How To Lose an NBA Team In One Fell Swoop

In case you missed it, over in Syria this week Muslim extremists are crucifying teenagers who refuse to adopt Islam, are ripping unborn children from the wombs of pregnant Christians and hanging the dead fetuses from trees by their umbilical cords, and massacring entire villages to later use the heads of their victims as soccer balls, but the lackadaisical US media is more intent on the crucifixion of some doddering old racist who owns an NBA franchise.

At least it took CNN off their non-stop 24-hour Malaysian Airlines coverage and prognosticating over Kim Kardashian's airbrushed ass-selfies and pending nuptials with noted douchecanoe Kanye West. Not that this is new; they devoted all manner of time to reports that George Clooney got engaged rather than report that an Oregon power plant was burning medical waste, including aborted fetuses, to heat homes. But I digress.

Yes, what Don Sterling (born Donald Tokowitz) said was reprehensible. In no way do I condone his racist remarks. To tell his girlfriend (or is she? She denies she is, and he's legally still married to Rochelle Stein, since 1957) not to bring black people to games kinda bites the hand that feeds him. And it has fed him well, as he is worth a staggering $1.9 BILLION dollars, a fortune he started as a divorce & personal injury lawyer and then a slumlord property owner. He's got a long history of being a scumbag, a racist, a sexist, and all-around general-purpose turd. However, being a turd isn't against the law.

Like I said, it bites the hand that feeds him, and the hands he feeds. The team he owns, the Los Angeles Clippers, has a payroll this year of a little over $73 million. Of his 14 active starters right now, 11 are black players. While he has racist views, he shells out millions to black players and black employees. His team's black coach, Doc Rivers, has a 3-year $21 million contract. For such a racist he's received a lifetime achievement award from the NAACP and was slated to get a second award from them until this week.

So, he gets recorded making a racist rant, a recording he may not have consented to, in his own home. In California recording a conversation without the consent of the recorded parties is illegal. The recording was made by a woman who has been sued previously for fraud by Sterling's wife and has stated she'd get even with Sterling. So he says what he says in the privacy of his own home, not in a public forum, the woman then peddles her tape of him to the public, the story is broken by TMZ Sports, and a few days later Sterling is banned for life by the NBA, is fined $2.5 million bucks, and will now be forced to sell the team. How convenient for the NBA that they get to remove a hugely unpopular owner now that his long-abysmal team is finally hot and in the playoffs, making it a hot commodity for sale. It's no secret the NBA hates having two teams in the LA market and would love to move the Clippers to Seattle. With Sterling out of the picture, they can manipulate matters to their liking. Billionaires from David Geffen to Queen Oprah are already lining up to buy.

Again, what Sterling said was wrong, but it was not illegal. He broke no laws, yet his team is being taken from him, and if it were me being banned for life from a sport where I owned a team, I'd tell them to go piss up a rope before paying a $2.5 million dollar fine for saying something in the privacy of my own home. In essence, he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech in his own home and because his speech was unpopular, he is being denied his main source of income, his property (ie: the team) is more or less being confiscated from him, and a sports league is going to skim two and a half million clams off the top of the deal when they sell his team to move it to another market where they can make more money off of it. And you know damn well they'll force the good taxpaying people of Seattle to build a brand-new stadium for them that the NBA will dictate terms of operation for. You know, stuff like, the NBA team has dibs on every date during the season so if you want to hold a concert or other event here, you better hope the date where that band is in town ain't a game night because we ain't budging.

Furthermore, if this was a case where a black owner, or athlete, or rapper, or actor, or some other black celebrity mouthpiece said something anti-white, would it even make the news? Not bloody likely. Racism directed against whites is either laughed off or ignored completely. Oprah gets in the news crying racism but when it's found to be a misunderstanding on HER part, the story is buried. Spike Lee tweets out the address for a couple who he thought was George Zimmerman's parents so that people could ostensibly kill them, and nothing happens. Samuel L. Jackson admits openly he only voted for Obama because he's black, and he's applauded for his honesty instead of being called out for racism. That girl at the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman trial who could barely speak a coherent sentence and can't read cursive despite being a high school graduate calls white people crackers and is held up as a pillar of the community. Jay-Z is spotted court-side at a basketball game wearing a racist medallion around his neck, and no one will dare say boo.

