[KSig RC]

I caught a little of the actual House proceedings this morning as I got out of the shower - what a joke.

This is really an excuse for the members of the House committee to proselytize from the podium, get air time, rant and rave to a camera and then peddle themselves as "difference makers" during their next reelection campaign. Baseball's testing program is on par or superior to any league out there, and its penalties are more severe - football, by contrast, has a legitimate drug problem, with stars caught every year and a testing program that is notoriously full of holes and pre-test warnings to star players. I witnessed the committee chair first, then the minority leader, stand up and deliver a ridiculous sermon on the dangers of drugs, while giving uncited and laughably uninformed "statistics" on drug use and the connection between athletics and use of performance-enhancing substances. Never mind that most of these users are not baseball players - football has, by far, the more serious problem - or that the true 'enablers' are generally not pro athletes, but rather the parents who fund the purchases, or the coaches who look the other way in search of more and better wins, or etc.

The finger-wagging on the part of Congress in this situation is laughable at best, and insidiously dangerous at worst. Announcing the baseball situation as a "problem" while focusing on the stars and not the majority of users (who are, in general, failed scrubs or the injured), all the while making innuendo that the problem is worse than the testing indicates because of the specter of HGH (which has never been shown to actually increase muscle mass or athletic performance), really gives children the actual license and rationale for using performance-enhancing substances. It's a total joke.

We should all be ashamed, as taxpayers, that our money and time is being wasted on such an inane, onanistic exercise as this. How silly.