Last night on WUSA’s 11 o’clock news, Brett Haber ended his sports report by showing portions of a cutesy commercial designed to prevent anabolic steroid use.

The animated clip began with several sports balls sort of hanging out together in a locker room. One by one, the balls deflate, as a narrator goes over the alleged harmful side-effects of steroid abuse (”damage kidneys, destroy the liver - even cause heart attacks and strokes”).

The money shot comes with the biggest orb in the bunch, the basketball, shriveling into a small pea just as the narrator says , “Not to mention something else they can do to a guy’s body.”

Get it, kids? STEROIDS WILL SHRIVEL YOUR BALLS!

Turns out the clip is called “Shrinking,” and was a public service announcement produced in early 2006 by the Partnership for a Drug Free America, a governmental body, with support from Major League Baseball.

The same message, of course, is implied — with much greater impact, I must say — by Dead Balls Era™. That’s the slogan I and I alone feel is the best name for the homerific and drug-addled period that baseball is now allegedly crawling out from.

My three-plus-years crusade to get Dead Balls Era™ accepted by the cultural mainstream, or anybody else, has been a failure.

I just Googled “Dead Balls Era™”: Five hits.

That’s less than “Dead Balls Era™” got five months ago, when I last wrote about how few Google hits “Dead Balls Era™ was getting..

I’m not givin’ up.

This week a main topic on regular talk radio has been the Pew Center study that found we put more people in jail than any nation on the planet. Even the Chinese are stunned by our numbers.

Last night, meanwhile, a main topic on JT the Brick’s nationally syndicated sportstalk show (heard locally on WTEM-AM) was about whether Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds would go to jail first. While I was listening, neither the callers nor the host mentioned the Pew findings, or questioned the wisdom of spending government resources to police athletics.

And while the country’s mood seems to be in favor of imprisoning athletes who allegedly lied about taking performance enhancing drugs under oath: Self-described clean cycling activist Matt DeCanio, a product of Orange County, Va., has started a petition to have the feds investigate Lance Armstrong for the very same crimes that public officials are trying to put Clemens and Bonds away for.

Makes sense to me.

Leonard Shapiro, confined to the Washington Post website after decades in the home-deliverable version, weighed in on last week’s steroid circus on Capitol Hill yesterday afternoon.

Perhaps a bit late, but Shapiro’s piece is redeemed by how many words he devotes to trashing Rep. Dan Burton.

The Indiana Republican, remember, so fawned over Roger Clemens that the disgraced pitcher probably left the Rayburn Building with a “palpable mass on his buttocks” like that discussed in the hearing, only this one was from Burton’s lips.

The performance inspired Shapiro:

“Maybe it takes one slime-bucket to know another one.

After all, according to published reports, [Burton] is the same man who, while married to his first wife in the 1980s, fathered an illegitimate child after an affair with an employee of an Indiana state agency. He’s also been accused of sexual harassment in the workplace, including the alleged groping of a lobbyist from Planned Parentood in the mid-1990s when she visited his office.

Salon, the internet magazine, reported in a 1995 profile on Burton that several sources indicated the Congressman “has also maintained sexual relationships with women on his Congressional and campaign payrolls.”

This is the same Dan Burton widely criticized by his home town Indianapolis Star newspaper for missing countless votes on the House floor while playing in a number of charity golf tournaments on the PGA Tour.

In 1997, he was the guest of the AT&T chairman and CEO in a practice round before the PGA Tour’s annual Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. Three weeks earlier, he had assumed chairmanship of a House committee that had approval over a legislative agency soon to award $5 billion in government contracts for long distance and local telecommunication services, with AT&T one of the companies trying to get a large piece of that action. AT&T reportedly also hosted a campaign fundraiser for him that week at a local restaurant.

This is the same Dan Burton who has been accused for many years of unethical campaign fundraising practices, a bullying, seemingly buffoonish Congressman, the Chicago Tribune once editorialized was a “crude, crass man who is a disgrace to his district, his state, his party and the House.”

