Game of Thrones—the hit HBO series now in its fourth season and based on George R.R. Martin’s pseudo-medieval fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire—is big news. Every episode generates not only a tsunami of fan reaction but intense discussions by bloggers and journalists; the death of sadistic boy-king Joffrey may have made more headlines than Russia's attempted takeover of Eastern Ukraine. And now, the latest episode has touched off a raging debate that goes beyond the show itself to a very current real–life issue: defining rape and consent. (The New Republic alone had two online articles on the subject.) But this controversy has revealed a fascinating fact: A lot of feminists who rail against "rape culture" don’t actually practice the black-and-white, yes-or-no dogma that they preach—not even with regard to fiction...Heh.
Fuc the owner!!! I will buy. Them n sell them to magic johnson !! http://t.co/fDHLQw8Im5
— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) April 26, 2014
Snoop Dogg said he will buy the Clippers from Donald Sterling and sell it back to Magic Johnson. Straight up, hes a G pic.twitter.com/ocRLBMM0Ro
— Dilpreet (@Dilpreet09) April 27, 2014
Just met Shannon Watts. #NRAAM
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 26, 2014Nope, not interested "talking" to #DanaLoesch after insults and bullying of victims and their families. #MomsDemand #gunsense #gunbullies
— Shannon (@shannonrwatts) April 26, 2014. @shannonrwatts had security who pushed and ran into me simply because I asked her to correct her false remarks about me. #NRAAM #gunsense
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 26, 2014After the malicious lies and bully tactics against me by @shannonrwatts I was still willing to attempt civil convo. She wasn’t. #gunsense
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 26, 2014
I'd say it's @NoMoreMister who gets the curious search results, lol! http://t.co/Pv5Mvhfn3U @RSMcCain @GatewayPundit @ChrisLoesch @MsEBL
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 26, 2014
.@BlazingCatFur OMG leftist @NoMoreMIster is having a meltdown over racist #DonaldSterling, lol! http://t.co/Pv5Mvhfn3U #DonaldSterling
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 26, 2014
Hey, '@NoMoreMister', even @MBouffant's calling you out, lol!
http://t.co/gTOZLQwNot #Racist #Democrats
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 27, 2014
.@MBouffant Can you just get idiot @NoMoreMister to issue an update and correction? Thanks: http://t.co/TtsoBmvmUK #DonaldSterling #Racism
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 27, 2014
Clippers Owner Donald Sterling Under Investigation By The NBA After Allegedly Racist Comments http://t.co/KzgroGIWWG pic.twitter.com/9elQUx76TT
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) April 26, 2014
In the audio recording, a person identified by TMZ as Sterling can be heard chiding a former girlfriend, identified by the website as V. Stiviano, saying he was angry that she had posted a picture on her Instagram account of herself and Johnson.PREVIOUSLY: "Liberal #Democrat Donald Sterling Caught on Tape Screaming Ugly Racist Epithets," and "Hey, 'No More Mister', It's 'Donald T. Sterling' Who Owns the #Clippers, LOL!"
“It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people,” Sterling is alleged to have said. He added later in the recording, referring to her Instagram postings, that “you don’t have to have yourself with, walking with black people.”
“Don’t put him on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don’t bring him to my games,” the person identified as Sterling also said. “Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you want to promo, broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?”
Sterling’s wife sued Stiviano last month, asking for the return of cash, property, cars and other items that Sterling gave Stiviano.
The Clippers’ president, Andy Roeser, said in a statement Saturday that he was not certain whether the recording was authentic and that the club was investigating.
“Mr. Sterling is emphatic that what is reflected on that recording is not consistent with, nor does it reflect, his views, beliefs or feelings,” Roeser said in the statement. “It is the antithesis of who he is, what he believes and how he has lived his life. He feels terrible that such sentiments are being attributed to him and apologizes to anyone who might have been hurt by them.”
I am fresh out of my 3 week work Bubble which largely kept me away from monitoring pressing current events like the "controversy" over this irritating video made by Avril Lavigne. I mean racist? Really? What a crock. It was allegedly pulled from YouTube, but is back now and apparently hasn't been whitewashed like Katy Perry's crapola was because she offended Islam.Yeah, she's a sweetie. But see Althouse, "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist" (via Memeorandum):
Avril is a pleasant young lady, I hope her music improves.
Do you not see what's so cliven about it? Well, then, you might want to submit to Vox, the website that explains everything to the point needed by an adequately intelligent but generally pretty busy person...Well, maybe the Vox-splainers will be all over Donald Sterling's racism as well, lol!
