The controversy continues to rage over the behavior of fans and the reaction of locals to NBA All-Star Weekend. In the Sun yesterday, Joe Schoenmann (a former colleague of mine at Las Vegas Weekly) looks at the race issue (raised on the Buffet last week) noting: "The subtext of all this--generally spoken in code--is that many of the visitors were black." In the article, MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman implies as much about the local reaction noting the term "these people"  used in some commentary sounds a lot like code for race. And, it does. But local journalist Damon Hodge (a current colleague of mine at Las Vegas Weekly) who frequently covers sports, gangs and crime in Vegas and who also walked the Strip on NBA All -Star weekend had a very different perspective. Hodge told the Sun that he saw plenty of out of town thugs who clearly came to Vegas looking for trouble that weekend, and Hodge added he hopes never to see anything like NBA All-Star weekend hit the Strip again. Interestingly, most everyone who Schoenmann quotes who feels that racism was behind the local response to All-Star Weekend is identified by him as white in the article while everyone who says that race wasn't the issue only that the crowd was packed with thugs behaving badly is identified as black. Jason Whitlock, a sports columnist for Kansas City Star, who was here covering the event put it this way in the Sun article: "I don't put this on Vegas. I'm black, I love black people--but this thing, the amount of disrespect I saw, this was ridiculous."