Your national story of the day is the continuing Walter Reed hospital public relations fiasco. Today the highest ranking medical officer General Kevin C. Kiley resigned. He is the third person to resign in this scandal that combines politics with medical ethics for a story that ends badly for all involved.
However, in terms medical coverage about other hospitals, I am convinced that no medium covers medicine in a more interesting fashion than the Los Angeles Times. In terms of the importance of the stories that the Times has covered, today's story might not even be the best. But their tenacity is fantastic.
This article tries to link a drug overdose to shortsightedness by military hospital personnel in Los Angeles in a similar backdrop to the Walter Reed story that involves a recovering drug addict. Some of these ethical dilemmas make for great theater. March 2 they ran an article about a doctor who deliberately overdosed a patient with sedatives and pain killers while six staff members watched and did not intervene. The doctor was a transplant surgeon, and used the drugs to hasten the death of an organ donor.
This is another in a long line of stories the L.A. Times has run about transplant centers gone awry, as each of the links in this sentence will demonstrate. The names that seem to come up for reporting the stories is Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein. Hopefully the medical community will applaud your efforts. These are great stories.
On other pages of the L.A. Times (namely the front page), the fallback plan for Iraq was detailed. The plan is based upon the pullout from El Salvador in 1980s. It is good to see that Plan G is in place if the troop surge Plan F doesn't work. Plan F is naturally the good natured but problematic follow up to the failed Plans E,D,C,B and A. Glad to see some planning and scheming going on behind the scenes.
Sports news involves one topic and one topic only today. Go March Madness or go home. It's that simple. Every commentator on the planet is crying about who could've, should've, would've been in the tournament. I can't decide who to put in my pool final four. This year, I'm going front runner with two one-seeds and two two-seeds in my Final Four. I'm traveling through the pool with a Salt Lake City conservative approach.
Of course, criminality and sports keep boiling in the background. Chris Simon got suspended for teeing off on Ryan Hollweg's face with a hockey stick. In the WWE, that might get him a title belt. In the NHL, it gets him a 25 game suspension.
Also, former North Hill basketball player O.J. Mayo was arrested for marijuana possession. The 6' 4 point guard is the highest (no pun intended) rated player in high school basketball. He is projected to go from one year of NCAA basketball to the NBA fast lane. Mayo, who committed to USC, is a Cincinnati area youth. He was apparently strongly influenced by the behavior of his hometown football team the Cincinnati Bengals.
Lastly, in entertainment, the House of Representatives subcommittee on telecommunications and the internet is having a hearing tomorrow with video archive of the discussi0n available. This is an important issue involving music, radio and Web communication. Stay tuned and make sure this ends well.
