Being a gay Boy Scout is akin to be a female Catholic. You are allowed to serve in the organization but will never be admitted to the leadership because, let’s face it, you are ultimately a secondary human being.

We all live in places where natural disasters can happen, whether tornadoes, or hurricanes or earthquakes or volcanoes erupting. And every day that we wake up and are able to go about our daily lives with normalcy, knowing the people and pets we love are safe and our homes are snug and cozy and waiting for us to get off work, we should remember to be very, very grateful. It can all go away so quickly.

I went to Hawaii for me godchild’s college graduation. It was wonderful yet I couldn’t wait to get back to Alaska where we know the air should not contain humidity and the sun does not necessarily mean warmth.  My happiness was quickly tempered by the worse cold anyone has ever had in the history of mankind, coupled with the news emanating from Washington DC.

You’d think by now we’d all be immune to what spews forth from that cesspool. We’ve endured stains on blue dresses, vice presidents shooting friends in the face, senators with inexplicably wide stances in public restrooms, and representatives sending pictures of their private parts to women expected to swoon at such manly manhood. And those are just what immediately come to mind.  Given time for a little thought, it just gets worse. Newt telling his wife he’s leaving her as she emerges from cancer surgery. Mark Foley sending suggestive e-mails to male congressional pages while sitting on the committee supposedly protecting them from such sleaziness. 
Our national cesspool is definitely centered in our capital where congressmen seem to feel they live by rules that put them above and beyond common decency. And yes, I deliberately use the word congressmen since congresswomen do not seem to be caught up with the sleaze factor… yet.
When Barack Obama was first elected, some of us felt there just might be a chance to sweep away some of that sleaze factor. Maybe it was wrong of us to expect him to be above the fray just because he was our first African-American president. Maybe it was wrong of us to want him to be some sort of superman who would get things done without getting dirty. 
I’m not sure at this point what bothers me more – the current scandals or the president’s seeming detachment from them. It’s like the first debate in the last presidential election when he basically phoned it in and seemed to have trouble rousing himself to even do that. I watch him now and wonder just how disengaged you can be and still function.
I can believe that he perhaps didn’t know what the IRS was doing. I can almost believe he didn’t know about the phone records. I don’t at all believe he was unaware of the truth about Benghazi. A real man would have stood up and said that, as Harry Truman put it so well, the buck stops here. Whatever happens on my watch, even if done by subordinates without my knowledge, is my responsibility because I picked those subordinates. They are my people. This is my administration. Seriously, does he never watch NCIS? The basic tenet of the whole Gibb’s persona is that he is ultimately responsible for his team and their actions because that’s what a real man does.
So this man that so many of us placed such perhaps unrealistic hope in has proven to be not just human, but as flawed a human as so many who came before him. Our disappointment is perhaps the greater because our hopes had been raised so high.
Is he still a good president? Sure, just as good as Bush or Clinton or any number of others scandal ridden presidents before him. Even Nixon had his good moments before being enveloped in the bad moment that destroyed his presidency. And Obama has done things that will reverberate well into the future such as ending sex discrimination in the military or finally passing some version of universal health care for everyone. He broke barriers in being elected that many thought would not be broken for generations yet to come. He had the guts to give the order to take out America’s number one most wanted man despite knowing the risk that, in fact, the intel might be wrong and Osama might not be there. He did all this and yet he still disappoints.
Maybe Americans just need to accept that being a politician means being dirty because in today’s America, you can’t get elected nationally without support from shadowy and questionable organizations. Or maybe the old axiom that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is simply a reality that will never change.
No matter. It seems that in today’s world, no politician can remain a hero for long. We are the poorer for it.

There are little green things showing their heads above the ground in my yard. Quiet. It doesn’t take much to scare them away. Can’t wait to see what they are… given my ability in my yard, I’m going to guess either dandelions or whatever grows from the seeds my birds scatter in the house, my dogs eat because… well, because… and then poop out in the yard. This is always an exciting spring mystery.

I couldn’t stop grinning from ear to ear when I read that the judge ordered Joe Miller to pay Alaska Dispatch over $85,000 in legal fees for his sleazy (and does the man know any other way, really?) attempts to use the law to duck the law. He’s the type of lawyer that Charles Dickens skewered so well over 150 years ago in Bleak House with the case titled Jarndyce v Jarndyce. In fact, Joe would have fit right in with the sleaze that Dickens described in that lawsuit. Yay for Alaska Dispatch! Yay for John McKay! And yay for full disclosure winning again.

We can send men to the moon. We can send spaceships to the outer limits of our galaxy. But the best we can come up with for attaching dog tags to dog collars are those damned tight little curled metal pieces that defy fingers, knives and pliers to open and twist the tag on. I’ve just spent the better part of Sunday afternoon affixing new dog tags to my dogs’ collars and my fingers are bleeding, my normally only slightly rancid personality is now totally gone to hell and I may need to drink heavily to get over the ordeal.
This is 2013. Surely we can do better than this.

In all my life, I have never seen two dogs more reluctant to go out and “do their thing” as Bubba and Carm on Friday when that crappy mixture of rain and snow fell. I think they would have held it for twenty four hours if needed… or at least until I went to bed and couldn’t see them peeing on my carpet.

I didn’t think it was possible to feel this miserable for this long. I guess this is what I should expect when exposed to sunshine, humidity and heat. Alaskans just do not do well under those circumstances. I have gone from a scratchy throat to a stuffy nose to a hacking cough and I now feel as though someone screwed my ears on too tight.
Yep… sunshine will kill you if you aren’t careful.

Not unlike the three amigos, they travel together and they are a force of nature. I’d show you their front but you’d be blinded by the beauty.
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I’m not sure Alaskans were ever meant to be hot AND humid at the same time. It simply isn’t healthy.

Back in my mostly misspent youth I could have written something in a stream of consciousness fashion that would have been coherent… or, at least, coherent to my addled brain. But now in my old age I find that if I miss a night’s sleep and then try to stay awake to write something, my stream of consciousness doesn’t even rise to the level of bizarre. It’s just incoherent.  All of which goes to explain why I won’t have a column in the Daily News today or on my website tomorrow. You can only push so hard before you collapse into bed whimpering.

It is 6 AM. I’ve just returned home after an overnight flight from Hawaii. I thought I’d try to stay up and then just go to bed tonight so keep my schedule straight. Not gonna happen.
Good night.

Why do people take pictures of their meals in restaurants? What’s the point? I see these pictures on Facebook and in my heart I feel sorry for those that take them. I just want to take their hand and gently suggest they get a fork, eat their dinner and then get a life.

While I, as a diehard Alaskan, welcome that brief period between snow and mosquitoes that we laughingly refer to as spring, the return of the sun does have one down side. And that is the appearance of all that dirt that we was so hard to see by the dim light of winter. So I went through my usual crazed moment and had the carpets, floors, windows and blinds in my house washed. Now I no longer fear my mother glancing earthward and wondering how she could have raised such a slob. And let’s just keep it our little secret that I pay people to do this for me. I’m not sure she would totally approve. 

Whenever I see Sarah Palin, the phrase “You can never underestimate the intelligence of the American voter” pops into my head.