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Knee Surgery D-Day -1

Posted by laeva65 on Monday, June 25, 2007 3:23:18 PM
Now it begins to get serious. For the last month I've been telling everyone I know that June 26 is when I will enter St. Luke's Hospital in Phoenix to have my left knee replaced.

That day is tomorrow. Funny, I don't feel too many butterflies.  A couple of hours ago I had about 5 seconds of panic and then it went away.  To me, that means I'm ready. I've come down this road before, only to call it off or see problems develop that prevented me from having the surgery. On those occasions, High Anxiety was my emotional state.

The last time, I was on the table, getting my leg shaved when they saw from a readout of my vitals that I was in total panic mode and so they said. "No surgery today."  I said, "That's a sign. I'm going home."

I had the right knee replaced 10 years ago, and it was a real ordeal.  I'm pretty pain tolerant, but this was ridiculous.  Still, I wished the doctor had agreed to do both knees at once but he wouldn't do it.  Lemme tell ya: If you ever find yourself in a position where you need knee or hip replacements, if you need them both done have them both done at the same time.  It will be a harder rehab but when it is over it will be OVER.  You won't have another one staring at you as I do.

How did I get into this situation?  Some  guys inherit $50 million like my buddy CG; others inherit trust funds and large houses.  My legacy from my mom was arthritis. See we were poor, but we liked to share with one another.  From my dad, I got my tendency to be overweight.  From dear old ma, I got the ar-thur-i-tis.

To keep myself fit, I fell into the running craze of the '70s and '80s.  It was great. There was nothing like going out and doing 4 or 5 miles on a bright clear morning.  The buzz was awesome.  In the late '80s, the knees started howling, and by '91 I was injuring myself when I tried to run.

I have totally the wrong bone structure to be a runner.  I have the bones of a farm animal.  Huge, massive bones.  To be successful at it you need the bones of a bird, like my friend Pam who runs the Boston Marathon each year.  She probably carries 110 lbs. on a frame of about 5-foot-7.  She glides. I plodded. Hence my problem.

What finally got me to turn my head around and commit eagerly to this surgery?  It had an awful lot to do with our men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, missing limbs,  having left a full measure of their devotion in the streets of Fallujah or on a road in Baghdad.  What got to me was their attitudes.  What they wanted more than anything was to be back with their units.  Once they were fitted with a prosthetic, they figured they could learn how to move well enough to rejoin the fight.

Seeing that made me embarrassed.  I felt like a coward.  I saw how gung-ho these kids were and I said to myself, "I want some of that."

Well, tomorrow morning I'm going to start on that road.  I probably won't be posting for a week, but I'll get back at it as soon as I can.
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Two and 'que

Posted by laeva65 on Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:10:42 AM
It came to an end for my Sun Devils tonight in a ridiculously nervewracking 10 inning loss to Cal-Irvine. Congratulations to the Anteaters.  We had them by 4 runs and needed 6 outs and couldn't close the deal.

'Two and 'que'  is  College World Series slang for  what happens when you lose  two games: You get to go to a barbeque and then go home.

Baseball is a fiendish game. I hate it. I love it.
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Guardsman 'died as he wanted — with honor'

Posted by laeva65 on Sunday, June 17, 2007 1:03:17 PM
This story is pretty well-written, so I think I'll just let Carol Ann Alaimo of The Arizona Daily Star tell it.  Carol Ann?

Why would a soldier who had just returned from war turn right around and offer to go again?

It was a question answered many times over at the funeral of Tucson's most recent war casualty.

Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Charles R. Browning, who volunteered for the assignment that took his life in Afghanistan, was buried with military honors at Evergreen Cemetery on Thursday. Despite 100-plus degree heat, nearly 400 people turned out to pay respects.

Friends and comrades said Browning's decision to head back overseas, not long after he'd finished a 15-month tour in support of the war in Iraq, wasn't surprising for someone who even as a child seemed to have soldiering in his blood and a deep sense of duty to his country.

Browning, 31, believed that by fighting terrorists on foreign soil, the U.S. military was keeping the homeland safe from further Sept. 11-style attacks, said Sgt. 1st Class Fernando Basurto, Browning's platoon sergeant during his first wartime tour.

He used say, 'As long as we're here, they'll be trying to kill us here and our families will be safe at home,' " Basurto said in an interview, recalling their conversations overseas.

So, nine months after that mission ended, Browning left his wife and two daughters again to train for his second tour, Basurto said."

Thank you, Ms Alaimo. That's some pretty sensitive journalism for a newspaper that is as left as they come.  Conservatives have called it The Arizona Daily Red Star for years.

But this is a case where the stature of the man and the magnitude of his sacrifice overwhelm all petty political considerations.

