The Dish

"[E]ach cat must burp twice. sometimes it helps if you sing to them," – cat-sitting instructions from "Kelly." Any volunteers?

"This is not a typical American family. I don’t know many of us who have been involved in TV reality shows and chasing storms, it’s a different experience than most of us face,” – Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden. They're so busted. But I love the 911 dispatcher's calm inquiries about a flying saucer.

Sometimes, you just despair of liberal rationalists.

The NYT gets something important wrong:

In a Sunday feature already posted online, the New York Times and free-lancer Carol Kino have unfortunately hetero-normalized David Hockney. According to Kino: "In 2005 Mr. Hockney — temporarily, he says — left Hollywood, where he had lived full time since 1978, to transform the manicured green and golden slopes, woods and farmland of the East Yorkshire landscape into spare, quickly worked compositions charged with pink, orange and violet."

That's not true. Hockney did not leave California because the East Yorkshire landscape romantically called him home to England. Hockney left because the United States government would not allow his partner, John Fitzherbert, back into the country. In order to be with Fitzherbert, Hockney returned to the UK.

I think that many straight people find it so impossible to understand how they could be treated this way that they simply don't see what their gay friends deal with every day. If heterosexuals were treated this way, there'd be a revolution.

A reader writes:

If a Republican president had come up with this slogan, it would immediately have been put up as the main headline on Drudge (red font & siren optional), which inevitably leads to the main topic of conversation on conservative radio.  Every damn Republican representative would be working every interview around those three words and the national narrative would be created … unfortunately these are the Dems we're talking about, so the only people who will ever hear this are the ones politically interested enough to read blogs such as yours.

James Pethokoukis voices one of the most common arguments against the healthcare bill:

The CBO projects $81 billion in savings over the first decade and then “the added revenues and cost savings are projected to grow more rapidly than the cost of the coverage expansion.” Great news. But those savings will materialize only if Congress actually cuts a projected $400 billion in government healthcare spending — including Medicare reimbursements to hospitals, doctors and other providers –  over 10 years. Skepticism here is warranted. Previous congressional promises to cut reimbursements haven’t panned out.

Others argue that the CBO tends to underestimate savings from Medicare cuts. But at some point, what cannot continue won't.

Who ya gonna believe – the coroner or the Daily Mail?

… like the family photo – from the 19th century.

In case anyone thought that the president's studied vagueness at the HRC dinner was accidental, try finding the words "Maine" or "Washington State" in this statement. Maybe the campaigns can use this as if the president were actually putting his weight behind these specific campaigns. But he isn't.

A reader writes:

Here is another example of DADT consequences that I haven’t seen mentioned. I was in the Navy from 1985-1995, 10 years of service, keep in mind that is half way to retirement.  I finally admitted to myself in 1987 I was gay but kept it hidden from all except my closest friends.  In 1992, after 4 years of shore duty and getting ready to be rotated back to a ship command, I found out that I was HIV+ and with the exception of how the Navy went about telling me I was HIV+ (another horror story in itself) the Navy treated me very well.  But when you are HIV+, you are kept on shore based commands, as the Navy wants you within a certain amount of miles to a Military Hospital. 

But my job entailed for me to keep going up in rank I needed to be ship based to continue to progress in my rate (job).  My peers were always asking how I kept getting shore duty year after year.

I obviously couldn’t tell them that I was HIV+ (being HIV+ in those days = that you were gay) and would be station on a shore command the rest of my Navy career.  I decided that after 3 years of lying to my shipmates, and that I could not live the double life any longer I decided, to the dismay of my family, who at the time did not know I was gay or HIV+ and because I was only 10 years away from retirement, it was time that I give up my military career and become a civilian. 

But the remarkable part of ending the leading this double life was that my CD4 count went from being consistently around 250 during the time I was in the Navy, to within 6 months of being discharged to having a CD4 count over 900 without medication changes.  The stress of living a double life the constant fear that I was going to be found out was killing my immune system.