Major league sports in America are run by fucking idiots.
Major League Baseball is protesting a democratically passed Georgia voting law while bolstering ties with a Communist Party-backed Chinese company that cracked down on an NBA executive who supported the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” league commissioner Rob Manfred said announcing the decision to pull this year’s All-Star Game out of the Peach State Friday.
He said protesting Georgia’s new GOP-backed election integrity law was “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.”
But the MLB signed a deal with Tencent Wednesday, one of China’s largest tech companies.
It’s one of the Chinese firms that briefly dropped NBA games in 2019 after former Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey publicly voiced support for pro-democracy protesters facing a Beijing-backed crackdown in Hong Kong.
The new deal grants Tencent rights to stream MLB games in a number of Asian countries until 2023. Back in 2018, the MLB and Tencent reached another deal that granted the company streaming rights for 125 games within China.
American sports executives who prostrate themselves to a communist totalitarian regime for monetary gain is the new diplomacy.
By the way, Colorado, the state that will host the all-star game, has pretty strict laws on voter ID:
Critics are scratching their heads over Major League Baseball’s decision to yank its All-Star Game from Georgia and move it to Colorado — where voting laws are actually more restrictive than those in the Peach State which prompted the boycott.
The mountainous state requires voters to provide identification for in-person and first-time absentee voting.
“All voters who vote at the polls must provide identification,” the Colorado Secretary of State’s website says. “If you are voting by mail for the first time, you may also need to provide a photocopy of your identification when you return your mail ballot.”
Under Georgia’s newly passed voting bill, ID — or another proof of identity, like a utility bill or bank statement — is required for in-person voting, as well as for all absentee voting.
And similar to the measure now in place in Georgia, campaign operatives in Colorado are banned from offering snacks and water to voters who are in line.
Note that the key stipulation is campaign operatives. Nothing in the law prohibits people from getting water and snacks from anyone who doesn’t engage in electioneering.
Colorado is also more restrictive when it comes to early voting — polling stations must open 15 days before the election through Election Day, excluding Sundays, according to Ballotpedia.
But the new law expanded early voting in Georgia by adding a second mandatory Saturday and giving counties the option of opening two Sundays — as well as allowing them to extend early voting hours beyond standard business hours.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was baffled over MLB’s pick of Colorado after rebuffing his own state in protest of its new voting laws.
“Georgia has 17 days of in-person early voting including two optional Sundays, Colorado has 15,” the Republican governor told Fox News. “So what I’m being told, they also have a photo ID requirement. So it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
Of course, it makes sense. MLB is showboating for “woke” activists and political points. The facts don’t matter.