There is one more fact about Sgt. Browning that folks might find interesting.  He was a man who put it on the line every day of his life.  Back home in Florence, AZ, Sgt. Browning was a corrections officer at the Arizona State Prison.

It is a bleak Father's Day for the Brownings, but there are many who are grateful fot this man's life.  Some day his daughters will be comforted by the knowledge that their dad was one of the best.
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We're not in Omaha anymore, Toto

Posted by laeva65 on Sunday, June 17, 2007 1:53:45 AM
From the College World Series (Go you Sun Devils!) to the Insurgent Bowl in Gaza and the West Bank.  This is where the two Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, compete to see who is more bloodthirsty, savage, and stupid.

It looks like Hamas has a comfortable lead, machine gunning their way around the countryside . The grand irony here is that someone in Hamas had the brilliant idea to ransack the home formerly occupied by Bill Clinton's favorite peaceman, Yasser Arafat. (In the immortal words of Opinion Journal's James Taranto, Arafat is in stable condition after dying in a French hospital.)

The news reports that Chez Yasser is regarded as a shrine by Fatah, whose cause he betrayed and whose accounts he looted for upwards of 40 years to the tune, some say, of as much as $4 billion.  If I were Hamas, I'd go after the other Arafat shrine - the one in Switzerland where all the loot is stashed.

One more irony since my doctor said I'm anemic - when the Israelis had Gaza, it was one of the most productive farming areas in the region.  The Israelis exported tomatoes and vegetables all over the Mediterranean and beyond.  Now that Hamas and Fatah have Gaza, it's once again good only for machine gun fire and burning buildings.

That's enough irony even for me.
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Another Pair of Jokers

Posted by laeva65 on Sunday, June 17, 2007 1:35:16 AM
Ok, so Mike Nifong has been sent to the showers.  The civil cases will do little but enrich the lawyers for the Duke lacrosse players.  Trial lawyers traditionally take one-third of any judgment awarded. 

We turn now to a couple of other misbegotten prosecutors - Patrick Fitzgerald and Ronnie Earle.  Their victims are Scooter Libby and Tom DeLay.

How on earth can a man like Scooter Libby, who by all accounts has been a faithful aide to the Vice President of the United States, be sent to prison for a case in which no crime was committed and one had to be invented?

How the Libby case got started: The Bush Justice Department punked out when Night Train Joe Wilson started blaming Karl Rove for 'outing' his wife as a covert agent for the CIA. 

Wilson's tale included accusations that Rove was angry because Wilson told everyone Saddam Hussein was NOT shopping for yellowcake uranium in the African country of Niger.

President Bush told the nation in a State of the Union message that British intelligence had good information that Saddam was indeed yellowcake shopping at the Niger store.  (It was either that, Niger's most valuable commodity, or something like cottonseed.)

This led to the fiction of "Bush lied, people died."  Attorney General John Ashcroft acted like someone put a scorpion in his shoe.  He hotfooted it away from the case and handed it to Peter Fitzgerald, an ace federal prosecutor.

Ashcroft probably felt he was doing the right thing.  I think it's safe to say history will render a different judgment.  Fitzgerald kept this case going far past the point where he learned that: a) no crime was committed because Mrs. Night Train Joe Wilson was not a covert agent and, b) the person who started all this talk about her was a disaffected aide to Colin Powell, Richard Armitage.

Month after month, Fitzgerald's subpoena machine was cranking, and half of the drive-by media made a trip to the grand jury.  One poor reporter, Judy Miller, spent some serious time in the slammer for refusing to testify.

Here we have a case of a talented and successful prosecutor who let Washington go to his head and he ended up ruining Scooter Libby's life because the guy had a bad memory.  This should be on the top of the stack for President Bush to pardon.  It is reprehensible what happened to Scooter Libby.

But when we get to Ronnie Earle, we have a much lower life form - a political hack who knows that a grand jury in Texas will indict a cheese enchilada. DeLay was the Majority Leader of the House and a pretty good one.  He kept the GOP caucus in line and got things done. They called him "the Hammer" for, well, obvious reasons.  The trouble here is that the House Republicans had a caucus rule - which, by the way, the Democrats do not - that any member of leadership who is indicted for a crime must give up his post.

Enter Ronnie Earle.  He went through six separate grand juries - SIX! - before he could find one that would indict DeLay for a campaign finance violation that we learned later was not a crime.  This case has blown up in Earle's face, but the damage has been done. The Hammer is gone and the Democrats, with such moral paragons as William "Freezer" Jefferson and Jack "Surrender in Iraq" Murtha, control the House.

