Today at noon Eastern Bill Simmons will begin another one of his marathon chat sessions on ESPN.com. It's always fun to see what Bill tackles in the live chat, and what gets edited out by his ESPN overlords. You may be unaware of this, but ESPN actually has a reputation for quashing the slightest bit of dissent from any of its voices. It's why Jason Whitlock was killed last night.

Oh, so you're saying Jason Whitlock wasn't killed? Well, how do you know? Have you seen Whitlock today? ESPN probably just kept the story off the air, that's why.

Now if you'll excuse me for a moment, there's someone with heavy-soled boots in my hallway. And now they're pounding on my door. What gives?

The blogosphere is suddenly all atwitter about Bill Simmons's latest NFL picks column, specifically a passing shot at certain unnamed blogs:

[T]he fake-laughing battle between Shannon Sharpe on CBS, Terry Bradshaw on Fox, Bettis on NBC and Tom Jackson on ESPN could end up being more interesting than any of the division races. It's too bad nobody's keeping score. We have all these evil blogs now that go after everybody in the media, couldn't one of them keep a fake-laugh tally on the pregame shows?

While I can't imagine Bill is a big fan of Sons of the Sports Guy, the blogosphere provides necessary criticism for lazy or inept journalists and commentators who have no business keeping their jobs. Jay the Joke, Fire Joe Morgan, and Scoopwatch are excellent examples of blogs providing a counterattack to the bloviated wretches who have suckled too long on the ESPN teat.

As for Bill's assertion that blogs can be "evil," maybe it's best if everybody just sat back and took a couple deep breaths. The Simmons backlash is really unwarranted. People always attack him for having irregularities in his beliefs or changing his mind on certain subjects, and I can totally empathize with the Sports Guy here. Sometimes I write about how girls say that on a scale of 1 to 10 as a lover, I'm an 11, while other times it's a 12. What can I say? Sometimes I have off days.