ADDED: The Vox-shaming continues here.
The truth is that the racist Clippers owner is a classic, typically far-left liberal from L.A.'s typically progressive westside.******
Desperate leftists can take that to the bank the idiot losers.
Clippers Owner Donald Sterling to GF -- Don't Bring Black People to My Games ... Including Magic Johnson http://t.co/AtPwbjxHfA
— TMZ (@TMZ) April 26, 2014
And there's a YouTube clip at the Independent Journal Review, "Explosive Audio: L.A. Clippers Owner Donald Sterling Shows Us All What Truly Ugly Racism Sounds Like." As it notes there: Just for the record, Sterling’s record of political support is for two Democratic politicians: former California Governor Gray Davis and three-term Senator Bill Bradley.Of course! Sterling's a liberal leftist Democrat of the first order! Also here, "Follow the Money: Political Contributions of NBA Owners."
You can't flip through our newspaper these days without spotting the giant ads Sterling buys promoting his awards and donations, his smiling face plastered among a jumble of names and cut-and-paste photos.And left-wing author and activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, back in 2009, hammered Sterling's racism --- and took the NAACP to task for giving the Clippers owner a pass on his disgusting racist bigotry. See, "Put Donald T. Sterling's NAACP Award on Hold":
I wangled an invitation because I wanted to meet him. I was curious about the man -- and the motives -- behind the generosity. Sterling has been dogged for years by claims that he's a bigot. Was this simple image repair or true redemption, I wondered.
Two months ago, Sterling settled a housing discrimination lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department for $2.7 million. Four years ago, he spent millions to settle a similar lawsuit brought by a fair housing group.
Both accused him of trying to exclude blacks, Latinos and families with children from renting apartments in buildings he owns.
Yet there he was last week playing Santa, handing out $1 million from his private charitable foundation to 10 high schools in South and East Los Angeles and 20 charities across Los Angeles County.
Like Skid Row's Para Los Niños, "another fabulous Hispanic charity in Boyle Heights, where I grew up," Sterling said.
And Roosevelt High, "with all the Hispanic kids," he said, "where nobody thought they could study and learn calculus until that teacher" -- Jaime Escalante -- came along.
Oops -- Escalante taught at Garfield High, which also received a Sterling grant.
A Google search with the name Donald Sterling and racial discrimination found nearly 12,000 results. Not one of them even remotely had Sterling doing anything to further racial goodwill. The checklist of reported Sterling racial escapades include a Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit and forced settlement, slurs and gaffes against Hispanics and African-Americans, and that includes two high profile Clipper players, the shooing of minorities away from his pricey Beverly Hills condos and rentals, and an overblown and failed promise to build a Homeless shelter on L.A.s skid row. Then there's the allegations and lawsuit by former Clipper General Manager Elgin Baylor that Sterling runs his operations like a Southern plantation.While perhaps Ofari Hutchison's not persuaded that Sterling's done much in fact to help the black community, as LAT's Banks points out, the Clippers owner indeed has a long history of philanthropy for a litany of left-wing causes. Sports Illustrated, back in 2000, ran a major feature story on Sterling, critical of his success as an NBA owner but highlighting his liberal philanthropy, "Up And Down In Beverly Hills":
The NAACP airbrushed this away and simply said that Sterling has been a gem in giving oodles of tickets away to needy inner city kids and ladling out some cash to charities and sports camps for them. How any of this ranks as a take the lead, storm the barriers battle against racial injustice is a mystery....
The issue is not what, whether or even if Sterling did anything to further the cause of racial justice and civil rights. He hasn't. The issue is what the NAACP is doing to further it.
Many people believe that Sterling is playing a different game from the rest of the NBA owners. "I don't know how important winning is to Donald," says [Carl] Scheer, the team's general manager Scheer. "He seems more concerned mat his books are balanced, that he runs one of the few NBA franchises with no debt, that he can bring his friends to games." Those friends—a mix of Friars Clubbers and Merv Era celebs—show up en masse at Sterling's Malibu White Party, the extravagant tented barbecue-and-bubbly beach bash he often throws at his second home, a neo-Tudor oceanfront bungalow. The party is so named because guests are encouraged to dress all in white, as in The Great Gatsby. "Sterling's agenda is as much social as professional," says Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mark Heisler. "He loves the status that owning even a bad team confers."Sterling's a classic Beverly Hills-Hollywood schmoozer and left-wing philanthropist big shot, and the occasional leftist tight wad, heh.
