Free Republic

While Silver said he had not polled the owners, he expressed confidence there will be sufficient support to oust Sterlin. Silver's bold prediction suggests he has the necessary votes. That said, expect there to be some debate among owners. No owner will defend Sterling's racism... 1. Neither the Clippers nor Sterling is in financial trouble. Article 13 was designed as an extraordinary remedy for such a problem -- not other problems. While sponsors have dropped their deals with the Clippers and players have contemplated boycotts, the team appears to be in strong financial shape with a deep-pocketed, if reviled, owner....

To heck with Oprah, Larry Ellison, Magics Johnsons, David Geffen and the others. We freepers can do a better job. TV just said the Bunny Ranch owner is putting in a bid. If he can then so can Free Republic. Lets get in on the action before AlGore and Rush Limbaugh put in their bids! And best of all we would not run the team like a plantation!

LISTEN TO LARRY TALK ABOUT HOW THEY RAILROADED STERLING WHILE OTHERS (LIKE SHARPTON) HAVE ALWAYS GOTTEN A PASS

Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron compared Republicans that oppose President Barack Obama to the Ku Klux Klan. ...“Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated,” Aaron told USA Today Sports. Aaron continued: “The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”

Three years ago, I wrote in National Review: Let us accept for the sake of argument that racism is bad, that homophobia is bad, that Islamophobia is bad, that offensive utterances are bad, that mean-spirited thoughts are bad. So what? As bad as they are, the government’s criminalizing all of them and setting up an enforcement regime in the interests of micro-regulating us into compliance is a thousand times worse. Likewise, as bad as Donald Sterling is, what the NBA is doing is a thousand times worse: “The views expressed by Mr. Sterling are deeply offensive and harmful. That they...

(CNN) -- This past week, my inbox blew up with e-mails asking whether Donald Sterling's First Amendment rights were violated in the uproar over the Los Angeles Clippers owner's racist remarks about black people. After all, he was simply expressing his views, however unpopular. While he did have some rights violated, his First Amendment rights remain intact. The First Amendment protects you from the government punishing you because of your speech. The NBA is a private club, and it can discipline Sterling all it wants. What about the chorus of criticism? Are we all violating his First Amendment rights by...

Darren Rovell breaks down what the Clippers could be worth and how difficult it might be for the NBA to get Donald Sterling to sell the team. Video at link

When paparazzi caught up with V. Stiviano, Donald Sterling‘s girlfriend and the woman on the other end of Sterling’s racist rant, Stiviano went on an odd tangent about how one day, she will become a future president. She said, “One day I will become President of the United States of America, and I will change the legislation and laws.” Stiviano kept going on for a bit, bringing up “modern day history [and the] civil rights movement” for some reason. The entire time, Stiviano’s face is hidden by a gigantic visor. Stiviano has been accused of leaking the tape of Sterling’s...

DETROIT (WWJ/AP) -On Tuesday, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned for life by the NBA in response to racist comments the league says he made in a recorded conversation, but what comes next? The other NBA owners need a 75 percent vote to have Donald Sterling removed as owner. But Detroit News columnist and 97-1 The Ticket co-host Terry Foster wonders if the other owners may be worried about their own skeletons in their closets. “I think there is a fear … some owners may not … want an investigation, so they want this thing to go away...

Last thread on this subject: If an NBA team owner said that he thought that certain statemnets from Louis Farrakhan were anti-Semitic or racially charged, did not want him to be the center of attention in his arena and have cameras and the media/televison's making a scene over him, could that NBA owner ban him from his arena? Could the NBA ban Farrakhan? Would Larry Johnson want him to be banned? I asked a question on another thread of mine and some said that the NBA could ban him. I countered (when McDonald's was brought up) that if Sterling owned...

