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Even sports writers are tearing into the president nowadays. Amazing catch by Josh Marshall of Mike Lupica's latest:

The careers of Bonds and Sheffield and Giambi go along fine. It is a different story for Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle. Pending an appeal, they are going to jail because of their reporting about Bonds and the rest of the BALCO All-Stars.

The government of George Bush, which will leak the name of a CIA operative named Valerie Plame when it suits its purposes, now wants Fainaru-Wada and Williams in jail because they won't reveal the names of the person or persons the government says leaked them grand jury testimony. It is always worth pointing out that if you ran the country the way Bush and his people do, you wouldn't want to encourage whistleblowers, either.

Once George Bush told baseball to get rid of steroids in a State of the Union address. Fainaru-Wada and Williams, through their reporting and later their book "Game of Shadows," did their part. They took the President at his word, obviously unaware that this President will say anything in a State of the Union, about weapons of mass destruction or anything else.

[...]So now the reporters are the bad guys, not the ballplayers who used drugs and then, most likely, lied about that in front of the grand jury. Get the reporters, not them. It's a variation of starting a war against somebody who didn't blow up two of your buildings and kill 3000 of your people.

[...]Specter, a Republican not afraid to stand up to this President, wants to change the law. A federal shield law was originally proposed by Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, a Democrat, and Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana. Specter got into this earlier this year, with modifications that specifically exclude shield rights in cases dealing with national security or terrorism.

Only in the current political climate is no distinction drawn between a pusher of steroids like Greg Anderson, Bonds' former trainer, and reporters out to tell the truth about people like Anderson. And like Bonds.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams were not threats to national security, just to some drug cheats in baseball. The idea that they must go to jail to protect the rights of those cheats is an outrage.

Sen. Specter has identified the real threat here. It is against a free press. In the America of this President, you need more than a shield law to protect that. You need a new President.