What a country, eh?
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Devils in a Squeaker

Posted by laeva65 on Saturday, June 16, 2007 7:03:58 PM
OK. My Sun Devils started off in the winner's bracket this afternoon at the College World Series in Omaha, beating a scrappy Cal-Irvine team 5-4.  Ike Davis, son of former major league pitcher Ron Davis, hit the home run that sealed the deal.
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One Down, 88 to Go

Posted by laeva65 on Saturday, June 16, 2007 7:01:22 PM
Well, Mike Nifong got what he deserved and as terrible as his conduct was, I have to say he took his punishment like a stand-up guy.  He agreed disbarment was appropriate and said he does not plan to appeal.

If only we'd be so lucky with those 88 members of the Duke University faculty who signed their names to a full-page newspaper ad condemning the three Duke lacrosse players before there was anything more than an allegation that something had happened at the frat house that night. 

The disgusting hubris of those people is revolting. They deserve a strong sanction. But most, if not all, of them probably are tenured and therefore immune from any kind of punishment.  What creeps!

The three lacrosse players are cleared of any charges, but there always will be people of bad faith who will believe them guilty.  And anytime one of them is mentioned in the newspaper ever again for an unrelated event, the Internet archives will vomit up the background of the Duke lacrosse case.

By the way, a childhood friend of mine told me he coached one of the three young men in youth lacrosse and said he was a fine boy.
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The Good Devil(s)

Posted by laeva65 on Sunday, June 10, 2007 12:44:52 PM
When the Roman emperors wanted to relieve the civic pressure brought on by their misadventures, they would order up a series of athletic contests in the Colosseum. I've been a little grim lately so I think I'll shift my focus to my favorite pastime, baseball - in particular my beloved Arizona State Sun Devils.

This year's crop of Devils is a magnificent, multi-talented lot.  The maestro, Coach Pat Murphy, has a mad strategy that calls for inserting the most improbable player in the unlikeliest situation.

Take last night.  Down 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth against Ole Miss and with runners on second and third, Murphy sends up his closer to pinch-hit.  Now, normally. asking your closer (the pitcher who generally comes into games in the last inning to seal a win) to bat in a tight situation is a bit like asking jazz pianist extraordinaire Art Tatum to take a turn at tenor saxophone.

What sweet music there was! The closer, Jason Jarvis, launched a soaring fly ball to deep right field.  It was caught, but it was deep enough to score the man from third and tie the ballgame.

As recently as the inning before, the Devils were scoreless, and had been handcuffed all night by a magnificent Ole Miss pitcher named Will Kline.  While Jarvis raced down the field into the Devils bullpen to warm up in case he was going to pitch the 10th inning, the PAC-10's offensive player of the year came to bat. 

That would be Brett Wallace, who had stunk up the joint with an O-fer. Kline had beaten Wallace like a rented mule all night long.

So naturally Wallace strokes the first pitch he sees into center field, driving home the winning run and deflating the spirit of a very good Ole Miss squad.

Game 2 of the three game series is this evening.  Winner goes to the College World Series. Bet on the Devil(s).
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Passport Insanity

Posted by laeva65 on Friday, June 08, 2007 11:08:12 AM
I guess this isn't a surprising thing to happen to a red-headed twin born on Christmas Day.

My son Billy is a college baseball player. He had not hooked up with a summer league team and was preparing instead for a summer of work in Phoenix.

Monday afternoon brought the call that would change his summer, if not his life: He was invited to play for the Kelowna, B.C., Falcons, a team in the prestigious West Coast Baseball League.

The reservations were made, then the discovery that Billy's passport had expired last year. We hurried to the Clerk of the Court of Maricopa County, surrendered the expired passport and paid nearly $200 to start the engine of passport renewal. Do not worry, we were told, you don't need a passport to fly INTO Canada.  We breathed a sigh of relief.

Thursday morning (June 7), he presented his ticket and identifying documents (sans passport, of course) at Alaska Airlines in Sky Harbor Airport. We're sorry, the agents told him, you need a valid passport to fly into Canada. "THE LAW CHANGED JUST YESTERDAY."

Too far along to quit now, the poor kid flew to Seattle and then took a 14-hour bus ride to Kelowna, B.C. The schedule called for him to step off the bus and then head to practice with his new teammates.

Now today, after the ordeal of Thursday, we hear the new policy will be suspended.  

We're the richest, smartest nation on Earth. How come we can't create a system that allows our citizens easy egress and ingress to our neighboring countries? How hard can it be? 
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In Memoriam

Posted by laeva65 on Thursday, June 07, 2007 11:15:31 AM
A Chandler, AZ soldier has died in Iraq, the Department of Defense announced Wednesday afternoon.

Sgt. Caleb P. Christopher, 25, died June 3 in Baghdad. He was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.

Christopher was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.

Christopher is only the second soldier from Chandler to die in the line of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

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The Field Will Shrink by One

Posted by laeva65 on Monday, June 04, 2007 1:14:35 AM
It's a bad sign when people start to laugh at, rather than with, a politician.  It's worse if the pol is running for President.

