Get Out Of Afghanistan Now!

From the "adding insult to injury" department: BP continues to profit by supplying the US military with oil to continue our useless war in Afghanistan. Seven more soldiers died this week and nobody noticed. We should get our troops out of there now!

The Disappointment That Is Obama

My bill of particulars against Mr. Obama:

1. Fails to close GITMO.
2. Fails to end Iraq War.
3. Escalates the war in Afghanistan.
4. Backs lifting ban on commercial whaling.
5. Opposes marriage equality.
6. Refuses to sign on to international treaty banning land mines.
7. Excercises no leadership to end DADT.
8. Argues in favor of DOMA with hateful anti-gay DOJ brief.
9. Gives only partial spousal benefits to federal GLBT employees and no health care benefits.
10. Fails to nominate a strong liberal to the Supreme Court.
11. Fails to advocate for a strong enough stimulus to create jobs.
12. Fails to press for real energy independence with tough conservation.
13. Favors offshore drilling.
14. Continues biased policy of unconditional support for Israel.
15. Continues improper Bush policies on secrecy, wiretapping, etc.
16. Keeps Bush appointee Gates on as Defense Secretary.
17. Refuses to cut defense spending.
18. Maintains Reagan era ban on gay men donating blood.


...and this is just the beginning!

Obama Backs Lifting Ban On Commercial Whaling

According to this article on line, Obama and company are in favor of lifting the 24 year old ban oncommercial whaling. That's nice. Another campaign promise broken.

Cossack Clothing

Ukraine Performer

A strolling musician at the Cossack horsemanship show near Kherson.

Obama's Failure To Lead

An all to common thread among the critics of Barak Obama is his refusal to take the lead - to act presidential - on the important issues that the country faces and in fulfilling his campaign promises. Read Frank Rich in today's New York Times. Rich outlines how Obama depends upon his advisors too much (they are often wrong,) and fails to pull togehter the various themes and act on them in a way that could define his presidency in a poisitve rather than negative way. Rich pleads with him to fix his presidency by exercising forceful leadership.

The gay community knows Obama's failings all to well. We are overwhelming disappointed in him. Now a year and a half into his presidency he has done virtually nothing for us. Gay and lesbian servicemembers are still being discharged. The Obama Justice Department is still defending the Defense Of Marriage Act in Court, the Employment Non Discrimination Act is languishing in Congress...and the list goes on and on.

Obama is seemingly oblivious to the malaise affecting his presidency. He is lucky that so far no real viable opposition has emerged from the tired and backward-looking Republican Party. However, if he expects an energized base to help propel him into a second term he is in for a major disappointment himself. Frank Rich still thinks it's not too late for Obama to find his inner Teddy Rooosevelt, to become a forceful leader. I'm not so sure.

Cossack Horsemanship

Along The Dnieper River

A small farmhouse located on "Fisherman's Island."

Alternate Reality: Why Israel Is Wrong

Andrew Sullivan explains:

A country permanently occupying and colonizing a neighboring region, and treating its original inhabitants as dangerous interlopers, is the victim. An elite commando unit attacking a ship carrying toys and wheelchairs in the hours before dawn are those we should feel pity for. A country with 150 nuclear warheads and the strongest military in its region, the victor in every conventional war it has always fought, is somehow also always fighting for its very existence. A country backed by the sole superpower, supplied with aid by huge majorities in the US Congress, is facing extinction. Self-defense requires not civilly disabling and inspecting the cargo of an unarmed ship but raiding it at dawn and killing nine and injuring dozens. Basic human revulsion at a military that can kill over a thousand people - including scores of women and children in a trapped, impoverished enclave - can only be a function of anti-Semitism. A territory that is being systematically populated with Israelis in illegal settlements in contravention of the Geneva Conventions is merely a "buffer zone". You need to colonize buffer zones?

Invasion and occupation of neighboring countries is "forward defense". And asking that a two-state solution be moved forward by freezing illegal settlement construction and allowing a blockade that, while interdicting arms, doesn't seek to kill civilians and restrict the import of basic necessities is to deprive a country with 150 nuclear warheads of any legitimate form of self-defense.

This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned. And you will notice one thing as well: no regret whatsoever for the loss of human life, just as the hideous murder of so many civilians in the Gaza war had to be the responsibility of the victims, not the attackers. There is no sense of the human here; just the tribe.

Something has been wrong here for a very long time, and now it is inescapable. Until the discourse is rescued from the victims of Israel Derangement Syndrome, Israel and America will slowly be drawn into wars they cannot ultimately win, lose every other ally they ever had, and embolden and fortify the very Islamist forces we are seeking to defuse and defeat.

The Viking M. Lomonosov

This is the ship we travelled on for 11 days in Ukraine. The capacity is 200 passengers and 100 crew.