Fire Island Flora And Fauna

At the feeder this morning: a House Finch and an Eastern Towhee:






The Beach Plum blossoms in the early Spring turning the dunes white with floral snow that lasts for about a week:

Gay Bishop Robinson Scolds Pope Ratzinger

Openly gay Episcopal Bishop V. Eugene Robinson writes to paparatzi:

You will not rid your church of sexual abuse by throwing homosexuals out of your seminaries or out of the priesthood. Homosexual priests have faithfully and responsibly served God throughout Catholic history. To scapegoat them and deprive them of their pulpits is a tragedy for the people they serve and for the church. Yours is a problem of abuse, not sexual orientation.

Yet Another Catastrosphe

Arianna Huffington...

What was just a troubling oil spill a week ago is now, according to Interior Secretary Salazar, "potentially...very catastrophic." In other words, it's much worse than we thought. Has there ever been a crisis in the last decade that turned out to be better than we thought it was going to be? Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, the housing bubble, the foreclosure and unemployment crises -- all much worse than we thought they would be.

Obama Becomes Bush

The Obama administration, once again, seems to be morphing into the Bush administration.

So says the ACLU in regard to Obama' international assassinations program.

Ella fitzgerald - Mack The Knife High quality

There Will Be NO REPEAL Of DADT

Obama is ALL TALK when it comes to repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He refuses to push Congress to actually pass the repeal. Now we are told that a year long study of the effects of repeal must be completed first. By that time, the Congress will probably be under partial or total Republican control. This means that we can forget about any gay rights legislation. Obama will then tell the gay community that he favored repeal but he couldn't get Congress to pass it. So we will be stuck with DADT and Obama and no real progress on the gay rights agenda. You read it here first. Remember: Obama could end discharges under DADT with the stroke of his pen but he refuses to do so!

Justin/Austin - Part Five

pope ratzinger

Richard Dawkins describes pope ratzinger:

A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.

Sufjan Stevens Cutie

Is this his boyfriend?

Obama On OIl Drilling: Not Change We Can Believe In

From the New York Times:

...in North Carolina, Frank Tursi, a preservationist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation, said he believed that there was very little oil off the state’s popular beaches and high risk from drilling into the seabed.

“It all leaves the president with a delicious irony and that is: In order to garner support for a bill that is intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the administration is willing to expand the very substance that causes those emissions in the first place,” Mr. Tursi said. “Pandering for votes that rely on a polluting fuel of the past is not the kind of change many of us expected.”