Congress overseeing sports is like…
Friday, 15 February 2008 | 62 readers so far
Is it just me or does anyone else think that Congress telling professional sports what substances players may or may not use is like putting Satan in charge of Auschwitz because the living conditions are bad? Might as well put the heroin addicts in charge of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some aspects of our modern American reality are completely idiotic.
Our national attitude towards drugs is one of those aspects.
1 February 15th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Oliver says:
This is a total nonsense and scandal. There’s no problem with pharmaceuticals selling addictive drugs like Paxil, but there’s with steroids and majijuana.
How many millions of my taxes are being wasted on the Congress investigating spy gate and Clemens?
Also, the CIA can destroy tapes, Bush and Clinton can lie to the American people but Clemens cannot lie to Congress.
What a bunch of #$@#$@#$
2 February 16th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
reasonablecitizen says:
I once had a conversation with a colleague in which we discussed whether or not pro sports should be drug free. After some thought, it occurred to us that professional athletes should not be restricted in their pursuit of drugs, surgery , prosthetic limbs, or any other mechanism they wish to choose to enhance their sports performance. If the method is not against the law when it is thought of, who cares?
I see a future in which metahumans will compete with metahumans and ‘naturals’ will compete with naturals. But this is not a legal issue, this is a sports industry choice. Like vitaminzed cereal, protein drinks, and pesticides in food, there will also develop an organic, natural, and unenhanced version of pro sports.
No need to make a federal case out of it, let the industry do what it wants and the athletes to do what their conscience dictates.
3 February 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Gringo_Malo says:
On the bright side, while Congresscritters are harassing Roger Clemens, they’re not working on new entitlement legislation, such as universal health care, or new “gun control” legislation in the wake of another shooting by another nut case off his meds. Personally, I’d like to see them spend a few years as a joint committee of the whole investigating Paris Hilton or Brittney Spears.
4 February 18th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Trevor says:
They always find the time for earmarks, Gringo. Always.
5 February 19th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Gringo_Malo says:
I saw McCain on one of the Sunday morning talk shows recently. He was talking about decreasing government spending by cutting earmarks. He complained that his colleagues had legislated $35 billion in earmarks, what we used to call pork, I guess, in the previous year.
When you consider that Congress is spending upwards of $2 billion per day to impose a replica of the French government on Iraq, and that Uncle Sugar spent about $1.6 trillion on unconstitutional income transfer progams last year, $35 billion in earmarks seems to be way down in the noise. Anyone who really wants to cut government spending will need to go after the big ticket items, the war and entitlements. I know of only one presidential candidate who says he wants to do that, and he has no chance of nomination.
BTW, I got the $1.6 trillion figure using the 2007 figures from this site, and adding the figures for Social Security and Disability under the Pensions heading to the figures for Health Care, Education, and Welfare. Please do check my arithmetic.
Anyway, one man’s earmark is another man’s essential program. I’d really like to limit Congressional sessions to about ten days each quarter, limit the total number of characters in the U.S. Code and CFR, and put an actual dollar limit on federal spending, but I’d settle for a Congress that spent all it’s time on earmarks and Brittney Spears.
6 February 19th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Citizen Deux says:
Not happy about this, not at all. The only reason for oversight is the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by MLB since the early part of the 20th century.
7 February 21st, 2008 at 10:35 am
Gringo_Malo says:
Correction on the cost of the Iraqi War. According to Paul Craig Roberts, it’s only $275 million per day. $2 billion per day would approximate the whole of defense spending in FY2007, which was $653.9 billion, according to usgovernmentspending.com. Don’t know where Roberts gets the $275 million figure. It just goes to show that we all sometimes fail to recognize leftist disinformation.
So entitlements greatly exceed the cost of the war. That’s too bad, because cutting entitlements would probably require a military coup d’etat.
8 February 26th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Trevor says:
Our government is big, and there are a lot of good people working in its various warrens. However, the system we call our federal government, as a whole, is doing more damage than good, in my opinion.