Things That Just Piss Me Off

This is really a shame. People go online and do and say things they would never do or say in person. They believe that the Internet is so anonymous that they can get away with anything.

Unfortunately, it seems that in some cases they can.

A Hoax Turned Fatal Draws Anger but No Charges
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo., Nov. 21 — Megan Meier died believing that somewhere in this world lived a boy named Josh Evans who hated her. He was 16, owned a pet snake, and she thought he was the cutest boyfriend she ever had.

Josh contacted Megan through her page on MySpace.com, the social networking Web site, said Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. They flirted for weeks, but only online — Josh said his family had no phone. On Oct. 15, 2006, Josh suddenly turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded insults for an hour.

The next day, in his final message, said Megan’s father, Ron Meier, Josh wrote, “The world would be a better place without you.”

Sobbing, Megan ran into her bedroom closet. Her mother found her there, hanging from a belt. She was 13.

Six weeks after Megan’s death, her parents learned that Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, then 47, who lived four houses down the street in this rapidly growing community 35 miles northwest of St. Louis.

But a St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman, Lt. Craig McGuire, said that what Ms. Drew did “might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

Ok, before you say it, I already know that the red cross DOES help people and if you have been through a disaster, you know that they were there to help. This is not about the quality of service the red cross and others provide. It’s about how they get the money to do so and the end does not justify the means.

The red cross is just an example. All year they do fundraisers telling you they need money just in case a disaster happens. They take money from people who agreed to deduct it from their paychecks all year long to make sure they have the money to respond and help duiring a disaster.

Yet, as soon as a disaster happens, they run commercials to tell you they need money because a disaster has occured!

What happens to all that money they were raising in advance so they would be prepared? High salaries, plush offices, and a lot of stuff that isn’t really necessary.

No. I do not mind that someone gets paid for doing good work. I think they should be paid. But some of them are getting paid a ton of money when someone could have been found that really wants to do it for the right reasons and who will accept a reasonable salary.

Instead these charities reach out to the corporate world for their CEOs and Board members and say they need to pay high to compete with what the for profit corporations pay.

If you are a charity and you are hiring someone to run the charity who’s major concern is how much they will be paid, you should not be hiring them in the first place.

If you are a charity and your first concern is finding someone who is good at marketing and business rather than for their interest in the charitable work that you do, then you are at fault when your charity is more about collecting money than about accomplishing your mission and serving others.

Then when the charity is caught doing something wrong or it is getting bad press, they fire the CEO and say “There, everything is fixed now.”

Red Cross Fires Its President, Citing Relationship

The American Red Cross dismissed its president and chief executive, Mark W. Everson, yesterday, citing his “personal relationship with a subordinate employee.” He had been in office for only six months.

The news was another blow to an organization that has struggled to overcome criticism of its performance after Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, and it stunned the organization’s employees, as well as the nonprofit world at large.

“Although this is difficult and disappointing news for the Red Cross community, the organization remains strong and the life-saving mission of the American Red Cross will go forward,” Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, chairman of the Red Cross board, said in a statement.

See, we fired this guy and that solves all the problems relating to hurricane katrina and everything. We are AOK now!

The United Way is another one. The nes media talks about commercial fundraisers who call on the phone for doantions because they say the commercial fundraiser takes 75% of the money and the charity only receives 25%.

Each commercial fundraiser likely raises less than 1 million dollars per year gross. That means they kept $750,000 but paid for whatever entertainment the event had, paid for the insurance for the event, paid the payroll for the phone callers, paid the payroll taxes for the employees, and paid for everything else associated with the fundraising event. Which probably nets them about 25%. So the charity gets 25% and so does the commercial fundraiser.

The United Way has no charitable purpose, yet it is registered as a charity. What they do is raise money for charities. How are they any different than the commercial fundraisers and how do they get 501C3 status while the commercial fundraiser has to register as a commercial fundraiser?

The United Way says they only retain 25%. Yes, after paying all the same expenses that the commercial fundraiser had to pay. But even if they kept only 25% and paid the expenses out of that, you have to consider that they raise over 100 million dollars each year.

That means they keep 25 million dollars for processing your charitable donation and deciding who to give it to.

If you went ahead and decided which charity you wanted to give it to, then you would not have that 25% going to the United Way.

