Author Archives: Bok
Sterling / Silver
How can somebody so rich be such a fool? LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s bigoted habits were well known around the NBA, yet they never seemed to be a problem for him. He has more NAACP life-time achievement awards than Barack Obama has Nobel Peace prizes.
Well, it’s a problem now.
Sterling / Silver
Word got out that Sterling told his girlfriend not to bring black people to his basketball games. This embarrassed the NBA. New commissioner Adam Silver came down hard. Sterling was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from his own team, and told to find a buyer.
Sterling deserved what he got if you look at it as a life-time boorish behavior award. But he’s being punished for something he said in private, not for anything he actually did.
As the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass says, “if you’re an American, you know the back story. It’s race in America. And it’s showtime.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anticipated all this in a piece he wrote condemning Sterling before his penalty came down:
Racists deserve to be paraded around the modern town square of the television screen so that the rest of us who believe in the American ideals of equality can be reminded that racism is still a disease that we haven’t yet licked.
What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really?…
Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way?
Waiving the Individual Mandate for Sainthood
Four popes, two living and two not so much, gathered at the Vatican on Sunday for a papal Hall of Fame induction. The wildly popular and beloved Pope Francis canonized the wildly popular and beloved Pope John Paul II and Pope John XXIII. It was a two for one not seen since the middle ages. The brains of the operation, emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, assisted. Daily Beast called it a Pope-a-polooza.
John Paul II ended communism. John XXIII ended meatless Fridays. They’ve been called bookends of the Second Vatican Council
Individual Mandate for Sainthood Waivers
John Paul II took the High Speed Escalator to Heaven when Benedict XVI waived the 5 year saintly waiting period. Francis greased the skids for John XXIII by granting a waiver of the two miracle mandate for sainthood.
Here’s Peggy Noonan capturing the sweeping grandeur of the event. And here is Maureen Dowd capturing the sweeping under the rug of the priest sex abuse scandals.
The Tortoise and The Harry
In the old cowboy movies range wars were fought over cows and sheep. Now they’re fought over cows and dessert tortoises.
Thanks to the Cliven Bundy standoff with BLM we learned that the federal government owns 81% of the land in Nevada. Harry Reid owns the rest. Well, not quite but it seems that way.
The 7/8 on the US not under the thumb of the BLM is the “brokest nation on earth” according to Mark Steyn:
I think it’s absurd and obnoxious that an obscure and unaccountable government agency should rule an area the size of France, Germany and Italy combined. What for? Why should the 26th largest country on earth (which the Bureau of Land Management is) be maintained in perpetuity as the world’s biggest nature preserve for the desert tortoise? The seven-eighths of the United States that isn’t under the iron rod of the BLM is the Brokest Nation in History: it wouldn’t hurt to have a little more productive land.
Speaking of Bundy, Steyn doesn’t think his racial attitudes should get the BLM off the hook.
Let’s stipulate that Cliven Bundy is a racist. Let’s also assume, if only to save time, that he’s Islamophobic, homophobic and transphobic. So what? Does that make criticizing the Bureau of Land Management “racist” or “homophobic”?
Cliven Bundy Steps in It
Just when Cliven Bundy was generating sympathy for standing up to the man he opened his mouth and stepped in it
Crazy Cliven’s cows graze on on federal grass and he hasn’t paid the bill for 20 years. That makes him sort of a welfare queen of the range. Which is why it was surprising to hear him talking about “negroes” on government subsidy. Here he is in his own words:
