Swing and a Miss

The stands were packed, media-wise, with journalists having hyped the House hearing on steroids for days.

Jose Canseco, admitted user, served as a warmup act, peddling his book on talk show after talk show while promising to show up at yesterday's committee hearing and . . . take the Fifth.

Never mind the criticism that this was a publicity stunt by Tom Davis and Henry Waxman, that their panel wasn't going to do anything more than bask in the reflected starpower of the likes of McGwire and Sosa.

Finally, at 2:20 p.m., it was time to play ball!

Mark McGwire, who hit 70 homers in '98, said he wouldn't dignify Canseco's charge that Jose had injected him with steroids by saying whether he or anyone else had used steroids. This non-denial denial made him look foolish and neutralized his sobs about the horrors of the drug. He may as well have stood up and shouted that he had cheated. And I write this as someone who admired the way he handled himself seven years ago.

Curt Schilling of the Red Sox took a swing at "that so-called author" and his "irresponsibly" written book.

(And, inexplicably, no Barry Bonds, Mr. 73 Homers, who admits to taking a suspicious substance.)

After opening statements, the panel broke for nearly two hours. Doesn't anyone there know how to put on a show? You don't call your boring witnesses in the morning and schedule your superstars so close to deadline!

(Not that the earlier witnesses were always boring. One man described how his son, a high school athlete, died after taking steroids. This was not deemed worthy of live cable coverage, although they all carried a missing-girl news conference a bit later.)

When the hearing reconvened, Schilling said he had "grossly overstated" the steroids problem. He also called Canseco a "liar."

Sammy Sosa, incredibly terse, said he didn't know. And: "I don't have too much to tell you." Throughout the hearing, except when denying steroid use in a statement, he looked befuddled.

McGwire: "I don't know. I'm a retired player."

Author Canseco said steroids were a big problem, "no doubt whatsoever."

From then on, apparently realizing that none of the players was going to fess up, lawmakers began to ask convoluted questions, but McGwire ducked even some of those. "I'm not here to talk about the past," he kept saying--even as he kept nominating himself as an anti-steroids "spokesman."

"Are you taking the Fifth?" demanded Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings.

"I'm not here to discuss the past," said McGwire, sounding like Al Gore repeating there was "no controlling legal authority."

Indiana Rep. Mark Souder finally broke through the politeness and expressed outrage at McGwire's refusal to discuss "the past."

The hearing dragged on throughout the evening, but only MSNBC stuck with it.

Let's go to the columnists. The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy:

"Say it ain't so, Mark. Or say it is so. Just answer the question. And don't consult with your lawyer before answering.

"At the end of baseball's dark day on Capitol Hill yesterday, Mark McGwire was forever tarnished in the eyes of the nation. He would not answer questions about his alleged involvement with steroids. We'll never look at him the same way."

San Francisco Chronicle's Gwen Knapp:

"Mark McGwire revived Major League Baseball in 1998, he disgraced the game in equal measure Thursday. "Through his repeated, feeble evasions in front of a congressional hearing on steroids, McGwire transformed himself from a towering American icon into a petty figure with neither the decency nor the guts to be forthright about substances that he described as dangerous to children.

"Every terse nonanswer eroded McGwire's stature more, and baseball shrank with him."

George Vescey of the New York Times on McGwire:

"Now he has a new image - not just the slugger who roared past Babe Ruth and Roger Maris, not just the reluctant witness who came close to sobs yesterday, but for his inarticulate responses, essentially with the whole nation watching.

"McGwire, now 41 and considerably slimmer than the hulking slugger who whacked 70 homers in 1998, was being questioned about steroid use by the House Committee on Government Reform.

"He will have to live with the perception that everybody else came off better - certainly the grieving parents who lost sons to drug reactions, even the conflicting medical experts, even the union and management officials who are paid to deal with just such annoyances...Somehow, McGwire lost more than anybody in the room yesterday."

USA Today's Hal Bodley:

"A lot of words were spoken, but nothing was said...It was long and painful -- for the political suits asking the questions and the uncomfortable players answering them, or not answering them."

Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman whacks Congress: "We're at war in Iraq, at war in Afghanistan, threatened by Al Qaeda, mired in budget deficits, faced with gargantuan liabilities in Social Security and Medicare, struggling to sustain the fighting capacity of our military forces--and what does this committee think warrants its urgent attention? Whether a handful of overpaid entertainers are taking forbidden pills to improve their performance."

The MainSt.USA blog: "Conveniently, Sammy Sosa has lost his ability to speak English . . . Jose Canseco is an idiot, but he's the only honest player on this panel...Mark McGwire has shrunk a great deal from his playing days . . . Congress is full of cowards. No one has even managed to make McGwire take the 5th Amendment, although it's clear that the 5th is his fallback position. They're letting him get away with "I'm not here to talk about the past" and offering to become a spokesperson against steroids which is just ridiculous. So we know: McGwire was juiced. Roger Maris still owns the single season home run record as far as I'm concerned. The only guys who have exceeded it are Bonds, McGwire & Sosa, The Juice Boys."

Creeping Meatball: "The U.S. House of Representatives commmittee hearing on Steroid Use in Baseball has been a disaster for both Major League Baseball and the U.S. Congress. The committee members seem unprepared on one hand and too impressed with the players who testified. Also, many members prefaced their remarks with anecdotes about how much they like baseball. Embarrassing. The baseball players, meanwhile, could well have played starring roles in the film Dumb and Dumber. Mark McGwire took the virtual Fifth in that he didn't say anything of note and seemed sedated throughout his testimony."

Meanwhile, the strangest story of the day: a supposedly classified cable accusing a veteran journalist and activist of being an Iraqi spy. I've got the details here.

Remember Bush's vow to crack down on spending while keeping his tax cuts? Well, the Senate couldn't even cut $15 billion:

"The Senate dealt a major blow to President Bush's deficit-reduction hopes by stripping all proposed Medicaid savings from a Republican-backed budget resolution before approving it last night," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"Seven Republicans broke ranks on the 52-48 Medicaid vote, infuriating colleagues in the House and provoking a scathing rebuke from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R., N.H.). The White House can salvage some of the savings in the coming budget talks between the House and Senate, but yesterday's setback underscores just how difficult it is politically -- even in Mr. Bush's own party -- to rein in the escalating cost of many government benefit programs."

More on the DeLay dustup, with American Prospect's Terence Samuel praising the Dems for getting tough:

"Ethics debates are always a touchy subject on Capitol Hill. There is a MAD (mutually assured destruction) quality to them the can scare even the most reckless and partisan of members; an ethics complaint is a widely available weapon that can easily be turned against those who bring them. But in the current debates over Tom DeLay's ethics troubles, Democrats have stopped holding back. Partly it's because there's blood in the water, but it's also because a lot of people are playing a new game now: If you can't legislate, agitate.

"House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who once observed an ethics détente with the Republicans, took questions about the majority leader to the floor this week, abandoning the pretense that the DeLay debate was going to be about individual House members expressing concern about the integrity and reputation of the institution. Now, clearly, it's war, and Pelosi's the general leading the charge."

In Salon, ex-Clintonite

Sid Blumenthal hits the Hammer on his relations with lobbyists:

"DeLay's troubles reveal the anatomy of his power, known from Texas to Washington as DeLay Inc. By controlling the majority in the House, DeLay has been able to enforce discipline on the vast army of lobbyists, law firms and trade associations in Washington. His K Street Project, named after the nondescript street where many of the lobbyists maintain their offices, attempts to ensure that Democrats will not be hired by lobbyists and law firms, which will kick in maximum campaign contributions or else let their clients suffer the consequences.

"In 1999, DeLay received a 'private rebuke' from the House ethics committee for punishing the Electronic Industries Alliance for hiring a Democrat to head its Washington office. DeLay sabotaged trade bills that would have benefited the EIA, and soon the group hired a former House Republican staffer, who arranged contributions to DeLay's political action committee. One prominent Republican lobbyist confided to me that DeLay personally upbraided him for hiring a Democrat in his firm. The Republican majority is thus financially supported through strong-arm tactics and quid pro quos, and pursues policies that always serve the demands of special interests -- from the pharmaceutical companies on Medicare, to credit card firms on bankruptcy, to oil, gas and coal companies on energy."