Figure this. You donate $1000 to the United Way. They take out $250 and pass the other $750 to the charity of their choice. Then that charity is also allowed to deduct 25% for their administration costs. So now you have made a $500 contribution. 50%. About the same as if you had just donated it through the commercial fundraiser over the phone.

The NCMEC, National Center For Missing And Exploited Childre gets more than 40 million dollars per year in government funding and donations. Yet, as far as finding missing children, they haven’t done anything at all. They have helped with online porn.

They have maintained a website that lists all the missing children. They claim that they have helped recover thousands of missing children.

Not true at all. Here is how it works. When a child is reported missing, law enforcement reports it to the NCIC, National Crime Information Center. Any missing child that is entered into NCIC is then also added to the NCMEC website.

If the police find the child 3 blocks away playing with friends, the police report the child found to NCIC. Then it is removed from the NCMEC database and the NCMEC tells us they have helped recover another missing child.

Now we all feel better because the NCMEC is doing such a great job so we are ok with them getting next year’s funding.

When charities get too large, they become businesses. They are there to make a profit. The NCMEC spends a million dollars or more each year on PR to make sure you know they are on the job while that money could be funding a real search team for missing children instead.

But these charities pay big money to hire the best PR people they can find. They work on showing the public an image and making people believe that charities they have never heard of should be avoided and that you should only give to charities whose name you recognize.

They know they do enough PR to make sure you recognize their names so they know that by convincing the public that name awareness equals legitimacy then they will get the bulk of the charity money that is available each year.

The truth is that if you want your charitable dollars to have the most impact, you should be looking around in your own community and finding those who are doing real charitible work that you can see. Give your money to them.

Better yet, do not donate to a charity until you have volunteered with them for at least one day so you can really see what they do. Any charity that tells you they only need your money and not your time should send you running the other way.

I’m proposing another new tv reality show. I want to call it Run For The Border and it can be sponsored by Taco Bell. It will sort of be a cross between a game show and a reality show so I know people will waste time watching it.

We get a group of people who want to cross the border into the US illegally and film them doing it.

It will be like a contest to see who makes it. And for those that do make it into this country illegally, Tell them what they’ve won Johnny!

You’ve won Free Medical Care! No taxes to pay since you won’t be filing any income tax returns and no need for insurance!

Free medical care even extends to having your baby born right here in the USA and as a bonus, your children will be automatically granted US Citizenship and will never need to go through all of that pesky paperwork!

Free schooling for your children. Again since you will be paying no property taxes or income taxes, the schooling for your children you bring into the country illegally will be free of charge. While native and naturalized US citizens pay for it all!

A Drivers License! Yes, you will win a drivers license even though you pay no taxes for the roads and will likely avoid paying for any tickets you receive, because you will likely be hiding!

Yes the politicians talk about increasing border security to keep you out of the country, but if you DO make it, you get a drivers license as one of your prizes!

All of this can be yours if you just RUN FOR THE BORDER!

Now I will be accused of being a racist for this post. This is not about race and that is just the threat used to discourage people from speaking the truth about this issue.

I’m not against ANYONE coming to this country and applying for legal citizenship. I’m not against ANYONE coming into this country on a student or work visa as long as they obey the rules that apply to their visa.

If the first thing you do on entering this country is break the law, then what can I expect you to do afterwards? If you enter the country illegally, you start out your venture by breaking US law.

So when someone assumes that illegal aliens might be criminals, well you sort of justified that remark by BREAKING THE LAW AS A CRIMINAL WOULD DO.

There are plenty of people in this country that came from other countries, many of them even more impoverished than mexico. They applied for visas. They applied for citizenship. They followed the law. They respected our country enough to do so.

Yet when those who enter illegally disrespect this country and it’s laws we are not supposed to say anything about it. If we do, we are labeled racists. It has nothing to do with racism. it has to do with the law and the fact that if you are going to live here you should respect our laws. If you start out by breaking or ignoring our laws, then you are the one who is showing disrespect, not those who speak against it.

Look up what happens if a US citizen is caught living illegally in Mexico.

Mexico has a radical idea for a rational immigration policy that most Americans would love. However, Mexican officials haven’t been sharing that idea with us as they press for our Congress to adopt the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill.