But people lost their MINDS over Sterling's remarks. The Clippers protested by playing their game the other night with their jerseys on inside out to obscure their team logo and the next night the Miami Heat wore theirs inside out as a sign of solidarity. So, lemme get this straight, if a player wears non-sanctioned sneakers or the wrong color socks or something non-team related on their uniforms or helmets in most leagues they get fined. The NBA has fined people over their shoes, their jersey numbers, the length of their shorts. But no one is doling out fines for wearing your jersey inside out to obscure the team logo. I guess since they all did it as a team they were, in fact, uniform...or the league is just being politically correct. And since the only way Spike Lee gets his name in the news anymore is by stirring the racism pot as he sits court-side at games, of course he had to issue a statement saying Sterling has a slave owner mentality and sees his players as slaves. Hey Spike (Oh, wait, Shelton...Your given name is Shelton), your last film made less than  a total of $2.2 million at the theaters and there are five black players on the Clippers that made more this year than that, so that's not exactly slavery. Chris Paul got over $18 million this year and over the next four years over $20 million, over $21 million, nearly $22.5 million, and over $24 million respectively. Not exactly slave wages there, Shelton.

I'm not a basketball fan, but I do wish the Clippers the best of luck. They're a long-suffering franchise with long-suffering fans, due to suffering Don Sterling's crappy ownership. Not the best way to exact an ownership change and if they move I'll feel bad for their LA fan base who'll be losing their team. At least they'll still have non-stop Kardashian coverage.

Tell me why....again

Once again, dear readers, as I do every couple few months or so, I need to ask why…

Why do illegal aliens get in-state tuition in California, but I can’t? Oh wait; I'm an American citizen. If you’re going to let illegal non-Americans get in-state tuition, then you better do away with out of state tuition for American citizens.

Why is it the city council of San Francisco is looking to stifle the First Amendment rights to free speech for a private citizen, namely talk-radio host Michael Savage? When illegal aliens in San Francisco said they were going to fast in a hunger strike until they got special treatment, Savage said that they could go ahead & starve. So now all the liberal assclowns on the Left Coast are calling for the government to censor the free speech of a private citizen that they don’t agree with, calling it Hate Speech.

Why are any government officials even paying attention to these aforementioned illegals and granting them rights and privileges reserved for CITIZENS instead of declaring them persona non grata and deporting them?

Why is it a hate crime for the College Republicans at San Francisco State University to stomp on paper copies of flags from terrorist organizations but any asshole can burn an actual American flag and be protected under free speech & freedom of expression? At a small anti-terrorism rally in October 2006, several members of the College Republicans stomped on pieces of paper they had painted to look like flags of the radical Islamic organizations Hezbollah and Hamas (both known terrorism sponsors), copying the designs from images on the Internet. They weren’t even REAL flags. A few days later, a Muslim student filed a complaint, on the grounds that the Arabic script on the Hezbollah and Hamas flags contained the word “Allah.” The university pressed charges, accusing the "blasphemers" of “incivility” and creating “a hostile environment.” Perhaps Muslims ought to have a beef with terrorists who put Allah’s name on their flags, not with people who stomp on paper copies of those flags.

Why is it that my buddy and “adopted” little brother Steve is on his third combat tour in Iraq in 5 years when we seem no closer to resolving that fucking goat rope than we were a couple thousand casualties ago? The ‘war” in Iraq has now lasted longer than our involvement in World War Two; enough is enough.

Why do we venerate Al Gore as the official spokes-doofus for the environment when he’s not even a fucking climatologist? He’s not even a meteorologist, nor even a geologist. His degree from Harvard was in GOVERNMENT, and he dropped out of law school (and divinity school) at Vanderbilt before becoming a career politician. Real climatologists and geologists have been saying for years that Gore’s Global Warming Apocalyptic Armageddon Psychobabble is a crock of shit full of more flaws than the Titanic, but people like Oprah think he’s gonna drive us all to a greener tomorrow in the back seat of a Prius Hybrid. Eat me.

Why is it that suicide rates in the Army are at the highest rate in 26 years? Why are America’s best & brightest & bravest taking their own lives in combat zones and back at home after returning from these combat zones, and why is PTSD swept under the rug like some dirty little secret? A country that forgets its veterans will itself be forgotten.

Why are all the touchy-feely types claiming that America’s government separated a mother & child after the illegal alien mother was sent back to Mexico and left her American-born child here in the States? No one forced her to leave him behind. That was HER choice, amigos. She could just as easily have taken her kid back with her to Tijuana. This, after she holed up in a church for the past year claiming religious sanctuary. Elvira Arellano, 32, arrived in Washington state illegally in 1997. She was deported to Mexico shortly afterward, but returned and moved to Illinois in 2000, taking a job cleaning planes at O’Hare International Airport. She was arrested in 2002 at O’Hare and convicted of working under a false Social Security number. She was to surrender to authorities last August but instead sought refuge at the church on Aug. 15, 2006. So……WHY are background checks at one of America’s biggest & busiest airports so lax that an illegal immigrant had a job cleaning airplanes there?

And why, when I can’t seem to drum up more than a mere handful of people who actually read what I write, is Dog The Bounty Hunter on top of the New York Times best-seller list? I have nothing against Duane Chapman; he seems like a decent fellow. But #1, and I can't get more than 15 readers? That’s just wrong.