Category: The Dish

If you didn’t know that before, you do now.

This quote can’t be good news for Rove:

"The Republican leadership spent $1 million on helping Chafee, and then it wonders why conservatives don’t think they’re wanted in this party. They think the leadership wants them to come out every year, shine your shoes, then go sit in the back of the bus, take their Bibles and read them and shut up."

Rocco has a leak of the imminent document from the American Catholic bishops on pastoral care of homosexual Catholics. No big surprises – but a nod toward baptizing the adopted children of same-sex couples.

Attacking Jerry Brown – and "flaky liberals" everywhere. The last words? "Amen to that."

Here’s a graph compiled from data provided by Brookings.

A first-person account of the unraveling of civil order in much of the country can be read here.

A reader writes:

Whoa there, Andrew. To quote another great libertarian, Dave Barry, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and in this case, yours is wrong." I think by "whiny, lesbian complaint-rock", you meant "staggeringly brilliant contemporary rock fueled by searing individualistic rage." I’m sure you’ll correct this minor wording error expediently.

Actually, I’m too busy watching ’80s videos. I hope to get the results up by early next week.

A sign that he isn’t completely immune to the bleeding obvious:

TIME: Mr. Vice President, if you had to take back any one thing you’d said about Iraq, what would it be?

CHENEY: I expressed the sentiment some time ago that I thought we were over the hump in terms of violence, I think that was premature. I thought the elections would have created that environment. And it hasn’t happened yet.

"I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle," – Zeyad, from the Healing Iraq blog.

I know how he feels. Other Iraqi bloggers are venting in an unprecedented way about the anarchy and violence that is now consuming their country. Check it out.

The former House clerk who oversaw the page program on the Hill testified before the House Ethics Committee for four hours today, according to ABC News. His testimony? Trandahl testified that

a top aide to House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed of "all issues dealing with the page program," according to a Republican familiar with the investigation.

The Republican source said Trandahl planned to name Ted Van Der Meid, the speaker’s counsel and floor manager, as the person who was briefed on a regular basis about any issue that arose in the page program, including a "problem group of members and staff who spent too much time socializing with pages outside of official duties." One of whom was Mark Foley.

Trandahl’s testimony before the House Ethics Committee could provide additional evidence that key members of the speaker’s staff were aware of problems involving the page program for years.

Full disclosure: Trandahl has long been a friend of mine. I haven’t spoken to him since this Foley affair surfaced. But the signs are clear. Both he and Kirk Fordham have testified that Hastert’s office knew very well for a long time what predators like Mark Foley were up to. If the committee finds Fordham and Trandahl credible before the election, Hastert will have to quit. He would have caused less damage to the GOP had he quit already. This thing, in other words, is not over. And it could detonate at a very precarious time.

We don’t know is the only real answer. But the number of people prepared to tell interviewers they are gay has gone up a great deal in the past few years. And the number of self-identifying same-sex couples has leapt in the last decade as well – across the entire country. Marc Fisher has the stats and a link to the PDF report from UCLA’s law school. The five gayest cities in America? San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Portland and then Washington, D.C.