Here's a guest post from our buddy from Utah, looserobes (Steve).

He says it's snowing heavily there today. This is another of those Pineapple Express storms from Hawaii. The Weather Channel says that unlike the Christmas Eve storm back east, this one is supposed to track northeast from here.

Here's what our friend has to say:

"Although I am a baseball fan, I don’t love the game the way I used to when I was younger. The ludicrously huge salaries have turned me off. The free agency turnstile has turned me off. The Steroid Era cheats have spoiled the purity of the sport.

It has long been true that justice is how one wants a case to turn out. Steroid user Rafael Palmeiro is an example of this truism. “I hope,” he recently said, “the voters judge my career fairly.” The voters he’s talking about are the members of the Baseball Writers Ass’n of America (BBWAA) who decide which ballplayers go into the revered Hall of Fame. This happens to be Palmeiro’s first year of eligibility. Many think that the only fair way to judge his career is to consider that just five months after he wagged his finger at congressmen and swore under oath that he didn’t use steroids, he tested positive for steroids and got suspended from the game.

Gee, he now says, I thought it was vitamin B-12 that I was injecting into my body. C’mon, man. Many baseball writers openly opine he will never get into the Hall of Fame, not only because of the steroid use but because of the dishonesty. Mark McGwire, who now enters his fifth year of eligibility, last year received just 23.7% of the vote. A vote of 75% is necessary to achieve entry into the revered Hall.

Palmeiro says he’s telling the truth just like George W. Bush told him to do. He could find a more respected truth teller from whom to get advice. How about Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens? They are both under investigation for lying about steroid use. They both become eligible for the Hall of Fame in two more years.

Baseball continues to be a reflection of the larger society, where truth telling suffers every day in courtrooms across the country. Taking the oath means nothing more than what many witnesses do in order to purchase a ticket to get on the stand and lie. These days, one good rule to go by is as follows: don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see."