When I brought Josie home from the vet, my Irish bride cried when she saw her stitches.  It looks ugly.  She has two large areas that are shaved, with stitches that are about six inches long on her back and on her rump. 

The vet removed two surface tumors.  The one on her back was fibrous matter and the one that was high up on her hind leg, the one that was bleeding, was soft tissue. When I asked him if they looked cancerous, he said that they both possibly could be and he removed all the tumor he could see.  I don't want a lab report.  Knowing or not knowing will not change the way we treat her.

Josie is big for a female Pyrenees, and when she was in her prime, she weighed 125 pounds. Before the surgery she weighed 86 pounds.  She has lost a third of her body weight.  I knew she was getting thinner, but I was stunned when I realized just how severe the loss had become.  She has zero body fat and now she's burning her muscle tissue.

The average life of a great pyrenees is 8 to 10 years and Josie is over 12 years old.  I'm not satisfied with 12 years. I want more time with Josie.  I'm going to fatten her up and give back to her the same pleasure and quality of life that she's given us.

Today we have a sock taped on her left front leg because she has bitten the hair off.  We think it's probably irritated where the needle for sedative for the surgery was inserted.

But Josie's confused.  She's wearing a polka-dot pair of my boxers on her bottom with her tail sticking out of the fly.

She's had a tumor high up on her leg near the tail for quite some time. The vet looked at it last August, but didn't want to do anything yet.  Last night it started bleeding.  We called the vet, but he doesn't need to see her until Monday. 

It's in a place that's impossible to wrap so we shaved off the hair around the opening and bandaged it.  Just in case it started leaking again, we put a pair of my boxers on her and pinned it so it wouldn't come off.

Now as I'm typing this, she's laying on the floor; giving me a soulful look. She's trying to get me all sympathetic so I'll give her a treat.

I'm an organizer of an activist group in Illinois and I'm inviting you to join the Tea Party Blogring at http://www.xanga.com/groups/group.aspx?id=2570286

Every day, federal, state and local governments stifle small businesses to privilege well-connected incumbent companies. It's a system of protectionism for influential insiders who don't want competition.

Here are some examples.

Case No. 1.

• The monks at St. Joseph Abbey had to take the state of Louisiana to federal court to defend their right to sell handmade caskets.
• Funeral directors had managed to get Louisiana to pass a law decreeing that only "licensed funeral directors" may sell "funeral merchandise" like caskets.
• To sell caskets legally, the monks would have to obtain a funeral director's license, which requires a year-long apprenticeship, passing a funeral industry test and converting their monastery into a "funeral establishment" by installing embalming equipment, among other things.

Case No. 2.

• Hector Ricketts offers New York City residents an alternative to New York's public transportation.
• He employs drivers who offer commuters rides in minivans and typically charge $2 a head -- the subways and buses charge $2.25.
• The city's public transit union used its political connections to regulate the vans to death: The politicians have decreed that vans may not drive routes used by city buses or provide service to a passenger unless it is prearranged by phone; and the vans must keep a passenger manifest on board and enter the name of everyone to be picked up.

Case No. 3.

• Melony Armstrong of Tupelo, Miss., wanted to expand her African hairbraiding business, but was told that she needed a full cosmetology license.
• That required 1,200 hours of classes and a cosmetology instructor's license -- 2,000 more hours.
• The courses and license had little to do with her profession and were simply barriers to entry favored by her competition.

Source: John Stossel, "Entrepreneurs under Attack," Freeman Online, December 2010.

For text: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/give-me-a-break/entrepreneurs-under-attack/

For more on Regulatory Issues: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/?Article_Category=38

Our big, sweet Josie is starting to fail after giving us years of joy and love.  I brought her home on Christmas Eve twelve years ago when she was just six weeks old.  She is the best Christmas present I've ever gotten.

She's slowly losing the use of her hind legs and she's starting to gag for no apparent reason, like she's trying to cough .  The vet says that the gagging is an indication that she has fluid and congestion building around her heart and lungs. 

Her hind leg problems are just a symptom of what most large dogs eventually suffer from and she's no exception.  She has trouble getting up stairs and seems to almost pull herself up with the strength of her front legs.   Sometimes her back legs stumble and she slides back down the stairs.

Why do the good things in your life never seem to last long enough?

Watch this video from the Institute for Justice entitled "Why Chuck Can't Get His Business Off the Ground."  This is a Libertarian group which stands for small business and fights unfair regulations and licensing requirements, which stifle our free market economy. 

To check out their website, click here.

Our government is in the process of taking away one of our freedoms and our doctors' right to practice medicine the way they choose.  This video is chilling!

Wouldn't you want to score lots
of touchdowns if she was cheering
for you?

"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end!"