Enough with the steroids already!

Is anybody as pissed as me that our legislators are wasting their time meddling in an ongoing investigation by calling a bunch of baseball players to testify about steroid use? My representative Henry Waxman signed this statement, and normally I'm down with him, but this smacks of unnecessary grandstanding by politicians that really really want to be seen on the nightly news questioning Curt Schilling and Sammy Sosa.

Steroids are illegal, and nothing that the House Committee hearings do are going to change that. The steroid issue has already received tons of publicity, so I don't see the argument about how important it is that "the American people know the facts on baseball's steroid scandal." Furthermore, if they compel certain players to testify, the ones that are on the witness list for the upcoming BALCO trial, they could taint the case and subvert justice. This is just shameless publicity-mongering. And it highlights how much meaningless crap the Congress happily does on a daily basis.

One thing I noticed in Sam Rosenfeld's story about the House Democratic report on institutional abuse in the Congress is that the House spends up to 3 days a week "nam(ing) post offices and congratulat(ing) sports champions and foreign governments.” Why the fuck are they doing this, other than out of a sense of tradition? Shouldn't we as citizens, whatever your political persuasion, demand that the business of legislating the country not be taken up by congratulating sports teams and naming post offices? Can't that be "taken offline," done by staffers or something?

Of course, none of this will be done because this is how politicians court popularity locally, and become a "man of the people." But it's retarded. We have real issues and real concerns. This kind of crap has no place in Congress.