He also enjoys the publicity he's received as a philanthropist. Southern California charities routinely fete Sterling as their Humanitarian of the Year. Since 1997, the title has been accorded him by the Vista Del Mar Orphanage, the Special Olympics, the Los Angeles Yeshiva, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation and the L.A. Police Historical Society. Not that every charity has found it easy to separate Sterling from his swag. Linda McCoy-Murray recognized that last summer when she phoned him to help sponsor a golf tournament in honor of her late husband, venerated L.A. Times sports columnist Jim Murray. Every pro franchise in California, according to McCoy-Murray had forked over at least $5,000 to her foundation, which provides journalism scholarships. Every pro franchise, that is, except the Clippers, which had memorialized Murray on the final page of last season's media guide. Sterling offered McCoy-Murray two season passes. "You know, that's wonderful," she remembers telling him. "but we're trying to endow a college scholarship fund. We could really use cash."
Well, we know that there's at least one person who won't be marking Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday. "Observe that no one in Europe dares to speak about the Holocaust even though it's not clear what the reality is about it, whether it even has a reality, or how it happened," said Iran's ruling cleric, Ali Khamenei, in a March 21 speech. "Expressing an opinion or doubts about the Holocaust is considered to be one of the greatest of sins [in Europe] where someone can get stopped, arrested, sued or imprisoned for this offense."Keep reading.
The ayatollah's recent comments on the Holocaust were part of a longer speech that was a scorching stemwinder against the West and Iranians who embrace Western ways. Holocaust revisionism is part of Mr. Khamenei's resistance to a world organized around Western norms and history. Other strategies include developing Iran's nuclear program, making its economy more sanctions-proof, and maintaining a religious culture capable of closing the "cracks" opened by the allure of a deviant Occident.
Many observers, including some within the Obama administration, have sought to play down the matter of Iranian Holocaust denial. So have many Iranians and Westerners who sincerely want to get past the nuclear issue and see Iran reintegrated into the world—Holocaust denial is just too awkward and painful to examine. It's an aberration, many insist, nasty insecure rhetoric without roots in Persian culture. In truth it is a symptom of a worldview utterly at odds with our own. It strongly suggests that Mr. Khamenei's republic will endure great economic hardship to realize its dream of becoming a nuclear power.
Holocaust revisionism permeates and defines the Iranian regime. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously supported a research mission to Poland in 2005 to investigate whether millions of Jews could have died at Auschwitz. (Poland's foreign ministry turned down the request.) Today, in addition to Supreme Leader Khamenei, commanders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps—who oversee Iran's nuclear program and terrorist operations—embrace Holocaust-denial with gusto.
Even the "moderate" president elected last year, Hasan Rouhani, danced around the subject of the Holocaust in his interview last September with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, saying it was up to historians to decide—as if they hadn't already—the true "dimensions" of Nazi slaughter. Mr. Rouhani didn't deny that the Germans killed Jews, but he grouped them with other victims of Nazi barbarism.
The Tehran regime's Holocaust reflections spring in great part from two sources...
We should ask Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the same question once posed to Sen. Joseph McCarthy by U.S. Army head counsel Robert N. Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"He's an abomination. An inhuman wretch. A pile of steaming refuse. And a Democrat (but I repeat myself).
Reid is back in the news for denigrating the peaceful supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, a popular critic of the Bureau of Land Management policy, as "domestic terrorists."
McCarthy in the 1950s became infamous for smearing his opponents with lurid allegations that he could not prove, while questioning their patriotism. Reid has brought back to the Senate that exact same McCarthy style of six decades ago -- and trumped it.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Reid libeled candidate Mitt Romney with the unsubstantiated and later-refuted charge that Romney was a tax cheat. "The word's out that he [Romney] hasn't paid any taxes for 10 years," Reid said.
Later, when asked for proof, Reid offered a pathetic rejoinder: "I have had a number of people tell me that." One wonders how many names were on Reid's McCarthyite "tell" list -- were there, as McCarthy used to bluster, 205 names, or perhaps just 57?
When asked again to document the slur, Reid echoed McCarthy perfectly: "The burden should be on him. He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes."
When the Koch brothers donated money that was used for political ads -- just as liberal political donors George Soros and the Steyer brothers have done -- Reid rushed to the Senate floor to question their patriotism: "These two brothers ... are about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine." The charge of being "un-American" is also vintage McCarthyite slander.
Reid also has a bad habit of racial bigotry. He once praised fellow Sen. Barack Obama because he was, in Reid's words, a "light-skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."