That’s too bad, because Mexico, which annually deports more illegal aliens than the United States does, has much to teach us about how it handles the immigration issue. Under Mexican law, it is a felony to be an illegal alien in Mexico.

At a time when the Supreme Court and many politicians seek to bring American law in line with foreign legal norms, it’s noteworthy that nobody has argued that the U.S. look at how Mexico deals with immigration and what it might teach us about how best to solve.

So excuse me for expecting our country to adopt similar laws as those of the Mexican government. I really find it funny that this never comes up when people are pushing for amnesty and drivers licenses for illegal aliens who break into our country.

The whole idea behind insurance is to reduce the consumer’s risk from natural disasters and emergencies. The insurance companies are supposed to be able to manage that risk by charging premiums to people knowing that the majority of them will never need to make a claim.

Homeowners face rising insurance rates
By M.P. McQueen
The Wall Street Journal
with Pantagraph reports

Still reeling from an estimated $56 billion of hurricane-related losses, major insurers are dropping policies or not writing new ones in coastal areas from Texas to Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard as far north as Massachusetts.

Yet during this same period, insurance companies are reporting large profits. reporting on how much they had to payout is their way of justifying the raising of rates and dropping policies. They don’t report their profits while claiming all of these losses to make it sound like they are really hurting.

Insurers including Allstate Corp. and Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. say they need to reduce the financial risk that could come with fresh storms as soon as this year. But the moves have left homeowners in a number of states scrambling to find new coverage, often at higher cost.

Some home insurers also are winning regulatory approval to raise premiums in states hit by hurricanes Katrina, Wilma and Rita.

Now, rate increases are expected to spread far beyond those areas, as the industry comes under new pressures related to hurricanes.

So basically, if there is any risk of actually having to pay anything out, they will just not write the policy. So the only policies they are willing to write or willing to charge an affordable rate for aren’t really for people who need them in the first place.

If you have no risk or minimal risk, you really don’t need the insurance that much. The insurance companies will sell it to you though. They will offer you a ton of coverage for things they know are likely to never happen.

If you have some risk, they will either cancel your policy or charge you more than your mortgage for your homeowners insurance.

Then if you do make a claim they will fight like hell to keep from paying you. If there are a lot of claims in an area, they will run to the government to pay you with your own tax dollars. So they don’t even carry risk when there is risk.

I know people in Florida that have had their rates raised by 500% in just one year.

Reinsurance companies, whose business it is to insure the insurers, have begun charging sharply higher prices in anticipation that hurricanes will become more frequent and more intense, and some primary insurers say they will try to recoup these added costs from consumers.

Allstate, the nation’s second biggest home insurer, after State Farm Insurance Cos., says it plans to seek premium increases in a “majority” of the 49 states in which it does business to help offset higher reinsurance costs.

They did this “anticipating” a rough hurricane season. We didn’t have one. They won’t be lowering rates as a result of an easy hurricane season.

This is the deal. We have a bad hurricane season, they raise the rates by a lot. They justify it by talking about how much it cost them that season. Then we go a couple of years without hurricane damage and they still keep the rates high.

The way it should be working is that when the season doesn’t bring a lot of hurricane season makes up for the times when they had to pay out due to damage. Then insurance rates could basically stay the same every year and in some years the insurance companies would profit a lot, other years they would profit less because of payouts.

But the insurance companies have found a way to keep profits high every year, whether there are bad storms or not.

In Massachusetts, some homeowners already are paying higher premiums as insurers abandon certain local markets.

While the state hasn’t experienced a devastating hurricane in more than 50 years, insurance companies, including Andover Cos. and Hingham Mutual Group, increasingly are refusing to write homeowners’ policies on Cape Cod and on the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, where many of the East Coast elite keep vacation homes.

So much for basing their costs on what really happens. They say they are raising rates along the gulf coast because of recent hurricane activity while in states where there has not been recent hurricanes they are still raising the rates.

The other scam the insurance companies pulled was the separation of different types of coverage. It used to be when you bought homeowners insurance that you were basically covered for whatever happens.

Then they got slick and started separating out the types of coverage. So you insure your home, but need separate coverage for wind damage, separate coverage for flood damage, separate coverage for lightning damage, etc.

