Maradona fighting for his life after heart failure

I was looking up info about congestive heart failure when I came across the above item. Even if his years of drug abuse helped put him where he is now, I hope he makes it.

Competing headlines from today's wires:

Fallujah Death Toll for Week More Than 600(1)

and

Bush: 'What We're Doing in Iraq Is Right'(2)

"Bush prays for a drop in Iraq casualties"(2b)*

note: (2b) from The San Jose Mercury News originally said
"Bush: What We're Doing in Iraq is Right" as well when it was initially posted about 8 hours ago. What do you think is more likely, that the Mercury News editors were concerned about not seeming original, or that someone from the GOP leaned on them, someone, perhaps, whose job it is to scour the net for Bush headlines and call editors and bitch advocate when an unfriendly turn of phrase is spotted? If it's someone from the white house, we're paying his salary. If you think I protest too much, take note of this skimble post and the accompanying NY Times article, which originally said,


President Bush, vacationing in Texas, conferred with his advisers today on the surge in bloodshed in Iraq and what to do or say about it.

now it says

Today's discussion among the president and his senior advisers took place in the middle of a crucial week for the administration.

*In the Mercury News article, Bush said:

"It was a tough week last week," speaking at an Army base that lost at least nine soldiers in recent days. Some 50 U.S. soldiers were killed in action in Iraq last week in addition to nearly 900 Iraqis...

and

"My prayers and thoughts are with those who paid the ultimate price for our security," he said.

Asked whether he expected the violence to abate soon, Bush said: "It's hard to tell. I know this, that we're plenty tough, and we'll remain tough."

[so that's the reason they changed the headline! after all, 600 Iraqis dead in a week is ok, but nearly 900 is a mite ...unpalatable? Still, they hated freedom, every last one of them, especially the kids, and it is Easter... so it's a good thing the president didn't pray for them. After all,what would people think?]

Arriana likes blogs. (Although I don't know what she sees in Mickey Kaus. )

from Wednesday's War Room '04:

Shocker: Wealthy winning class war
Just in time for tax season, the Seattle Times runs a news analysis showing that middle- and lower-income Americans are carrying the tax burden for the super-rich.

"When Democrats charge that President Bush's tax policies favor the wealthy, Republicans cry class warfare. But many experts say middle- and lower-income Americans are indeed getting nicked — by both parties. More of government's costs have been shifted down the income ladder, critics say. 'If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning,' Warren Buffett, the billionaire investment specialist and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, told his shareholders recently...

and from Tuesday:


The search is over

We have yet to discover WMDs in Iraq, but we seem to have located the limb of an al-Qaida leader. The first two paragraphs of this CNN story are priceless.

"Senior U.S. officials told CNN on Tuesday that they now believe fugitive terrorism suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi did not have a leg amputated in Iraq, as the Bush administration had previously said."

"Although the administration pointed to Iraq's medical assistance to al-Zarqawi as evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime, it's now believed that al-Zarqawi still has both legs."

both, as before by the inimitable Geraldine Sealey.

from Gary Hart's piece in today's Salon:

(On the U.S. Commission on National Security, which met from 1998 until it turned in its report in January 2001)

Why would a commission investigating the events leading up to 9/11 not want to know what an earlier commission learned about potential terrorist attacks and what recommendations it gave to the new administration? This would seem to any reasonable person to be of intense interest to the press and the public the media serves. Apparently not. Apparently the politics of whether National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice will testify under oath and the drama of personal assaults on chief terrorism advisor Richard Clarke exhaust media attention. It is difficult to know, or to understand, why this is so...

more here: "A Paul Revere no one wants to hear from"

Another internet quiz:Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?

Dennis Sanders at the Moderate Republican asks: Does Anyone Talk About Underemployment? Go read it.

The underappreciated Geraldine Sealey, who writes Salon's War Room '04 column, which is a journalist's blog of sorts, notes this New York Times article that says that over three-quarters of the relevant Clinton White house files on foreign policy and counterterrorism that the 9-11 comission have asked for are being withheld by the Bush administration, claiming security concerns.

"Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said some Clinton administration documents had been withheld because they were 'duplicative or unrelated,' while others were withheld because they were 'highly sensitive' and the information in them could be relayed to the commission in other ways. 'We are providing the commission with access to all the information they need to do their job,' Mr. McClellan said."

"The commission and the White House were reacting to public complaints from former aides to Mr. Clinton, who said they had been surprised to learn in recent months that three-quarters of the nearly 11,000 pages of files the former president was ready to offer the commission had been withheld by the Bush administration.

[emphasis mine.]

Some important medical news fromAnanova.