MLB’s ‘apology’ to Georgia, our party’s nuts to ‘welcome’ Zohran Mamdani and other commentary

Sports desk: MLB’s ‘Apology’ to Georgia

Major League Baseball was “implicitly making amends to Atlanta with Tuesday’s All-Star Game after moving the 2021 game in protest of Georgia election reforms,” declares J.T. Young at The Wall Street Journal. Objections to Georgia’s “Election Integrity Act, a package of common-sense measures to improve the voting process,” included calling it “racist” and “Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” and so MLB “moved the All-Star Game to Denver.” Yet “criticisms of Georgia’s 2021 election law as racist and restrictive proved moot in the 2022 and 2024 election cycles.” Early voting “surged” in 2022, “hit a record high in 2024” and “the number of black Georgians casting ballots increased by 800,000” between 2020 and 2024. “By bringing the All-Star Game back to Georgia,” Major League Baseball was making “a baseball apology.”

Democrat: Our Party’s Nuts To ‘Welcome’ Zohran

Veteran Dem operative Joe Klein at Sanity Clause mocks calls to welcome Zohran Mamdani into the “big tent” of the Democratic Party. “Lefties” like Mamdani are “not a ‘new brand’ but the same old soreheads.” While his own “big tent is closed to QAnon, Proud Boys. . . and to the Democratic Socialists of America,” many Dems are “wobbly on Mamdani. Where the hell are you, Chuck Schumer?” After all, “the Democratic Socialists are the Proud Boys of the Democratic Party.” The sad truth is that socialism makes “a lot of sense” if you have “no sense of how things actually work” — it’s for people who have “idealism but no experience.” Meanwhile, the DNC is busying planning “litigation” against President Trump, but it has no plans for immigration or tax reform. “Instead, we get anti-zionism and state-run grocery stores.”

Conservative: What the Autopen Scandal Reveals

It would be hard to find “any reasonably informed American who honestly thinks President Joe Biden wasn’t in a state of serious cognitive decline at the end of his term in office,” thunders The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson. The recent Times article on the Biden “administration’s use of the autopen” is an attempt at “damage control” in light of probes into “the high-profile clemency decisions that came down in the final days” of his presidency. The “scandal reveals just how far the deep state was willing to go to keep a mentally compromised figurehead in office.” Indeed, at the end of the day, the Biden “presidency stands as one of the greatest political scandals perpetrated against the American people” — and “someone needs to answer for that.”

Science beat: Climate Idiocy Over Rat Boom

A study claiming that “global warming” caused an “increase in the urban rat population” has gotten undeserved credit, scoffs Aaron Brown at Reason. The study “contains nothing meaningful about either climate change or rats,” because, for starters, its underlying data was drawn from “counting rat complaints reported by residents.” Different cities have different ways of recording rat complaints, with some including “calls about roaches, bedbugs, cats, dogs, raccoons, and mice.” Other cities only recorded rat bites. “Weak data and inaccurate statistics” make for bad science and are no basis for forming public policy.

DC watch: Hold the Tears Over Rubio’s Cuts

The New York Times and Washington Post are sounding alarms after Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued layoffs in his department, but the move requires “a little perspective,” cautions the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. With more than 80,000 employees, how “can a cut of 1,350 be ‘devastating?’” Remember, “the cuts are focused and not across the board,” with “a significant number” seemingly hitting the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Team Trump had “already cut most of DRL’s funding, so it was no surprise that the bureau’s staff was next” — and they amount to “only about 1.6% of the agency’s staff.” Besides, such offices only “distracted from the department’s core goals.” Rubio needs to “keep going, to put into place the reforms he envisioned for the department.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board