So they have left it to you to predict what might happen and make sure you have specific coverage for that type of damage. They know the average homeowner cannot predict this.

Insurance companies are experts at predicting what might happen according to where you live and other factors. In the old days the insurance salesman would help homeowners choose the right policy by using that information.

Now they do just the opposite. Their goal is to sell you as much insurance as they can for the things that are unlikely to happen while not advising you to buy coverage for the things that might actually happen.

Even the dictionary gets it wrong by having the definitions of these two words the same. They are far from the same thing. Most people in the US, whether democrat or republican, liberal or conservative, have one thing in common. They loove our country and they want to be patriots.

It’s said that if you focus on the 1% we have in common rather than the 99% we don’t, we can relate to each other better and I believe that.

But before we can agree about what being a patriot actually means, we can’t even agree to that 1%.

Nationalists believe in their country AND it’s government. Nationalists believe that whatever our government does is right because we are who we are. We are the greatest nation on earth, therefore what we are doing is right.

Hitler used this very thing to get the german people behind him. He used fear of people who were different than they were to unite the nationalist population behind his agenda. This was true of Stalin in Russia also.

Patriotism is entirely different. Patriotism is loving your country and recognizing that governments are inherently flawed and that we should watch every step they make to make sure they do not trample on our rights.

During this administration, everyone who questions the actions in Iraq has been accused of being a traitor, of not supporting the troops, and of not being a patriot. These are all lies and propaganda by the extreme right.

Questioning the war in Iraq is our patriotic duty.

Questioning wiretapping American citizens is our duty as patriots of this country.

Questioning our government when it says it wants to know what books we check out at the library is our duty as patriots.

Questioning attacking a country that has not attacked or directly threatened to attack our country is our duty as patriots.

Questioning the use of torture is our duty as patriots.

Blindly following whatever a president or our government in general decides to do is nationalism and is dangerous. That is not what the founding fathers intended at all.

The actions and words that created this country are very clear. They spelled out the need to watch those elected into government office with both eyes open and not to just “trust” they will do the right thing.

Bush supporters want us to blindly trust a guy who, throughout his life has not accomplished much of anything his daddy didn’t help him with, with the fate of our country that we love.

This is like putting your single neighbor who is 40, lives at home, has bad hygeine, can’t speak well, and has no job so he sits in the park and schoolyard watching kids play, to babysit your children.

Bush Regime Preaches Democracy, Proposes Tyranny
by Paul Craig Roberts of LewRockwell.com

Americans had best rethink the “war on terror” while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush’s blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.

The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done. Here is a short list of the Bush administration’s crimes:

Spying without court warrants on Americans in violation of both the US Constitution and the FISA statute.

The denial of habeas corpus, attorney-client privilege, due process, and Geneva Conventions protections to those, American or foreign, designated without evidence as terrorists or enemy combatants.

The justification and use of torture to coerce confessions and the kidnapping of foreign nationals who are sent to be tortured in foreign prisons.

The initiation of military aggression against states based on intentional deception by the Bush administration of the US public and the United Nations, and the intentional fabrication of “evidence” to justify unprovoked aggression against sovereign states, which is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the US.

Violation of the oath of office to defend the US Constitution by practically every member of the Bush administration and Congress.

Bush has assaulted the separation of powers and the rule of law with “signing statements” and “executive orders” that President Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean says are commands that treat the co-equal branches of government and the electorate as subservient to executive authority. In April 2006, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage listed 750 laws “challenged” by the Bush administration. Not even the demonized president of Iran claims to be above the law.

Genocide against the people of Iraq where one million Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s invasion and several million Iraqis are displaced persons.
Massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which is a form of genocide in which military force is routinely applied to unarmed noncombatants.

Massive corruption in which no-bid contracts are issued to Republican corporations in exchange for kickbacks to political campaigns.

The theft of two national elections as documented in books by Mark Crispin Miller and Greg Palast.

Now this really pisses me off. Insurance companies have been bilki9ng the public for a long time now. They take our money, then they invest it in the stock market, real estate, or whatever else they think will improve their bottom line for their investors.

Then whenever a big disaster hits, like 9-11 for instance, katrina, etc., they cry to the government to bail them out.