Now THAT’s sportswriting!

There has been a fascinating and ugly debate taking place in the City Desk comments section lately between Lance Armstrong’s defenders and his detractors.

It started in a thread about the steroid circus now going on in the halls of Congress, when Betsy Andreu, wife of one of Lance’s former cycling partners, alleged that Armstrong has tried to ruin her life for saying that she heard him admit to doctors that he had used performance enhancing drugs.

Andreu’s comments brought a strong rebuttal from Tim Herman, a lawyer for Armstrong in a 2004 fraud case surrounding Andreu’s allegations about Armstrong’s drug use. (Both Andreu and Herman confirmed in interviews that the posts on the City Paper board are indeed theirs.)

Herman’s rebuttal has since been dissected and rerebutted piece by piece by Andreu and a horde of mostly anonymous anti-Lance posters. Somebody posting as MSM inserted a link into the thread for a really, really fascinating and really, really ugly Mp3 of a phone conversation between America’s first golden-boy cyclist, Greg LeMond, and Stephanie McIlvain, who testified in that case that she didn’t hear Armstrong admit to using performance enhancers.

In the conversation, which was taped surreptitiously — McIlvain at one point asks if it’s being recorded, and LeMond assures her it’s not — McIlvain confesses that she was in fact in the room with Andreu when Armstrong admitted using the drugs.

The fear and contempt LeMond and McIlvain have for Armstrong and his lobby makes the conversation gripping, despite the low-fi quality of the recording. LeMond alleges that Armstrong is out to ruin him, and says that before “I have 17 years of my life destroyed by Lance, I will go down fighting!”

There’s likely nothing new contained in the allegations posted here. All the events alleged to have taken place in the thread took place a long time ago, if at all — the confession of drug use that Andreu says she heard from Armstrong was in the mid-1990s. The LeMond/McIlvain tape has been making the rounds in the cycling underbelly since at least last fall.

But, the passion in this thread makes it clear that the suspicions about Armstrong’s cleanliness as an athlete aren’t going to go away soon. And with what’s taking place across town right now — with federal lawmakers ready and eager to go back in time to investigate cheating and drug use charges in baseball and football —
by the end of the LeMond/McIlvain conversation, listeners are left with one big question:

Hey, Congress: When’s Lance Armstrong Coming?

Yesterday, Rep. Tom Davis was among the lawmakers demanding further investigation of Miguel Tejada.

Davis et al want to know if Tejada lied when he said he didn’t use performance enhancing drugs. Pretty soon, they’re going to get a chance to entrap Roger Clemens.

Well, if Congress has decided that the sports world is where the government’s investigative powers are most needed, and is so eager to turn its hearings into episodes of “Moment of Truth,”, and is really intent on clearing up questions about who’s using what performance enhancers, well, why stop with Tejada and Clemens?

Why stop with baseball?

Why not go after the Biggest Kahuna of all the alleged drug cheats: Lance Armstrong?

Unlike Tejada, Armstrong has represented America and been named to various White House panels.

By the evidentiary standard used in the Mitchell Report — where, basically, if one hanger on says you’re guilty, you’re guilty — Armstrong looks a helluva lot guiltier than Clemens.

So let’s really get this show going. Bring in Lance Armstrong and put him under oath.

Or, better yet, stop the circus…

Boswell, the great Baseball moralist, roasts Clemens. This says it all: “Clemens and Bonds now stand before us like twin symbols of the Steroid Age: cheats, liars, ego monsters who were not satisfied with mere greatness and wealth but, as they aged, had to pass everyone in the record book, break every mark and do it with outsize bodies, unrecognizable from their youth, that practically screamed, ‘Catch me if you can.’”

Wonkette posts a vid of Ron Paul fighting Hitler. Awesome or dull?

The Examiner reports the DC gov has to give $200,000 to Disney. It’s part of a new incentive program to keep Nicolas Cage from filming shitty movies in our town.