“SI.com has learned that Clippers owner Donald Sterling has hired prominent antitrust litigator Maxwell Blecher, who has written a letter to NBA executive vice president and general counsel Rick Buchanan threatening to sue the NBA. The letter, sources tell SI.com, claims that Sterling has done nothing wrong and that ‘no punishment is warranted’ for Sterling. Blecher also tells Buchanan that Sterling will not pay the $2.5 million fine, which is already past due. Blecher ends the letter by saying this controversy ‘will be adjudicated.'” – Sports Illustrated

“The clash of liberal pieties over the firing of New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson is wonderfully amusing. Feminists complain that her treatment is typical of the mistreatment women face in high-level management jobs, while others cheer the fact that her replacement, Dean Baquet, is the paper’s first black executive editor. There is some dispute over the question of Ms. Abramson’s compensation relative to her male predecessor, and about whether she was penalized for her management style, described as ‘condescending’ by one critic, in a way that a male editor would not have been.” – Kevin Williamson/National Review

“Reading the New York Times’ report on the defenestration of the paper’s executive editor, Jill Abramson, and the coronation, at a hastily arranged meeting Wednesday, of her replacement Dean Baquet, I could not escape the feeling that the Soviet press must have covered the comings and goings of Politburo members in much the same way.” – Matthew Continetti/Washington Free Beacon

“After releasing tens of thousands of criminal aliens, President Obama urgently asks law enforcement officials to lean on Republicans to pass amnesty. Will the GOP deport itself out of victory this year?” – Investors’ Business Daily

“The arrival last week of the enormous—829 pages!—and laborious U.S. National Climate Assessment, a report put together by 300 American worrywarts, reminds me of a little noted fact. The American left has no practical solution for many of the problems that agitate it, and that its neurotics hope will agitate us. Put another way, the left is given to setting the American people off on noble quests for which there is no solution. A case in point is global warming or climate change.” – Bob Tyrrell/American Spectator

“Some countries have dictators, tyrants and kings. America has victims in high office. Victims with vast powers and great wealth who despite all that are oppressed by the people they rule.” – Daniel Greenfield/Front Page Mag

“As he hints at a possible second bid for president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is contending with an unusual criminal investigation into whether he abused his authority, a case that legal experts say has virtually no precedent in modern Texas history.” – WSJ

“The lead story in The Times of London today declares ‘Scientists in Cover Up of ‘Damaging’ Climate View.‘  The Times thinks the story, concerning peer reviewers suppressing a scientific paper purely for political reasons, may amount to the next ‘Climategate,’ on par with the scandal of the leaked emails back in 2009.  This may be media hype, but at the very least it is another clear signal of the kind of enforced climate conformism we noted here on Wednesday, especially since it involves Lennart Bengtsson.” – Power Line

“SunTrust Banks is cutting ties with would-be reality stars David and Jason Benham after liberal activists attacked them for their conservative views on abortion and gay marriage, The Daily Caller has learned. In a statement provided first to TheDC on Friday, the Benham brothers confirmed that SunTrust Banks has pulled all of its listed properties with the Benham brothers’ bank-owned property business, which includes several franchisees across four states. The move comes just a week after HGTV announced it was canceling a planned home renovation show hosted by the brothers.” – Daily Caller

“American policy–Administration as well as opposition–isn’t even wrong, as I have been warning for weeks. It is simply irrelevant. We aren’t looking at the whole chessboard. The German media signaled in March that sanctions against Russia will drive Moscow and Beijing closer together, and that is precisely what has happened. We indulged in a frenzy of impotent, self-consoling posturing against the nasty aggressive Russians, and succeeded only in toppling a pillar of Cold War diplomacy. We set out to propagate democracy in Eastern Europe, and helped to push Putin’s popularity rating at home above 80%. In the entire sorry history of US diplomacy, I can think of nothing that more resembles an own goal. Nice going, guys. Putin isn’t a genius. We are complete idiots.” – PJ Media