"I am a lesbian and it was a later-in-life recognition," Meredith Baxter told Matt Lauer this morning on "Today." “Some people would say, well, you’re living a lie and, you know, the truth is — [but] not at all. This has only been for the past seven years.”

Recently, the tabloid media has been hinting at Baxter's orientation, with Perez Hilton posting photos of Baxter with her girlfriend, contractor Nancy Locke. Probably best known for playing the liberal mother of Michael J. Fox's young Republican on "Family Ties," Baxter told Lauer, "I don't want to be worried all the time." Locke, she said, is openly gay: “I had to reach a level of comfort because it wasn’t fair to push her back into secrecy.”

Baxter, 62, has been married three times, and she told Lauer she was consistently drawn to men with whom she clashed. “It never occurred to me to think, oh, [the problem is] me,” she said. Then, seven years ago, she met a woman. “I got involved with someone I never expected to get involved with, and it was that kind of awakening,” she said. The mother of five, Baxter recalled telling her kids. “I said, ‘I think I’m gay,’ and my oldest boy said, ‘I knew.'"

"The support from my family and anyone close to me has been so immediate and unqualified. I’ve really been blessed.” Baxter goes into much more detail about her process -- including a lesbian affair 13 years ago, before her third marriage to a man -- in a long Advocate interview that was posted today. For those who are interested, here's the link.

One day, a California woman woke up to discover her t-shirt soaked in blood. The source? Her breast. She immediately went to the emergency room, and the cause of the bleeding was eventually found to be a benign tumor. However, her health insurance denied the claim, stating that she "reasonably should have known that an emergency did not exist." Yes, copious amounts of blood flowing from your nipples is really something you want to wait out.

Not surprisingly, the woman's insurer, Blue Shield of California HMO, plans to review the case after being contacted by a local television station.

ATLANTA — Uninsured dialysis patients who could be cut off from their life-sustaining care lost a court challenge on Friday when a judge ruled that Grady Memorial Hospital could close its outpatient dialysis clinic. But the hospital gave the patients a temporary reprieve.

Ruling largely on technical grounds, a state court judge dissolved the restraining order that prevented last weekend’s scheduled closing of the clinic at Grady, the Atlanta region’s safety net hospital. The hospital, which is deeply in debt, quickly announced it would close the clinic within a week. It agreed, however, to pay for up to three months of dialysis at private clinics for the 51 patients who will be dislocated.

Grady will continue to assist the indigent patients, many of them illegal immigrants, in seeking care in their home countries or in other states where they may qualify for emergency Medicaid coverage.

BOSTON - The Boston Red Sox honored the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy before their game on Wednesday night, paying tribute to a lifelong fan whose family was as much a part of Boston history as the team itself.

The U.S. flag flew at half-staff at Fenway Park, where Kennedy threw out the ceremonial first pitch on opening day, 97 years after his grandfather, Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald christened the ballpark that is now the oldest in the major leagues.

A lone Air Force bugler played “Taps” as both teams lined up on the baselines — a tradition usually reserved for playoff games or opening day. The national anthem was sung by the a cappella group “Hyannis Sound” in recognition of Kennedy’s connection to Cape Cod.

obama is not going to kill your grandparents. the current system is killing your grandparents and my parents. i just recently found out that my step-mother has not been taking her cholestrol and high blood pressure medication because she can't afford it. she is 72...so what's wrong here?

The United States has two parties now — the Obama Party and the Fox Party. The Obama Party is larger, but it is unfocused and its troops are whiny. The Fox Party, which shows up en masse to harass politicians, is noisy and practiced in the art of simplistic obstruction. As the health-care debate rages, it's the Party of Sort-of-Maybe-Yes versus the Party of Hell No! The Yessers are more lackadaisical because they've forgotten the stakes—they've forgotten that this is the most important civil-rights bill in a generation, though it is rarely framed that way.