How bizarre is this, from the New York Post?

"An ex-con was charged yesterday in a chilling plot to kidnap David Letterman's toddler son and nanny from the TV host's Montana ranch and hold them for $5 million ransom.

"Kelly Allen Frank, 43, who was working as a painter at the ranch was being held in lieu of $650,000 bail on charges of solicitation of kidnapping and violating parole."

That's a cable drama we all can live without.

The Debate That Refuses to End: Why there aren't more women columnists and bloggers.

LaShawn Barberquotes from an angry letter:

"'LaShawn, as much as you preach, I wonder if you have a HUSBAND and a FAMILY??? Probably not.'

"Unfortunately this sort of response is what women, married or single, have to deal with from disgruntled men. A woman with strong opinions is a shrew. If she's unmarried, it's because of her 'preaching' (read: nagging) . . .

"It is true. Some men probably feel emasculated when I criticize them and/or kick them off my blog."

Why aren't men joining the discussion? Slate's Dahlia Lithwick wants to know:

"I can't seem to find -- beyond a short blurb by Slate's Jack Shafer -- a single opinion column by a single male columnist on the subject. (I don't count Jonathan Turley's scathing column on the personal nature of Susan Estrich's attack, since he does not get to the merits of her claims.) In fact, the most rigorous and systematic thinking by men and women about the apparent underrepresentation of female voices on the editorial pages is taking place in the blogosphere. Really great posts by both sexes on the debate can be found here, and here, and here, and here, just for starters.

"What do they conclude? Many bloggers point to the gender disparity among the nation's top political bloggers to illustrate the point that even where there are no barriers to entry -- no consciously or unconsciously prejudiced gatekeepers barring the doors -- women may simply choose to stay away from certain types of media. And just as women may not be producing opinion journalism at the same rates as men, they may not be consuming it all that much either. In short, there may be an interesting market problem at work here: I know an awful lot of smart, accomplished women who avoid both the op-ed pages and the Crossfire-style 'screaming shows' because that is simply not the type of discourse they seek out or value.

"I can also swear to the fact that as an editor, the number of pitches I receive from men outnumbers the pitches I see from women by several orders of magnitude. I can add, again purely anecdotally, that women largely send in pitches for reported pieces, and are far less inclined to frame a piece as an "argument" -- which may prove Tannen's point that argument is not necessarily a comfortable or natural mode of communication for women (a phenomenon I observed in law school as well). This is, in short, an insanely interesting thought problem to which we are applying very little interesting thought.

"There are at least a dozen ways to parse and think through the acknowledged underrepresentation of women opinion writers, and yet -- to the extent that we are having a national conversation on the topic -- it is a conversation so far almost wholly lacking the voices of men."

The guys at Powerline see free-market forces at work:

"The distinctive thing about blogging, we always thought, is that there are no editors.

"It turns out that there are editors though, in the form of bloggers who have achieved success and are thought to be able to transfer that success (or at least its possibility) to others by linking to their work. But the notion that such bloggers are making decisions about linking based on gender, or race for that matter, seems quite far-fetched. Most bloggers are driven by ideological passion. We link (a) to people who break stories that are important in our cosmology, (b) to people we think state our views in new or particularly forceful and effective ways and (c) to people who state opposing views in ways we think need to be refuted or ridiculed. It's hard to conceive of a successful blogger of any persuasion who would allow considerations of gender to enter into the linking calculus I have just described. We take this stuff too seriously for that.

"But our seriousness cuts both ways. Most bloggers are too passionate, and in many cases too busy, to link to a piece that isn't quite up to par merely in order to practice affirmative action."

Finally, is there such a thing as too much press attention? Here's a plea from Daily Kos "Memo to corporate media --

"Stories about blogging and bloggers are boring and old. Move on to the next trend, please. I can't tell you how many times I get calls from the cable news outlets and radio shows wanting me on the air to talk about 'blogs.' I wish it would stop."

When someone figures out what the next trend is, please let me know.