I understand the motive for the National Basketball Association banning L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his ugly racial remarks. Just desserts. The guy is a known asshole, according to this 4.27 N.Y. Times story. But how do you order a guy to cough up $2.5 million because TMZ posted an initially private audio recording and exposed him for the creep that he is? How did the NBA decide upon $2.5 million as a fine limit? Why not $10 million? Why not $500,000? We all understand that if you blunder in public, you have to take your punishment. Dicks deserve to be treated like dicks. I recognize also that getting outed (i.e., assasssinated) by TMZ or some other gossip site is par for the course these days, but Sterling was talking privately. That means nothing by today’s standards, I realize, but perhaps it should. I’m not taking Sterling’s Jim Crow attitudes lightly, but he’s almost certainly representative of God knows how many old rich white guys who have lived in their own private membranes for most of their lives. They’re never going to change or re-think things. They’re just going to die one day and that will eventually be that. Update: Sterling has just declared during a Fox News interview that he’s not selling the Clippers and that the NBA can go stuff it.