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December 12, 2007 4:08 PM

The Final Countdown

Posted by Matthew Felling
(Blair Bunting/Getty Images)
Tick, tick, tick … the clock is ticking down to tomorrow’s bombshell report on performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball. And the drumbeat of the narrative keeps getting louder, day by day.

Tick … Last week’s report of baseball suspending Baltimore Oriole Jay Gibbons and Kansas City Royal Jose Guillen.

Tick … Barry Bonds pleads not guilty to perjury and obstruction charges in a federal investigation of performance-enhancing drugs.

Tick … American Olympic track and field star Marion Jones is stripped of her 5 medals from the 2000 Olympics.

Tick .. Today’s New York Times reports that over fifty baseball players are going to get fingered by the report:
What it contains will be officially revealed Thursday, when [report author George] Mitchell holds a 2 p.m. news conference in Manhattan. Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig will hold a separate news conference across town at 4:30 p.m. to discuss the report's findings. But two people who are familiar with Mitchell’s investigation, and his findings, said that the report would contain the names of more than 50 active and former major league players who are linked to the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
With the report’s authors playing it cool on the details, we’re left to speculate just how jaw-dropping the report will be. How many of the 50 players are going to be news to us? Say, if the study points out known offenders like Jose Conseco or David Segui or Jason Giambi – who has elliptically implied his past steroid use – there won’t be a whole lot of new information there.

And will it address the concern of some fans, that baseball management merely looked the other way, as Salon’s King Kaufman wondered the other day?
What we're all waiting for is to see whether Mitchell's going to be a straight shooter, pardon the choice of words. The story of the juicing era in baseball can't be told without talking about the complicity of the clubs, the willingness of the owners to at least look the other way when it came to steroids and the like because bulked-up ballplayers seemed to hit more home runs, and everybody, not just chicks, digs the long ball.
While it may be just pre-release posturing, the preliminary reports coming out of New York suggest that the report won’t take it easy on the powers that be.
The report, to be issued Thursday, will be sharply critical of both Major League Baseball and the players’ union for tolerating the use of performance-enhancing drugs over an extended time.
So will it be a blockbuster end to a yearlong story? Or underwhelming, overhyped “not much news here” report? Will it get to the point where steroids should be considered -- as shorthand for America’s shortcuts to success, a cultural reference point from Enron to YouTube celebrity-chasing, if nothing else -- for Time’s Person of the Year?

Time will tell. Tick, tick, tick …
Tags:
Barry Bonds ,
George Mitchell ,
David Segui ,
Jay Gibbons ,
Marion Jones
Topics:
Media Issues
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by ellen883 February 25, 2009 8:37 PM EST
Are we THAT stupid?

So ... you thought it was the war in Iraq that was
costing us too much?
You Better Read This:

We, the Voters, have been hammered with the
propaganda that it was the Iraq war and the "war
on terror" that was bankrupting us. I now find
that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over
and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I also have
included the URL's for verification of all the following
facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare
to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food
assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC,
and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html


3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on
Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary
and secondary school education for children here
illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education
for the American-born children of illegal aliens,
known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate
illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal
aliens for welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion dollars a year in suppressed
American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have
a crime rate that's two and a half times that of
white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their
children, are going to make a huge additional
crime problem in the US.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10
MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern
Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from
Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs,
cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into
the U.S. from the Southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National policy Institute, estimated that
the total cost of mass deportation would be
between $206 and $230 billion or an average
cost of between $41and $46 billion annually
over a five year period.
Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances to their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration:
Nearly One million sex crimes Committed by
Illegal Immigrants In The United States.
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping
$ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

Are we THAT stupid?


If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message.
If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back
of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident
in the country.
Including every elected representative in
Washington, D.C. - five times a week for as long as
it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence
in our policies and enforcement thereof.
Reply to this comment
by ltjones4 December 14, 2007 1:59 PM EST
I would like for someone to do a story on Verizon DSL Support Services. Twice I was scheduled for repair service because my DSL Service was down for 4 days one time and a week another. Verizon scheduled me for a repair date on 12/13/07 between 8AM-7pm, I had to leave at least two numbers that I could be reached on and no one ever showed up and did''t even call. This is the 2nd time I''ve taken off work for verizon repair and they never showed up, and they can''t provide you with anyone to complaint to. I need help.
Reply to this comment

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