At 42% poor ol' Joe is worse off than Al Gore, a man who bored people so much, they voted for George W. Bush instead. In fact, he can't even measure up to his predecessor Dick Cheney, a man who took polls very seriously indeed.

This is either "a fascinating and important" puzzle or, you know, perfectly understandable given Barack Obama Superstar is his boss and nobody really cares about a guy whose job currently consists of campaigning for candidates who don't need it, poking gentle ha-has at the eco-nazis who vote for his party, making reassuring noises in the Midwest, playing pessimist on Afghanistan, and visiting countries his boss would like to, but can't afford to, ignore.

He's so determined to the VP of Obama's dreams, he's even trained himself to be marginally polite to Cheney! That's some hard work, folks.

Also, since no report about Obama or Biden is complete without it, let us mention that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is currently more popular than either Obama or Biden. This means she should have held both jobs.

It certainly surprised us, that not a single editor told Maureen Dowd to ditch the completely pointless and unfunny parody of the theme song to "Ghostbusters" that opens an otherwise completely harmless and fine column.

"If there's someone weak,
if you've sprung a leak,
if the world looks bleak,
if you hide and seek,
who ya gonna call?
OBAMABUSTERS!"

"If you hide and seek"??? What?

Anyway the rest of the column is about how Dick Cheney and his terrible daughters are all terrible, which you knew. We look forward to next week's column, "Biden He Does As He Pleases," which will explain what to do when you're stuck on the Amtrak between the moon and New York City.

That's right! Despite her lesbianic ways, 40-year old Mary has somehow managed to be impregnated, a fact that will no doubt bring up tension in the Cheney household, which barely survived her first birthing drama.

Though Dick and wife Lynne swear up and down that they love their gay daughter and her equally gay lady, Heather Poe, the conservative set never quite got used to the idea of a carpet muncher procreating.

Focus on the Family patriarch James Dobson wrote a Time piece called "Two Mommies is One Too Many," in which he argued Mary and Heather weren't man enough to raise a child. It was a really classy piece.

Well, naysayers better get used to the idea, because Ms. Mary — who, queerly, has never been photographer with her original tot — will be squeezing out this puppy come mid-November.

Now, perhaps this little bundle will be enough to dissuade granddaddy Dick from considering a White House run...

Even during the endless campaign, Obama's opponents claimed he would be soft on terrorism, an idea that's simmered quite tenaciously on the right. Cheney only reinforced that fear when he said Obama's torture and intelligence policies make the nation "vulnerable" to attack, an argument so absurd that we can't believe people believe it. And believe it they do.

But now, after last week's raids, the feds have arrested two men — 26-year old Najibullah Zazi and his father, Mohammed Wali Zazi — who they think may have been planning an attack on American soil, possibly at Fashion Week(!). The third suspect, a Queens-based imam named Ahmad Wais Afzali, allegedly tipped the Zazi men off to federal interest. All three are charged, for now, with lying to investigators.

The younger Zazi, however, admitted to training with Al Qaeda in Pakistan and had been jotting notes on how to make a bomb, which, to the feds, looks like he had plans to wreak havoc upon this dear nation.

Government spooks made clear that there's no imminent threat, but did describe the happenings as "ongoing and fast-paced." If Obama were more like Cheney or Bush, he would be playing these arrests up as a big win in our fight against terrorism. He would be cheering and making emboldened speeches celebrating his supreme powers as Commander-in-Chief. It would be nice to see a little good-natured "suck on that, Dick!" But, alas, Obama and his administration are far too classy.

Meanwhile, the right will likely remain mum, because now they look like prejudiced jerks. Again.

Since the start of the current election cycle, the Halliburton PAC has donated about $32,500 dollars to multiple lawmakers, most of them Republicans. That's no surprise, of course, for the company has a long history of cuddling up to the GOP. During the last cycle, they gave $147,500 to that party. So, who are they rooting for this season? A lot of people, but, as the Supreme Court again takes a look at corporations and campaign financing, here are the top five.

In addition to having been considered morally wrong in any circumstance for the whole history of our nation, torture is also illegal. So it's pretty much a no-brainer, when you read the report about how the CIA tortured people, to say "well then they should probably look into prosecuting people." Unless you're Dick Cheney! Then what you do is demand that some other documents that will prove that torture worked get released. And once those documents are released and they just muddy the issue even further by saying over and over again that is impossible to know what interrogation techniques produced what intelligence let alone how much of that intelligence was actionable or even accurate, if you are the media, you write "well Dick Cheney has a very good point."