So let us all have a good laugh at the expense of John Edwards.  Hell, he can afford it!

The $400 haircuts, the $480,000 salary while supposedly boning up on 'poverty' at a hedge fund.  (I never did figure that one out.) And this while he's pontificating about the "Two Americas."  Yeah, buddy, there are two Americas - the one we live in and the one you live in.

He was on thin cheese when his wife came down with cancer and -- sympathetic spouse that he is - Edwards didn't miss a step in his march to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Now the coup de grace, with news that John Kerry, his running mate in 2004, couldn't abide him and had grave doubts about having him on the ticket.  When the "Magic Hat" man doesn't want you, buddy you'd better get a dog, because you are all outta friends.
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In Memoriam

Posted by laeva65 on Sunday, June 03, 2007 4:56:45 PM
Sgt. Anthony D. Ewing said all he wanted to do was "go home and relax."

Instead, Ewing was one of five soldiers killed on Memorial Day in Abu Savda, Iraq, when a bomb struck their vehicle. Ewing and four other soldiers in the 1st Cavalry Division, stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, were killed in the vehicle explosion.

Ewing was a 2003 graduate of Westview High School in Avondale, AZ.
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Darfur

Posted by laeva65 on Saturday, June 02, 2007 7:33:41 PM
I must confess I get wrapped up in the immigration fight and distracted by our noble struggle in Iraq, so much so that I - like many others I suppose - don't have enough attention and emotion for the savage spectacle in Darfur.

But Michael Ledeen gets it right over at NRO with seething outrage at the diplomats who let this slaughter continue:

On a hot sabbath, i am prompted to say that Darfur is a catastrophe that could and should be solved in an hour or so. The killers largely operate from helicopters and small fixed wing aircraft. We could destroy them all in an hour or so. But that would be "wrong," because it would violate the current hymnal.

Go tell the victims. Explain why sanctions are better, because it makes the Western politicians feel pious. Even though black Africans are being slaughtered.

And while you're at it, tell the starving people of Zimbabwe why their killer and oppressor, Robert Mugabe, is left untouched by the entire outside world. Explain why St Nelson Mandela doesn't give a damn, while you're at it.

If this is true, and I see no reason to doubt Mr. Ledeen, how about we hear from Condoleezza Rice (she still IS Secretary of State, isn't she?) again?

I'd like to see Condi and Defense Secretary Gates standing in front of a map of Africa, telling us how F-117As and B-2s rolled in the night before and turned the murdering bastards into small flaming pieces.

Does anyone think the drive-by media would report that it had "energized the base" for the President? I'd like to hear the commentary from the "new" French regime. It would be a fine opportunity for Sarko to man up. 

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Come live in Arizona

Posted by laeva65 on Friday, June 01, 2007 9:17:29 PM
I created this blog a while ago, and it's darn time I got to using it.  I am indebted to TownHall for making the podcasts of my favorite shows available for download.  So I am just hours behind if I express my feelings about something I heard.

So let's get started.  I just heard Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page on the Hugh Hewitt Show. It got so bad that I was grateful when the break came. No doubt Mr. Riley is as smart - if not smarter - than I am, but on the issue of immigration he is under-educated.

Mr. Riley places little value on the enforcement aspect of the immigration bill.  I can only say, "Come live in Arizona."  He seems to have no understanding that the tough fencing that was built in San Diego shifted border crossers to the East.  To the East is Arizona.  Much of Arizona at the border is flat desert, where thousands of Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans. Panamanians, etc. and there are probably Yemenis and Syrians with the occasional Iranian.  It is the Heroin Highway, an easy stroll for drug traffickers.

This is perfect country for a fence. We must fence this off or we will lose our culture. If enough terrorists get in (or if we've let them in already) we may lose one of our cities.

Let me say at the start that I love Mexico, and I love Mexicans.  I have not spent much time at the big gringo resorts in Mexico, but as a young man 30 years ago, I took my girlfriend in my camper and we traveled throughout the entire country, with the exception of Yucatan.  We stopped in the small villages to camp.  We shopped for food daily in the mercados. My wife and I took our honeymoon there. I speak Spanish and I am a member of a Catholic parish that is - I'm guessing now - at least 65% Hispanic.

If the immigration bill is to move forward, we must have border enforcement. I know Sen. Jon Kyl, the Republican point man on this bill.  In an adult life in and out of politics, I have never met a more honorable public servant.

Jon Kyl knows we have to have enforcement, and we can get it if we insist on it and stop beating up our own people. This bill will be around a long time.  There is no chance it will be rammed through. The Democrats can't have their way with us - not yet at least. If we let them control Congress too long, there will be enough of them that they'll do anything they wish.  I lived through those days as a young man.  I don't want to see them again.
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