Sterling

[AUTailgatingRules]

Anyone else fond it amusing that Donald Sterling is a Democrat? 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/376641/racist-clippers-owner-donald-sterling-democrat-tim-cavanaugh

Also they keep talking about these tapes his girlfriend has, is he not married?

[Saniflush]

Anyone else fond it amusing that Donald Sterling is a Democrat? 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/376641/racist-clippers-owner-donald-sterling-democrat-tim-cavanaugh

Also they keep talking about these tapes his girlfriend has, is he not married?

 

[Kaos]

His team. His money.

He can say and think whatever he wants. 

Force him to sell? Sanction?  I find that absurd.

[Saniflush]

His team. His money.

He can say and think whatever he wants. 

Force him to sell? Sanction?  I find that absurd.

This.  All of it.

I nor anyone else has to agree with it and if there are to be repercussions then people vote with their money (fans), or their talent (players).  That is by far the quickest way to solve that behavior.   

[WiregrassTiger]

I agree with the above, at the same time, I can see how other teams in the league should have a voice. If I buy the house next door to you and decide I'm going to raise hogs, it isn't good for your home value.

On the other hand, I can't see how this hurts anyone but Sterling. And it probably won't hurt him much financially.

As they say, any publicity is good publicity. He'll likely find a way to profit.

[War Eagle!!!]

How the fuck does a dude have a half black/mexican girlfriend, half his age, and then tell her not to hang out with blacks or mexicans? Does he think she truly loves him and will go for that? How does he NOT see she is in for his money and that anything he says can and WILL BE held against him to get more of his money?

I personally don't give a damn what he says or what he thinks, but I think he should lose everything he has just for being such a dumb ass...

[WiregrassTiger]

How the fudge does a dude have a half black/mexican girlfriend, half his age, and then tell her not to hang out with blacks or mexicans? Does he think she truly loves him and will go for that? How does he NOT see she is in for his money and that anything he says can and WILL BE held against him to get more of his money?

I personally don't give a damn what he says or what he thinks, but I think he should lose everything he has just for being such a dumb ass...

I could find him very attractive, myself. That is, if he gives me my own bank account, cars, etc. I have been considering pulling my teeth and growing a beard anyway.

[CCTAU]

With that kind of money, would it not be more beneficial (and cheaper) to just go with a hooker?

[AUChizad]

Anyone else fond it amusing that Donald Sterling is a Democrat? 

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/376641/racist-clippers-owner-donald-sterling-democrat-tim-cavanaugh

Also they keep talking about these tapes his girlfriend has, is he not married?

Nice try.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/28/donald-sterling-and-the-neverending-fantasy-of-democrat-racism.html

Donald Sterling and the Neverending Fantasy of ‘Democrat’ Racism
Oh, how eager the conservative press is to call Donald Sterling a Democrat! It’s all part of their larger fantasy narrative about conservatism and race.

Update: Now comes the utterly shocking news that despite his campaign donations to the contrary, Sterling is—sit down—a registered Republican. The Los Angeles Times's Michael Hiltzik tweeted as much this morning, and I confirmed through a source that a Donald T. Sterling who lives in Beverly Hills and was born on April 26, 1934 is indeed a registered Republican voter in L.A. County. Now it's true, he makes no campaign contributions, so he's obviously not a gung-ho big-P Political Republican. But still, there goes your racist Democrat. Sorry, Daily Caller!

My Twitter feed yesterday was full of clucking conservatives challenging me to write about the Donald Sterling situation, or daring me to, or wagering that I would maintain a hypocritical silence in the face of this clear “proof” that Democrats are just as racist as Republicans.

They have a fair point—just one—in that I do agree that having written several times lately about racism within the ranks of the Republican Party, it would be bad form of me not to write about Sterling. So here you are, cons.

First of all, I’ve been amused at how eagerly the right-wing press has pounced on the “fact” that Sterling is a Democrat. To my knowledge, there is no such established fact at this point. This is based on two political contributions he made many moons ago.

Apparently, when the story broke Saturday morning, everyone in the cyberworld somehow glommed onto a 2011 list published at a site called RealGM that listed the political contributions of NBA owners. This list said Sterling had donated to two Democrats, Gray Davis and Bill Bradley, and that these were long ago, going back to “the early 1990s.”

The Web site of the Sunlight Foundation tells us that this isn’t quite right—a Donald Sterling of Beverly Hills actually gave $5,000 to Davis more recently, in 2002, which was, incidentally, a campaign in which the Davis operation was known to be putting the shoulder on people harder than almost any campaign in history. The Bradley donation, of $2,000, was made in 1989, as Bradley was a year out from his second re-election bid. It was not, in other words, for Bradley’s presidential campaign. So Sterling’s big Democratic donations, made 12 and 25 years ago, hardly make him some kind of Sheldon Adelson of the left. It would be as if another NBA owner had donated pretty modest amounts to former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft and New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, and on those bases, he was called a rabid Republican. Absurd.