That is what The Washington Post did yesterday. According to the story, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a difficult detainee who provided no worthwhile intelligence until he was waterboarded nearly 200 times and shackled and diapered and sleep-deprived for a week straight. Then he was suddenly a Chatty Cathy!

Of course, KSM has bragged about how he made up untrue intelligence while he was being tortured in order to make the torture stop, and the CIA inspector general who helmed the investigation into torture says there's been no analysis of which techniques produced what information or even how useful that information was, but hey, we tortured KSM and then he told us stuff, so torture works and no one should get in any trouble for it, ever.

The problem is probably that as soon as us shocked and appalled "civil rights extremists" who want to read al-Qaeda terrorists their rights said "torture is immoral and ineffective" it just opened the door for patriotic torturers to respond with "torture is effective and anyone who says otherwise has to prove it," which is not the best way for a moral debate to go, really.

And he keeps them displayed out in the open, in public, for visitors to see. Because Colin Powell is smaller than he is, probably.

This is via Wonkette who found a public Picassa gallery of some wedding party that the Cheneys hosted at their home. Here is another one, of Dick Cheney's "CHENEY" cattle brand.

The Washington Post's Barton Gellman reports today that in the course of writing his salacious tell-all memoir, which he's doing in longhand on yellow legal pads by the way, Cheney's been talking quite candidly to many scholars and diplomats and other assorted Washington big shots about his feelings toward Bush, and apparently he's hurt that he and the former president just didn't get each other during the waning days of the administration like they used to early on.

"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming. It was clear that Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory."

Gellman goes on to say that sources told him Cheney's been stung by Bush's "concessions to public sentiment," something the soulless old prick views as a "moral weakness," and that it's time for him to break his honor code of silence because "the statute of limitations has expired" on the things he's been keeping bottled up inside.

Now, only Dick Cheney could ever possibly reflect on the "stay the course" presidency of George W. Bush and somehow come to the mangled conclusion that it was conciliatory in just about anything that it did. If there's one thing that objective people can probably agree almost universally on when assessing Bush as a president, it's that he and his administration were hopelessly, tragically stubborn.

But perhaps even more impossible to fathom is that with each passing day Cheney makes Bush look more and more like a sympathetic character. If things keep going the way they're going now, it's entirely possible that history will come to judge Dick Cheney as the best and worst thing to ever happen to George W. Bush's legacy — worst because Bush's misplaced trust in him during his presidency more often than not led to unfortunate consequences, and best because Cheney's post-presidency attacks on him are enough to make even the most dedicated Bush-hater feel sorry for him, even if only just a bit.

• Jessica Simpson wanted a Barbie-like existence with Tony Romo, so much so that she wanted him to dress up as Ken (and her as Barbie) for her birthday party. If true, this is sad on five different levels, chief among them: (1) the relating of inanimate objects to having a desire to inhabit their manifested-in-reality counterparts, (2) the ideal for a relationship that is now absolutely shattered, something that was probably fairly delicate and precious to her, (3) the stark realization that this existence simply doesn't exist in life, but the existence of having a breakup because you (insanely) wanted to make your boyfriend dress up as a Ken doll and that was the braking point? That existence is very, very real. Honestly, just blame all of this on Joe Simpson. Did you know he had an Arcade Fire song written about him? It's true. Anyway, this filled me with a deep sadness the way, I don't know, reading Arthur Miller plays can. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Lindsay Lohan got a job in the new Robert Rodriguez movie. It's a full-length version of Machete, which was initially conceived as a trailer for his joint collaboration with Quintin Tarantino, Grind House. So: she just attached herself to a pretty decent project. Let's hope she shows up to work on time. [D Listed]
  
  
• Saved By The Bell cast members banned Screech from the reunion because (A) he's a perv and (B) he's writing a tell-all and (C) they had to bring him along for the College Years, didn't they? Zach Morris aka Mark Paul Gosselaar noted: "What is he going to say?" Gosselaar asked sarcastically. "We were (bleeping) groupies at 14?" which is kind of funny. They weren't! [NY Daily News]
  
  
• Kate Gosselin bought a condo in Rockville, Maryland: definitely not ex-husband Jon's Manhattan Piyimp Pad, but it'll do for now. It's apparently an hour away from her bodyguard, and also: Kate's dating a bodyguard, Jon's dating a twenty-something girl and walking around wearing Ed Hardy. Wow. It's like someone beat their cosmic existence with the Iron Book of Cliche. But E!'s running a nice picture of her smiling, so that's nice. [E!]
  
