of the Indian National Congress once said of Gandhi, “It costs a lot of money to keep this man in poverty.”

And that’s part of the problem, as one wag observed, further up the coast. “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s,” SF Weekly noted a decade ago, stumbling into the Fox Butterfield effect.