Lawyers for the five remaining defendants facing trial in the racially divisive Jena 6 incident in Louisiana presented evidence Friday of what they said was bias on the part of the judge presiding over the cases and sought his removal.

After four hours of testimony, a visiting judge appointed by the Louisiana Supreme Court to hear the recusal motion against LaSalle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray asked for more evidence and postponed a ruling until at least July...

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A Reading Featuring Adam Mansbach with Jeff Chang and Dan Wolf

Tuesday May 27, 2008 at 7:30pm
$5-$15/sliding scale, general admission

Intersection for the Arts
446 Valencia Street (btwn 15/16)
Mission District SF CA 94103
(415) 626-2787

This evening features dynamic author Adam Mansbach (The End of the Jews: A Novel, Angry Black White Boy: A Novel) in conversation about hip-hop, literature and race with journalist & author Jeff Chang. Mansbach reads from his latest novel The End of the Jews: A Novel, and also features an Open Process presentation of Dan Wolf's theatrical adaptation of Mansbach's critically acclaimed bestseller Angry Black White Boy featuring Tommy Shepherd & Keith Pinto from the hip-hop band Felonious.

In a 2007 interview with Cox News, McKinnon said he would vote for McCain, but "I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy." He added that if Obama were to reach the White House, it "would send a great message to the country and the world."

Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white--and black--children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants.

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In fact, the surge in Latino migration (the Southeast is home to the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States) is moving many of the institutions and actors responsible for enforcing Jim Crow to resurrect and reconfigure themselves in line with new demographics. Along with the almost daily arrests, raids and home invasions by federal, state and other authorities, newly resurgent civilian groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in addition to more than 144 new "nativist extremist" groups and 300 anti-immigrant organizations born in the past three years, mostly based in the South, are harassing immigrants as a way to grow their ranks.

The whole piece is here.

Bissinger's beef appears to be less with Leitch than with the changing media landscape. Sports blogs have brought younger, more diverse and more creative voices into the discussion of sports. While much mainstream sportswriting obsesses about personalities, scandal and statistics, the blogosphere offers other options. Pining for the past makes Bissinger sound like some 1950s preacher railing against rock 'n' roll. In some ways, Internet sports coverage is like rock--there's bad and there's good--but overall, it has expanded the confines of the form and content of sports journalism.

Costas fueled the controversy, likening blog commentary to what "a cabdriver" thinks about sports. In the past, he has called bloggers "pathetic, get-a-life losers." It's an attitude that's shared by many A-list columnists and sports personalities, some of whom seethe over the fact that "some guy in his basement" gets to have equal voice--or, in Leitch's case, even exceed the popularity of those whose once dominated the coverage.

There are sports blogs in every style, for every team, and they have entirely changed the game. Of course, some are repellent, but to swear off all blogs would be like refusing to read the New York Times because you don't like the National Enquirer.

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If anything, legacy sportswriters deserve far more scrutiny than the upstarts on the web. Washington Post and ESPN scribe Tony Kornheiser has said that this not a golden age of sportswriting, but it is a golden age for sportswriters. There is more money and fame for those willing to "play ball."

Consider what Big Daddy Drew wrote on Deadspin about ESPN's Rick Reilly. "Reilly is what I like to call a privileged sportswriter. I'm not saying he's rich, or snooty, or anything like that. What I mean is that, in his position, Reilly has access to privileges that you or I, as normal sports fans, don't have. He gets to go to the Masters, VIP-style. He gets to go golfing with Bill Clinton. He gets to ride in an Indy 500 race car. He gets to walk up to Sammy Sosa's locker and dare him to pee in a cup for him. He gets to do all that. And that's why he sucks.... If you're a privileged sportswriter, you're experiencing sports in a completely different way from normal, everyday fans. It's no coincidence the bulk of ESPN's programming now involves sportswriters talking to one another. They're the only people they can identify with. You certainly aren't part of the conversation."

What infuriates old-school sportswriters is that people on the web are calling them on their privilege, isolation and celebrity. In sharp contrast, bloggers, with their messy passion and sharp interaction with readers, sometimes sound far more authentic.

Read it all here.