  
• George Clooney has a girlfriend who at one time modeled nekkid, and some blogs have picked up the pictures. [Egotastic]
  
  
• Awesome. Mary Cheney is a total diva, just like her neo-con sociopath of a dad. No, really: that's what the item's about. Her sister would get a new SUV for her secret service detail, and Mary would be like, why isn't that one mine? And they'd be like, well, because you're the lesbian and we want to keep you as far in the closet as possible. Literally. Okay, last part isn't true, but probably. [Page Six]
  
  
• Gerard Butler likes to check out girls without being spotted by paparazzi, apparently, which is, uh, tragic? Especially when you're doing it at parties? [Page Six]
  
  
• Favorite gossip item of the week: Jasper Johns and Edward Albee, sitting around, telling jokes about turtles. I kid you not. [Page Six]
  
  
• Prince William's girlfriend Kate Middleton gets business advice from Richard Branson. I get business advice from the guy at my laundromat who thinks tax evasion is legal. Unsolicited, but appreciated nonetheless. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Rapper Drake tried to hit the stage while recovering from an injury and fell; his knee buckled out from under him. More and more, I'm starting to think his career is just a viral DeGrassi ad campaign. [TMZ]
  
  
• Charles Manson is running a business in prison, and having guys pen his signature for him, and thus, is still manipulating people into doing his bidding. Gotta hand it to him, though, for his entrepreneurial spirit. What's next, a blog network? Also, he makes "cloth scorpions," so if you were even remotely concerned about whether or not he's still totally fucking creepy, well, he still is. [Page Six]
  
  
• Mark Wahlberg got married. He said hi to everyone's mother in person. [People]
  
  
• Emma Watson wants to start her own fashion label, and it's going to be "green," and more magical than all the other fashion labels. It will probably perform light magic to counteract the dark magic of Mugatu-esque designer Karl Lagerfeld. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Amy Winehouse hired a private investigator to spy on her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil's every move so when they go to court, she can list all the reasons why nobody should ever give him a penny. But Hollywood, are you listening? Amy Winehouse and a Private Investigator is the potential new hit of the fall season, and surely, we could crush Mad Men's chances at ever winning another Emmy. Get in on it before I actually sell this. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• The Twilight people launched a website for their new movie and somewhere, thousands of trackpads have already been broken with the furious clicking of their psychotic teenage owners. [E!]

Citing numerous anonymous Bush White House sources, Time's Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf constructed a piece that reads like a gripping political novel. Most compellingly, the two central characters', Bush and Cheney, views on pardons, particularly the pardoning of Scooter Libby, couldn't have been more diametrically opposed, with Bush being distrustful of the whole pardon process, believing firmly that pardons were little more than vehicles for the politically connected to save their asses when and if they ever get into trouble, while Cheney labored almost obsessively to secure a pardon for Libby. In fact, Cheney's pardon crusade became so obsessive that it caused many within the administration to speculate that perhaps Libby had taken a bullet for Cheney in the Valerie Plame case, and that Cheney's dogged pursuit of a pardon was rooted in a personal debt of gratitude he owed Libby.

Petitions for pardons are usually sent in writing to the White House counsel's office or a specially designated attorney at the Department of Justice. In Libby's case, Cheney simply carried the message directly to Bush, as he had with so many other issues in the past, pressing the President in one-on-one meetings or in larger settings. A White House veteran was struck by his "extraordinary level of attention" to the case. Cheney's persistence became nearly as big an issue as the pardon itself. "Cheney really got in the President's face," says a longtime Bush-family source. "He just wouldn't give it up."

In the waning days of his presidency, Bush gave Cheney the opportunity to present one last case for the pardoning of Scooter Libby.

The Vice President argued the case in that Oval Office session, which was attended by the President and his top aides. He made his points in a calm, lawyerly style, saying Libby was a fall guy for critics of the Iraq war, a loyal team player caught up in a political dispute that never should have turned into a legal matter. They went after Scooter, Cheney would say, because they couldn't get his boss. But Bush pushed past the political dimension. "Did the jury get it right or wrong?" he asked.

In that meeting Cheney went on to make the argument that a liberal Washington jury and a maniacal prosecutor had teamed to criminalize Libby for having a faulty memory. Bush then spent a few days thinking things over.

Bush would decide alone. In private, he was bothered by Libby's lack of repentance. But he seemed more riveted by the central issue of the trial: truthfulness. Did Libby lie to prosecutors? The President had been told by private lawyers in the case that Libby never should have testified before the grand jury and instead should have invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Prosecutors can accept that. But lie to them, and it gets personal. "It's the difference between making mistakes, which everybody does, and making up a story," a lawyer told Bush. "That is a sin that prosecutors are not going to forgive."