They buy up insurance policies on buildings in japan knowing full well there could be a big earthquake there at any time and knowing they would not be able to cover it if it did happen. But fortunately for them they also know they can run to our government to be bailed out.

They threaten that if the insurance companies went belly up it would hurt the stock market and the economy so the government has to bail them out.

So we pay the premiums, then when a disaster hits, they get our tax money to pay for it while they use the premiums for investments and profit. We get it going and coming. Now they want us to pay again.

Insurers Shift Cost Burdens to Homeowners
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER of the NYTimes

American homeowners are having to make do with much less coverage at steadily rising prices. In Miami and other places along the coast, insurance prices have skyrocketed, deepening the national slowdown in home sales.

The cutbacks in coverage, consumer advocates say, have contributed to the slow recovery of the Gulf Coast from Hurricane Katrina and will most likely hamper recovery from the recent wildfires in California.

“You have a different mentality at the insurance companies,” said Andrew Barile, a consultant who has spent his life in the industry. “They no longer worry about the public service aspect. They’re concentrating on the bottom line.”

The bottom line has been good recently. The property insurance industry, including home, auto and commercial coverages, reported a record profit of $44 billion in 2005, even after paying $41 billion in damages from Katrina. The industry set another record for profit in 2006 at $64 billion. And as a second hurricane season is coming to an end without a hurricane hitting the coasts, 2007 is shaping up to be another lucrative year.

Ten years ago, for example, the average cost of home insurance in America was $455 a year.

Today, it is an estimated $886 for much less insurance. Along the coastlines, annual premiums on houses routinely run into the thousands of dollars. Contending that even those premiums are not high enough for the risk they face, the insurers have canceled or declined to renew several million policies.

Two years ago, the annual cost of coverage for Mr. Williams, a retired airline pilot, and his wife, a former flight attendant, rose more than 50 percent to $2,599, for about $250,000 in coverage.

The Bush administration is not helping either. Bush is so pro-big-business that all corporations have been pushing the limits as to what they can get away with because they know they have an ally in the white house.

The FCC is letting media companies buy out smaller newspapers, radio stations and tv stations, relaxing the rules put into place to assure diversity in the news we listen to, watch or read.

The EPA is virtually nonexistant as far as controlling pollution.

The FDA will approve anything the pharmeceutical companies tell them to and they got Bush to support a drug plan for seniors and prohibeted the government from being able to negotiate for better drug prices on their behalf.

The SEC isn’t doing anything to curb investment fraud even though they made it appear that something would happen after enron, worldcom, tyco, and others ripped everyone off. Pretty much putting martha stewart in jail is supposed to prove they are tough on corporate crime.

Try taking a grievance against an employer to the US Dept. of Labor or your state’s dept. of labor. Nothing will happen to an employer who doesn’t pay you or doesn’t provide the benefits they promised.

The Consumer protection Agency can’t even stop wal-mart, mattel, and other big companies from selling toys to our kids that contain lead.

And it’s obvious that the Insurance Commissioners are doing nothing at all to protect consumers.

The reason all of these government agencies that are supposed to protect us are not doing so?

Politicians posture and try to look good while creating these agencies for our protection, then when they write the budget, corporate lobbyists make sure the agencies do not get enough funding to do their jobs. Thats te game that allows the politicians to look good while the corporate lobbyists make sure nothing will happen to their clients from these agencies.

Sure talk about the EPA all you want senator, just make sure you don’t give them the money to actually investigate or spot check any violators.

Sure, have an insurance commissioner, but make sure you choose someone friendly to the industry who won’t make any waves.

And of course anyone chosen to head the SEC should be friendly to brokerages and who has a good relationship with a lot of the top CEOs so we can make sure that our books don’t get looked at too carefully.

Even George Bush violated SEC rules when he ran a corporation where his daddy got him a job and of course absolutely nothing happened to him then either.

First let’s talk about the troop withdrawals. Awhile back he got congress to approve sending 30,000 extra troops to Iraq. When pressed 6 months later for an exit strategy and for bringing the troops home, he said in 6 months he will be bringing troops home. He vowed to bring home 30,000 troops by next summer.

So let’s see. 6 months from now I will have us right back where we were 6 months ago. That’s progress george bush style.

Now in this story from the NYTimes you will see that he applies this same logic to the number of troops being killed.

