Of so this one is not about the the Gadfly and Kaiser, or about health care at all.  but it is about another Bay Area institution being unnecessarily dragged into the press and the courts.  So Barry Bonds was having an affair (and I admit that I went to the story to check out what the girl looked like!).  And apparently he "forced" the woman to move to Arizona, sort of paid for her house down-payment and may have done that with money he didn’t pay tax on, and also told her that he took steroids before he later allegedly told a grand jury that he wasn’t taking steroids at that time. (Aren’t grand jury trials supposed to be secret?)  Here’s all the gory details along with some pictures of the protagonists (and I can see why Mr Bonds was interested!).

Apparently he mightily pissed her off, and then only offered her $20,000 to go away when she said that she’d lost $100,000 on the move to Arizona and had to become a bar-maid to make ends meet. So now she’s testifying to his perjury and she’s writing a book.  Given that she knew two potentially very damaging things about him, couldn’t someone in the Bonds’ empire have perhaps suggested to Barry that he ought to pay her to keep quiet. I suspect a few hundred thousand dollars in return for a confidentiality agreement would have been money very well spent out of Bonds’ $17m annual salary!  But like that other bay area institution KP (and for that matter that East Coast institution Martha Stewart), he’s happy to take huge risks for no apparent gain by not managing his dis-engagements properly. 

And what the hell was his superstar agent Scott Boras thinking in all this? I saw a talk he gave (and very dull it was too) where he said that he told Bonds in 1999 that he needed to improve his performance.  Perhaps it was that suggestion that got him on the juice in the first place? Shouldn’t Boras have been on tap to deal with this?