A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, "expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision ... He didn't take it well."

Earlier today, in response to the publication of the Time article, Dick Cheney released the following statement:

Scooter Libby is an innocent man who was the victim of a severe miscarriage of justice.

He was not the source of the leak of Valerie Plame's name. Former Deputy Secretary of State, Rich Armitage, leaked the name and hid that fact from most of his colleagues, including the President. Mr. Libby is an honorable man and a faithful public servant who served the President, the Vice President and the nation with distinction for many years. He deserved a presidential pardon.

Yeah, there's some bad blood here. Now go read this piece.

Inside Bush and Cheney's Final Days [Time]

Reports the New York Times:

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

(CIA Director Leon) Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more "surgical" solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.

Today's Times piece confirms what's been widely rumored of late—That Leon Panetta's June 24th disclosure to members of the Senate Intelligence committee had everything to do with Dick Cheney's rumored covert ops squads that Seymour Hersh had spoken of. Whether or not any of this was legal appears to be open for debate at this point.

CIA Had Plans To Assassinate Qaeda Leaders [New York Times]

Sketchier than your weed dealer, Dan Abrams, the Gotti family, the guys who buried Hoffa, whoever makes the Shake Shack sauce, and anybody who's ever tried to conceal anything that probably shouldn't be hidden...combined. The Times' sources say that Panetta is pointing the finger to Cheney to the intelligence committees in the House and the Senate. From what's understood, it only took Panetta actually learning of the program - the nature of which is still widely unknown - to shut it down, which happened on June 23.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

So, what do we know about it?

• It wasn't the C.I.A.'s interrogation program.
  
  
• It didn't involve anything regarding domestic intelligence.
  
  
• The program never went operational. ""Because this program never went fully operational and hadn't been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial," one intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity. "That's worth remembering amid all the drama.""
  
  
• People think it was really, really bad, whatever it was. "Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that they felt should have been disclosed."

What isn't shady about this? Counter-terrorism - which quickly became a euphemism for "constitution-negating government action" in the Bush administration's "Homeland Security" efforts - has always been, by nature, a sketchy enterprise. It requires the government to (literally) tap into networks of people who operate under the most clandestine circumstances possible, in some of the most low-tech ways one can engage in criminal action. But still: the Bush administration was as transparent (regarding anything) as a brick wall. As the Times helpfully points out:

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration's most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.

Yes, it's true: the guy even kept his solar panel fetish in the closet. Either way, whatever this is, it wouldn't be a far stretch to imagine it as one of several reasons President Obama's sympathetically protecting Dick, still. Also, as much as we don't like to think about it, he probably wants to keep some things in his administration a secret. Shit, might as well learn from the best, right?

Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project [New York Times]

It's Dick Cheney! For some reason, former Vice President's Secret Service protection has been extended, though no one knows for how long. Also: these extensions must be approved by the commander in chief, so Obama is protecting Cheney from someone. Or maybe he is protecting all of us from Dick Cheney?

Let's go through these, shall we?

• Yet another ethics complaint was filed against Palin in Alaska yesterday. What for? Oh, remember when we learned that Palin, great American fiscal conservative and hater of wasteful spending that she is, was charging the state a travel per diem to work out of her own home in Wasilla? Well apparently she's continued to do it, pocketing several thousand dollars of "bonus" income in the process. So dang mavericky!
  
  
• Palin spoke to the Anchorage Daily News about her resignation and once again offered a mystery grab-bag of reasons for her abrupt departure.

  It's a combination of things that has brought me to this place of knowing. I love Alaskans too much to put them through a lame duck session heading into my final year in office; I was going to be honest and tell them I'm not going to run for re-election. I'm not going to let Alaskans go through a year of stymied, paralyzed administration and not getting anything done. I'm going to let Sean Parnell take this and we will see that things will let up...With Sean in the governor's seat it won't be the politics of personal destruction, I don't believe...Especially when all these lawmakers are lining up for office. Their desire would be to clobber the administration left and right so that they can position themselves for office. I'm not going to put Alaskans through that.

• Pill-addled party boss Rush Limbaugh still sees Palin as a viable leader of the Republican party. He took time away from being a Viagra-fueled sex tourist to make a statement about her on his show.

  These people saying that she's an instant target because she quit, that's just inside-the-Beltway formulaic and she's not that. If anything this woman, her m.o. is outside-the-box and not formulaic. All I know is that she is going to continue to fire-up people in the conservative Republican base as often as she speaks to 'em.