So, desperate as the conservative press has been to turn Sterling into a big-time Democrat, his contribution history actually proves rather little. Besides, people change their political views over time. And I’d be at least mildly surprised if a man who doesn’t want black people showing up on his girlfriend’s Instagram page had voted to install one in the White House.

But I confess: We don’t have answers to these questions yet. So, fine. Let’s say for the sake of this column that he is a Democrat. What would it prove? I think it’s quite clear what it would prove: There’s one racist Democrat in American public life, who doesn’t even have anything to do with politics beyond a few many-year-old contributions.

Find me another. And I mean a real, serious racist who’s said real, seriously racist things. I don’t mean Joe Biden, for calling Obama “clean and articulate.” That was a stupid racial comment; ditto Harry Reid’s statement about Obama having “no Negro dialect” unless he wanted to affect one.

Conservatives love to point to those two remarks, and I’m certainly not defending them. But here’s the contextual difference that conservatives either can’t understand or won’t concede. Biden and Reid both have long, long histories of supporting the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, civil-rights expansions, a view of the Constitution that endorses a broad interpretation of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—and federal judges who back all those things. Likewise Bill Clinton, who made some dubious comments in the heat of the 2008 primaries, like telling Ted Kennedy that “a few years ago, [Obama] would be getting our coffee.” A horrible statement, but one made by an ex-president with a long record of backing civil rights (and at a time when they were under pretty stern assault from Newt Gingrich’s House of Representatives).

This is something conservatives don’t understand. Or rather, they understand it—but they can’t acknowledge it. They can’t acknowledge this larger context of Democratic support for the things that have mostly improved black people’s lives and Republicans’ almost total opposition to them since at least the 1980s. To acknowledge all that would be to acknowledge that they’ve been wrong on one of the most searing issues in American political history. They of course can’t do that. So they have to construct this alternative, fantasy narrative, under which these things the Democrats have done for the last 50 years, things Republicans and conservatives have largely opposed, have been bad for black people.

Now it’s certainly the case that Democrats and liberals have made mistakes over the years. The conservative critique of welfare policy in the 1980s had a considerable amount of merit, and the welfare-rights movements of the left were horribly self-marginalizing and self-defeating. So welfare certainly created a dependency problem, and for some families (though far fewer since Clinton enacted the overhaul), it still does. But that’s one policy. Put it on the scale against voting rights, school desegregation, affirmative-action laws that have helped millions of young black (and brown and other) people have the opportunity to become lawyers and doctors and business leaders, and so on, and I think it’s pretty clear which way the scale tilts.

But the conservative fantasy narrative posits, preposterously and deceitfully, that all of it was horrible, and all of it constitutes keeping black people down on the Democratic (oops; “Democrat”) “plantation.” This is just a sick and venal metaphor, and its sickness and venality are why Cliven Bundy’s comments that compared welfare to slavery sparked the reaction they did. If you compare anything to slavery, the only thing it proves is how stupid you are about slavery and how little you’ve done to educate yourself about its realities, which in turn means that while you have the same First Amendment rights as any American, you certainly have no right to expect any reasonable person to take you seriously in debate.

There’s a second aspect to the right-wing fantasy narrative on racial prejudice, which is its complete decoupling of prejudice from economic or political power. That is to say, they know deep down that real racism (white on black) has scarred millions of American lives over many decades, as blacks have been denied opportunities by whites who owned and ran things. But again, they can’t acknowledge this aspect of the damage that racism has done. So they turn racism into a mere personal attribute, thereby divorcing it from any notion of political power. Once you’ve defined racism this way, then Al Sharpton can be as big a racist as Bull Connor. Now, I am a long way from being a Sharpton apologist. Ask Sharpton himself what he thinks of what I was writing about him during the 2001 New York mayoral campaign. But Bull Connor he never was and never will be.

I’ve actually been saddened by the enraged denial I’ve seen on Twitter in the past few weeks. I have no doubt that if I were a conservative, a real believer in free markets and the rest, I’d be wondering why my team was getting 5 percent of the black vote, and I’d be trying to do something instead of fabricating these fantasy reasons why everybody else was wrong. And I hope and think there are conservatives who do wonder that, and who would like to have an honest dialogue instead of trying to “prove” that a guy who made two old donations lets their party off the hook. Assuming they exist, it’s time for them to speak.

[wesfau2]

His team. His money.

He can say and think whatever he wants. 

