Friday the 13th linkage

Jason Whitlock on the Steve Nash/MVP/race card brouhaha. Seriously, why is open dialog on race anathema to Americans? Shouting down any suggestion that race may have been a factor does not a color blind society make. It's a good read.

Bomani Jones weighs in as well. And while we're on Page 2, when Scoop Jackson joined the Page 2 cast, I didn't know what to think - I liked his writing for the most part, though he seemed to love his own words a little too much. So far, he's been decent. Scoop on LeBabyjesus's new adventures.

My condolences to Manchester United supporters. Okay, I'm kidding. I hope Glazer runs your club into the ground.

So you've probably heard by now that Dave Chappelle checked himself into a mental health clinic in South Africa of all places. It's hard to be sympathetic to a guy who just got a $50 million deal but I'm not entirely surprised either. This is a guy who lives not in NYC or LA, but on some farm in Ohio. And he's complained before about random people yelling "I'm Rick James, bitch!" while he's walking with his kids.

And as much as I've enjoyed the show, none of the skits have really matched the quality of his standup, particularly the HBO special Killin' Them Softly.

In any case, I'm glad he didn't pull a Spalding Gray, especially after hearing about the bizarre behavior.

Speaking of DVDs, Scrubs: The First Season is coming out finally. But guess what else is coming out? Yup yup.

This story amuses me to no end: the bikerack that came from nowhere.

Via our brothers-in-sidedish Cole Slaw Blog, an enlightening piece on reporting on the Iraqi insurgents. It really is a great read on the difficulty of covering the war on Iraq and the current state of the media:

Lots of column inches have been spent in the discussion of how our rights as Americans are being surreptitiously confiscated, but what about our complicity, as journalists, in that? It seems to me that the assault on free speech, while the fear and intimidation is in the air, comes as much from us -- as individuals and networks of journalists who censor ourselves -- as it does from any other source.

We need to wake up as individuals and as a community of journalists and start asking the hard and scary questions. Questions we may not really want to know the answers to about ourselves, about our government, about what is being done in our name, and hold the responsible individuals accountable through due process in our legal or electoral system.

We need to begin to be able to look again at our government, our leadership and ourselves critically. That is what the Fourth Estate is all about. That's what American journalism can do at its zenith. I also happen to believe that, in fact, that is the highest form of patriotism -- expecting our country to live up to the promises it makes and the values it purports to hold. The role of the media in assisting the public to ensure those values are reflected in reality is undeniably failing today.

Times like this, I have to ask the age old question: what liberal media?