U.S. Says Attacks in Iraq Fell to the Level of Feb. 2006
By CARA BUCKLEY and MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAGHDAD, Nov. 18 — The American military said Sunday that the weekly number of attacks in Iraq had fallen to the lowest level since just before the February 2006 bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra, an event commonly used as a benchmark for the country’s worst spasm of bloodletting after the American invasion nearly five years ago.

Yeah, that’s progress george bush style. Soon it will be just as good as it was almost a year ago. How does this get spun as progress or success in Iraq?

Only the most backward thinking person can believe that achieving a level you were at a year ago equals success.

The data released Sunday cover attacks using car bombs, roadside bombs, mines, mortars, rockets, surface-to-air missiles and small arms. According to the statistics, roughly 575 attacks occurred last week.

Wow. Only 575 attacks in one week. Yeah this Iraq War thing is on it’s last legs now. We are really controlling things there. Bush has it all under control. Nothing to worry about. Just keep approving more money for this while our children is learning less in school because we have no money for that.

By bush’s standards, if a 9th grader will soon know as much as he should have known in 8th grade, then his education plan is a success also.

Thousands of new Sunni volunteers have made common cause with the Americans. About 72,000 such civilians have joined the effort, American officials said, and 45,000 each receive a $300 a month stipend from the Americans to help with the effort.

I have a couple of questions here. First are any of you out there who support the war in Iraq getting paid too? That would explain a lot.

Second; What happens when we stop giving these guys money and they get to keep all the guns we gave them?

Military officials stressed that attack levels might fluctuate in the future and that it was too soon to say that the United States had turned the corner in Iraq.

Hey! Wait just a minute. My President, King George, says we have turned that corner and that we are making tons of progress and that the Iraq War is successful. So how can this be?

I just figured on thanksgiving I should post about a turkey.

Our history is full of places where we provided arms to people who later became our enemies.

We gave arms and training to Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden to fight the russians.

We gave arms and even biological weapons to Saddam Hussein to fight the iranians with. The biological weapons were used to gas the Kurds in Northern iraq, which of course we condemn entirely.

That’s just 2 relatively recent examples of the US arming it’s friends who later become enemies. You would think we would learn by our mistakes. You would think that history would be a way to predict what happens when we take this approach.

But not with Bush and company. They are arming militias in Iraq and training them with our tactics. Bush claims this is working really really well and calls it progress. When they turn on us, what will he call it then? Oh yeah. He won’t have to because he will be out of office and the damage will be blamed on whoever is president then.

Now they want to take this history-proven failure of a tactic and arm the pakistanis against al queda. It will turn against us there as well and bush won’t be worried about it either.

I don’t know. We boycott all kinds of things, why not South African Products? Because one of their products are diamonds? Maybe you could put off buying that next diamond because it supports a country that supports the use of rape by militias.

From the NYTimes
WARREN HOGE

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 16 — The United States has failed to obtain a General Assembly resolution focused on rape used by governments and armed groups to achieve political and military objectives.

A General Assembly committee has instead adopted a resolution that reiterates past condemnations of rape in general but eliminates language in the American draft making specific reference to rape employed by soldiers and militia members as a tactic for intimidation and in warfare.

The nonbinding measure was watered down in response to objections from South Africa and Angola, acting on behalf of the Africa Group, a 43-nation coalition.

South Africa’s ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, defended the revised measure.

So much for what is happening in Darfur and happens in other conflicts in Africa. I guess South Africa and Angola see rape as a legitimate tool in warfare.

I’m not feeling a bit sorry for barry bonds. sorry. I do not believe that he did not know he was taking steroids. I think sammy sosa deserves an asterisk like barry’s for using corked bats as well.

Yes there are a lot of other baseball players cheating as well. There are players in other sports that have been caught cheating.

But you know, there is nowhere in the law that says you can use the “well so and so is doing it too” defense. This case is about barry bonds and the fact that he cheated and each cheating athlete should be treated as individual cases as well.

I listened to ESPN talk about this last night and it seems that several people think that since bonds is not the only cheater he should not be singled out.

If you rob a bank, you can’t say you should not be punished because there are other bank robbers doing the same thing.

Barry bonds should face the music. he made his own choices. No one forced him to take steroids. No one forced him to commit perjury.