Game of smoke and mirrors
The BALCO grand jury testimony has been unsealed. So that’s theotetically thirty-three thousand pages of data gathered from dozens of atheletes connected to steroid use. Thirty-three thousand pages of testimony your tax dollars paid to gather, which so far has given us the marvellous grand prize (as Jonathan Littman points out in that linked article) of a 30-month jail sentence for… err, well, for leaking the testimony. Thank god the government takes baseball so seriously, eh wot?
This almost makes me wonder if the government is engaged in some massive self-esteem-boosting exercise designed to make the prosecutors in the original O.J. Trial feel better about the terrible job they did. This is amateurish. How many times has Judge Illston rejected charges or motions filed by the government due to procedural errors? How many charges has she dismissed altogether due to the not entirely trivial fault of being exactly the same as some of the other charges? And now we get this, which looks for all the world like a major desperation play, and which looks as though it’ll have some pretty major backlash. What in the world is my hard-earned money paying for, anyhow? At least conduct a quality witch hunt, people.
On the plus side, though, A.J. Pierzynski might get hurt in the fallout, and if anybody has it coming, it’s that sonuvabitch. Yeah, you heard me, Barack Obama. What are you going to do about it? Huh??