When Reid was worried that he would not get enough Hispanic voters to the polls, he condescendingly lectured the Latino community: "I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK. Do I need to say more?"
Reid once singled out for damnation just one Supreme Court justice -- Clarence Thomas: "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court."
Reid has also brought back McCarthy's custom of vicious and sometimes profane insults.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Reid announced: "I can't stand John McCain." Of then-President George W. Bush, Reid said: "President Bush is a liar." Reid claimed that fellow Mormon Mitt Romney had "sullied" his religion.
When Gen. David Petraeus brought proof to Congress that the surge in Iraq was beginning to work by late 2007, Reid declared, "No, I don't believe him, because it's not happening."
He elaborated on that charge by labeling Petraeus -- at the time the senior ground commander of U.S. forces fighting in Iraq -- a veritable liar. Reid alleged that Petraeus "has made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual."
When an African-American and Democratic appointee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, William Magwood, opposed Reid on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site controversy, Reid called him a "first-class rat," "treacherous, miserable liar," "sh-t stirrer," and "one of the most unethical, prevaricating, incompetent people I've ever dealt with."
Like a pre-reform-era politician, Reid entered public service relatively poor and will leave it as a multimillionaire. He has granted lucrative favors to casinos and rich investors who hired his sons' legal firm. While in office he made considerable profits on private business and real estate deals. Some of those who donated to his campaigns got favorable government treatment.
Reid recently paid his granddaughter thousands of dollars from his campaign war chest to make jewelry gifts for his donors and friends. Only after a storm of criticism did he reimburse his campaign fund.
So how does Reid's reckless career continue with the Senate leader avoiding the sort of congressional censure that finally did in McCarthy? Why is there is no progressive muckraker to take on Reid the way that Edward R. Murrow once exposed McCarthy?
For the left, Reid's utility as an attack dog (like McCarthy's utility to Republicans) outweighs the downside of his crude bombast...
RT @HistoryInPix: A liberated Jewish Holocaust survivor turning the tables. pic.twitter.com/kmGtuX3zeD
— Mary Chastain (@mchastain81) April 25, 2014Contrary to popular belief, Reid arrived in Washington wealthy; he had a net worth of at least -- and likely more than -- $1 million, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Although Reid had spent most of the previous 15 years in public office, or pursuing public office, he still proved to be a robust earner. After his term as lieutenant governor ended in 1975, he would not return to public office full time until 1983. (The Gaming Commission is only part-time work.) All told, he worked at least 14 years as a private-practice attorney between 1964 and 1982.Keep reading. It's the part of the story to which Reid's political handlers objected, and RCP's included their objections bracketed in the text, in italics.
As a former public official with strong political connections, he found lucrative work in Las Vegas. It appears his personal boom was simply part of the broader expansion of Nevada’s economy. Some attorneys at the time, particularly those with political networks, would occasionally receive payment in the form of real estate. Given Nevada’s rapid growth, such payments would become extremely valuable over time. It’s unclear if Reid received land as compensation then, but he certainly made good money and invested in real estate early on.
Theoretically, working as a lawmaker should have severely limited Reid’s earning potential. In the early 1980s, members of Congress received a salary of about $70,000 per year. Though pay has generally risen -- and Reid receives more than most lawmakers because of his leadership position -- he has never earned more than $200,000 per year in salary.
Yet, his estimated net worth peaked at around $10 million just a few years ago, and he has remained consistently wealthier than when he entered Congress. (Reid reported that his net worth in 2012 was somewhere between $2.8 million and $6.3 million. His 2013 financial disclosures will be released later this year.) As of 2012, real estate composed about one-third of his portfolio. The rest was made up of government bonds; stakes in energy, electronics, pharmaceutical, and chemical companies; and other investments. He also possesses significant mining claims potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How did Reid manage to grow his net worth so significantly while raising a large family, on a public official’s salary, and incurring the expenses associated with maintaining two residences on opposite sides of the country? Reid has lived frugally -- before buying a house in recent years, he kept just a trailer in his hometown of Searchlight -- and he has made undeniably savvy investments. More significantly, however, is his willingness to enter political and ethical gray areas to make money.
Reid has walked a fine line over the years, occasionally breaking rules or engaging in brazenly unseemly behavior during his pursuit of wealth. Further, he has also used his position to save money in ways that the general public can’t -- a practice that creates public relations issues and raises questions about the senator’s ethics. As for any illegal behavior or obvious wrongdoing, Jon Ralston told RCP, “There’s been some smoke but there’s never any fire on that.”
There may be quite a bit of smoke.
