Outrages

Two things caught my eye in recent days and both have me madder than a wet hen:

First, According to Sports Illustrated, the International Tennis Federation is investigating a claim that Tommy Haas was poisoned before Germany's Davis Cup match against Russia.

Haas was forced out of his match against Mikhail Youzhny with a suspected stomach virus as Russia won both reverse singles matches on Sept. 23 to win the semifinal series 3-2 and reach the Davis Cup final.
[...]
German teammate Alexander Waske said he was told by a Russian who manages numerous athletes that it was poisoning, not a virus. Waske didn't say who the manager was.

I'm not a big conspiracy theory guy and this story is almost too incredible to even consider. Note the almost. Yes it sounds like typical tinfoil hat paranoia, but it does seem that folks who might be considered enemies of Russia do end up poisoned with much more frequency than the population in general. I'm not going to argue that Vlad himself would have ordered such a thing, but I don't think it would strain belief to think a "monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of attitude could have led someone involved with Russian tennis to have slipped Haas a dose of something nasty. I hate that I'd even consider such a thing possible, but unfortunately I do.

Second, our Democratic Congress. Remember these folks? Their entire platform in the mid-term elections boiled down to something like, "We'll get us out of Iraq and we'll stop the hemorrhage of money coming out of D.C." So how have they done? Well I can't see that they've accomplished much on Iraq (for better or worse) and as for the money, ... The Dems, along with willing Repubs, managed to override a Bush veto this week and preserve a water bill chock full of silly, wasteful earmarks. Then there's the latest farm bill! Debra Saunders has a nice take on it. The complaints are familiar, but no less frustrating -- huge payments to wealthy farmers, subsidies at a time when farm incomes are at all time highs, payments to people who have absolutely nothing to do with farming, etc. I know this is business as usual, but didn't the Dems pledge to stop this kind of crap and return fiscal sanity to Washington? My favorite part of Saunders' column:

Speaker Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, promises reform in the next Farm Bill. Ha. Methinks that if Democrats can't cut corporate welfare in the very year in which they promised to deliver big reforms, they never will. In five years, Pelosi simply will have honed the bad habits that the powerful develop to strengthen their chokehold on power inside the Beltway.

It's a pessimistic view, but one that I fear will prove true.

Sigh. I promise I'll try to find something cheerful to comment on next time.