The main reason that the bill isn't sold as civil rights is that most Americans don't believe there's a "right" to health care. They see their rights as inalienable, and thus free, which health care isn't. Serious illness is an abstraction (thankfully) for younger Americans. It's something that happens to someone else, and if that someone else is older than 65, we know that Medicare will take care of it. Polls show that the 87 percent of Americans who have health insurance aren't much interested in giving any new rights and entitlements to "them"—the uninsured.

But how about if you or someone you know loses a job and the them becomes "us"? The recession, which is thought to be harming the cause of reform, could be aiding it if the story were told with the proper sense of drama and fright. Since all versions of the pending bill ban discrimination by insurance companies against people with preexisting conditions, that provision isn't controversial. Which means it gets little attention. Which means that the deep moral wrong that passage of this bill would remedy is somehow missing from the debate.

Michael Scherer's excellent interview with Ezekiel Emanuel below should be required reading, and so should Ezra Klein's interview on Monday with Senator Johnny Isakson, who has made end-of-life counseling a personal cause. It is difficult to bear the nihilist cynicism of mainstream Republicans like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on this issue. The cruelty inherent in scaring the elderly to score political points is beyond reprehensible. I've had recent personal experience with this issue. In fact...

I've spent quite a bit of time with my elderly parents--they're both 89 and have been together since the age of 5--trying to help them steer their way through some difficult decisions, and trying to guarantee that their decisions about the rest of their lives will be honored, even if they have lost the ability to announce those decisions themselves. This isn't easy. My mother and her two sisters are quite frail and entirely dependent on my father, who has made no specific plans about what should happen to them should he lose the ability to take care of them. He has a living will, he thinks. My mother has often said that if she becomes severely debilitated, "Just let me die." But I'm not sure she has made that clear in a legal document. My father is reluctant to talk about these sensitive subjects and has resisted signing a power of attorney, to be activated if he becomes incapacitated.

My father grew up during the Depression and like many of his peers, he doesn't like spending money on services he suspects are unnecessary. End-of-life counseling on issues like living wills and powers of attorney is something he could clearly use--from a skilled professional who, unlike me, knows the best way to describe these things and the easiest way to enact them--and he would be more likely to take advantage of this service if it were offered free-of-charge, and regularly updated, by Medicare. Although, even then, I have to admit I'm not sure he'd want to take advantage of it.

LOS ANGELES, July 23 (UPI) -- A California judge has given the go-ahead to try a 15-year-old as an adult in the death of a gay student who wore makeup, earrings and high heels to school.

Ventura County Superior Judge Ken Riley heard three days of testimony before ruling Brandon McInerney should stand trial as an adult for the fatal shooting of Larry King in 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

King was shot twice in the head as he sat in a computer lab at the E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard.

Investigators said McInerney had told classmates before the incident, "You better say goodbye to him because you won't see him again."

An expert on white supremacists testified at the hearing about McInerney's apparent interest in Nazi symbols.

Prosecutor Maeve Fox said McInerney could face 53 years to life in prison if convicted.

...At the end of the day, aside from the dereliction of duty and malfeasance, this, for me, would be a private matter. That is if it were not for the appalling hypocrisy of yet another social conservative saying one thing while doing another.

There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot....

The situation in Iran is more complex. Democracy clearly works against this repressive regime. The forces of religion, however, are not so easily aligned against it. Many, possibly most, Iranians appear to be fed up with theocracy. But that does not mean they are fed up with religion. It does appear that the more openly devout Iranians—the poor, the rural—voted for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

* CARRADINE FOUND DEAD AT HOTEL

Actor DAVID CARRADINE has been found dead at a hotel in Thailand.

The Kill Bill star, 72, was staying in Bangkok while shooting his new movie Stretch.

Local media in Thailand initially reported Carradine had committed suicide by hanging himself in his hotel suite, but the star's agent has told a U.S. TV channel he believes the actor died of natural causes.

Carradine was born John Arthur Carradine in Hollywood, but changed his name to David after launching his acting career following a course in drama at San Francisco State University.

He appeared in dozens of films and TV dramas but was best known for his roles as Kwai Chang Caine in the 1970s series Kung Fu and as the title character from Quentin Tarantino's martial arts movies Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2.

Carradine leaves behind a wife, Annie.