April 30, 2014 5:08 PM Reid: NFL Should Punish Redskins Owner Like NBA Did Sterling By Andrew Johnson The NBA’s lifetime ban of Donald Sterling for his offensive comments should put the NFL on notice about Washington Redskins’ racist name, Harry Reid says. On the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon, Reid commended NBA commissioner Adam Silver for his response to the Sterling situation, and urged his NFL counterpart Roger Goodell to take similar action to “stamp out bigotry in its ranks.” The Senate majority leader also dismissed the tradition-based defense Redskins owner Dan Snyder has made of the team’s name when...

If and when Sterling becomes an ex-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, how can the NBA keep him from attending a Bulls-Knicks game in Chicago, for example, if he walks in just like everyone else? If Sterling can be banned, can some person who posts racially-charged epithets online on whatever online media platform be identified by the NBA as an "undesirable" - a persona non grata - and summarily "banned" from all NBA games? Are we now in the age where the owner of a "restaurant" who said no to blacks eating in his restaurant is booted out, his restaurant...

Oprah Winfrey is joining with entertainment mogul David Geffen and Oracle Corp. chief executive Larry Ellison in hopes of buying the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Clippers. The future ownership of the Clippers is in question after team owner Donald Sterling was banned for life from the league on Tuesday by NBA commissioner Adam Silver. The ban was in response to a recording of racist comments that the league said were made by Mr. Sterling, who acknowledged it was his voice on the tape, according to Mr. Silver.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver won near-universal plaudits for delivering “death penalty” sanctions on LA Clippers owner (for now) Donald Sterling with a lifetime ban and a recommendation to the owners that they force a franchise sale. The NAACP, however, isn’t satisfied. They want Silver and the owners to guarantee that this won’t happen in the future, too: The National Urban League, the National Action Network, the NAACP and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation issued a joint statement cheering Silver’s announcement that he banned Sterling for life and that the league would attempt to force him to sell the...

From a blogging friend of mine: END OF SINCERITY? IS THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NBA TO TRUMP THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES? James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. © April 30, 2014 When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa, after a physics lecture, Rex Jamison invited me to have coffee with him. Rex was valedictorian of his high school class at Story City, Iowa. He was also number one in my class at Iowa as well. He would go on to become a Rhodes Scholar at Cambridge in Great Britain, and subsequently to graduate from Harvard...

Donald Sterling is set to make up to $780 million if he's forced to sell the LA Clippers by the NBA's Board of Governors. All NBA team owners issued statements yesterday saying they want him out of the league, but could face a still legal battle since Sterling made clear he has no intention of selling. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling from the league for life Tuesday, and hit him with a $2.5million fine, after the billionaire was heard making racist statements in recently released audio recordings. Silver also called on the Board of Governors to push the 80-year-old...

A crowd gathered outside Los Angeles' Staples Center on Tuesday night before Game Five of the Clippers-Warriors NBA playoff series to protest racist comments made by Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen and Larry Ellison will join together in a bid to buy the Los Angeles Clippers if the NBA's board of governors votes to force Donald Sterling to sell the team, Geffen told ESPN's Jeremy Schaap on Wednesday. Geffen said he and Ellison would run the team, while Winfrey would be an investor. "Oprah is not interested in running the team," Geffen told Schaap. "She thinks it would be a great thing for an important black American to own [another] franchise. "The team deserves a better group of owners who want to win. Larry would sooner die...

On NPR’s race-matters talk show “Tell Me More” on Monday, host Michel Martin discussed the Donald Sterling scandal with New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden, announcing he had written the book "Forty Million Dollar Slave: The Rise, Fall, And Redemption Of The Black Athlete." Rhoden used the Sterling scandal to thump a tub for racial quotas in journalism. He claimed that every time there’s not a black journalist in a newsroom or a stadium press box, that news outlet or media elite is Donald Sterling-level racist:

Though he supports the lifetime ban that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver imposed on the Los Angeles Clippers owner Tuesday, Jabbar is sharply critical in his column of the public's and media's eager rush to pillory Sterling for making shocking racial comments in a private conversation with his mistress, recorded without his knowledge, after they ignored more serious public wrongdoing by the real estate titan for years.