Force him to sell? Sanction?  I find that absurd.

If his team wasn't a member of a league whose finances are impacted by his (now public) statements, then you'd be correct.  The NBA and other franchise owners have a duty to protect the brand.  That said, they knew who they were in bed with long before this came to light (see the penalties he was forced to pay for discriminatory housing practices).

[Townhallsavoy]

Something really shitty about this story is that it's taken a reality TV, sleazy tabloid service like TMZ to bring negative light onto Donald Sterling.  It took a back room deal from his mistress to expose him for what he really is.

The media was silent over ten years ago when he was sued for housing discrimination.

Heard nothing when his wife was going around to houses of blacks and hispanics, claiming to be from an inspection company, and then reporting the smallest details to Donald Sterling who in turn evicted them.

Not a peep when he said that black people smelled so bad they attracted rats and that hispanics were just lazy and weren't good for anything other than drinking alcohol all day. 

But naw.  He didn't let his black hispanic side piece post pictures of herself with black guys on Instagram.  Get the pitchforks. 

[Kaos]

Sanctioning someone, taking their property, imposing financial penalties or any of the other suggested punishments for Sterling raises some disturbing questions.

When you open the door to punishing someone for having and expressing an opinion with which you disagree where does that end? His position may be repugnant to you but as an American be has the absolute right to have it. 

I heard assclowns like Doug gottlieb raising hell about how sterling made his money and suggesting that it should all be taken away from him.

What happens when a sanctimonious prick like that decides he doesn't like the way you make your money and decrees that anyone who supports Auburn should be penalized by having their homes repossessed and their opportunity to make a living taken away?

When you start drawing those lines who gets to decide where they are?

It's dangerous ground.

[AUJarhead]

I find it disgusting as a nation that we now care more about the sanctions that the NBA will levy against Sterling than the sanctions the US will levy against Russia.

[CCTAU]

I find it disgusting as a nation that we now care more about the sanctions that the NBA will levy against Sterling than the sanctions the US will levy against Russia.

I was about to post something similar. My country is trampling my individual rights at an alarming rate and all I hear about is how some rich old white dude hates the brown people but loves the brown stank.

[WiregrassTiger]

How ironic it is that Sterling was set to receive an award from the NAACP next month. Glad to hear that they are not giving it to him. And, that the X's own CCTAU and Kaos are now in the running for the award.

[wesfau2]

Sanctioning someone, taking their property, imposing financial penalties or any of the other suggested punishments for Sterling raises some disturbing questions.

When you open the door to punishing someone for having and expressing an opinion with which you disagree where does that end? His position may be repugnant to you but as an American be has the absolute right to have it. 

I heard assclowns like Doug gottlieb raising hell about how sterling made his money and suggesting that it should all be taken away from him.

What happens when a sanctimonious prick like that decides he doesn't like the way you make your money and decrees that anyone who supports Auburn should be penalized by having their homes repossessed and their opportunity to make a living taken away?

When you start drawing those lines who gets to decide where they are?

It's dangerous ground.

You realize that there is no state action in play here, right?  He's going to feel the consequences of his contract with the NBA.  The contract that he voluntarily negotiated and entered into.

[CCTAU]

How ironic it is that Sterling was set to receive an award from the NAACP next month. Glad to hear that they are not giving it to him. And, that the X's own CCTAU and Kaos are now in the running for the award.

I did not say the words negro or slavery. You cannot put me into this category.


Besides. I cannot accept an award from those people.

[WiregrassTiger]

I did not say the words negro or slavery. You cannot put me into this category.


Besides. I cannot accept an award from those people.

You just said it. And what do you mean by "those people"?

[Snaggletiger]

I did not say the words negro or slavery. You cannot put me into this category.


Besides. I cannot accept an award from those people.

This is just a weird scenario all the way around.  First off, you know what the end result will be.  He's going to get suspended indefinitely, fined heavily and eventually "forced" to sell the franchise.  Of course, the commissioner can't make him give it up but obviously, the other owners can put the pressure on him and the exit of most of the sponsors will decide his fate.  Not that anyone would feel bad for the skwazillionare who will sell a franchise he bought for about $14 million for closer to $500 million. 

What I do have a problem with is the hypocrisy of so many in the media, which really should be no surprise.  I remember specifically one of these panels of "experts" discussing the whole Phil Robertson deal and everyone agreeing that that had he said those things in the privacy of his own home, it would be a different story.  But he didn't.  He said them in an interview.  Here, Sterling has a private conversation recorded and the sharks race to blood in the water.

But, you can't unring the bell.  He said it and he's going to pay the price.         

[wesfau2]

Actually, the NBA constitution contains language that could be interpreted to say that he can be forced to sell.