• Despite the fact that most of the people closest to her had no idea she was resigning last Friday, ABC is reporting that Palin consulted with Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani about the move.
  
  
• And finally, there's the inevitable freakout by Hitler over Sarah Palin's quitting. These are always funny, and this one is oh so very funny. Even funnier than the Michael Jackson death freakout, in my opinion.
  
  
  
  
  
  New Ethics Complain Filed Against Palin [Mudflats]
  Palin Says Ethics Inquiries Paralyzing [ADN]
  Sarah Palin May Have Quit, But That Won't Stop Her From Running For President in 2012, Says Rush Limbaugh [Daily News]
  Palin Called GOP Leaders Before Quitting [ABC]
  Hitler/Palin vid via YouTube
  Pic via Runner's World

It doesn't matter if you're black or white. Or gay or straight. What matters is that you're single, and the happy couples of the Weddings and Celebrations section of the Sunday NYT aren't. Professional P.Y.T. Phyllis Nefler's on the case:

Sometimes I hate it when the Times goes slumming. It's like the Vows editors have set up a Microsoft Outlook alert that periodically reminds them to interrupt the typical rotation – your renegade dating columnists-turned-wifeys, your power lesbians, your affable foreign dignitaries – for a solemn celebration of How The Other Half Lives.

But I'm also an enormous sap. There used to be this commercial with a girl whose mother takes her to McDonalds as a reward for finishing a book by herself for the first time, and then the guy behind the counter hands her a menu in Braille, and I mean, I can't even describe the spot without significant emotional turmoil. So as you might imagine, this tale of a homeless ex-con marrying a drug-addicted single mom at the behest of her cherubic 5-year-old was quite the tearjerker at the Nefler household:

I could actually just boil the whole thing down to its first and last sentences ("Paul Sousa never imagined he would marry downriver from where he camped out many nights as a homeless child growing up with an alcoholic mother. … It was the first wedding he had ever attended.") and you'd see what I mean, but then you'd miss this:

Yet the couple couldn't get too serious. Twelve-step programs always counsel participants to avoid big decisions in the first year of sobriety. Still, she stayed sober and "the red flags were turning into pink hearts," he said, laughing. But one day, Alannah, now 5, told Mr. Sousa, "Paul, I want you to be my stepdad."

He teased her: "What do I have to do? An application? Interview process?"

She looked at him and said confidently, "You have to marry my mom."

It's genuinely touching, and it makes many of the other announcements seem enormously snobby and superficial in comparison. Luckily, snobbish superficiality is exactly what we're here for. Win-win! Onward.

I'm convinced Woody Allen wrote the script for the marriage of Rebecca Rosenberg and Justin Soffer, who met "at a benefit party at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan." They both have jobs that don't really exist in real life (the bride is a "freelance writer and video producer of marketing and promotional materials" and the groom is "a vice president of subscriber marketing at Travelzoo.com") and there's even a generation gap, which was exposed in the wake of a Charles in Charge reference gone bust. The first time they met, they decided to go in on raffle tickets together. Do I need to tell you if they won?

True confessions: I have a soft spot for the surprisingly many geologists and scientists that the Times trots out each week, so I should note that while Naomi Levin and Benjamin Passey both "rock" – thank you – they are no match for Jordan Garner and Dominic Colosi.

These 23-year old recent Yale graduates could not bear to leave New Haven (which, by the way, is a city on the move!); both took jobs at the university, she as a "collections assistant in the vertebrate zoology division of the Peabody Museum of Natural History" and he as a "research assistant on mass spectrometry at the university's Earth Systems Center for Stable Isotopic Studies." Man, how come all of my friends are just dumb old analysts?

Speaking of friends, in the interest of full disclosure I should note that I know this bride, and she is wonderful and lovely. And she also knows how to pick em: "the bridegroom is a maternal great-great-grandson of Levi P. Morton, the vice president under Benjamin Harrison, and governor of New York from 1895 to 1897. The bridegroom is also a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of the colony of New Netherland."

Elsewhere this weekend, Amanda Congdon – remember her? - married the director and editor of her vlog (her celebrated rack is not visible in the photo, unfortunately); Dick Cheney's former social secretary, who must have had a pretty light work load, married a National Security Council staffer; someone's dad literally wrote the book on Economics; the grandaughter of the ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Pakistan, and Iran kept it international and married an Australian; and once again a well-executed neg (this one in the Bahamas) led to lasting bliss, proving that Mystery really is a modern genius.

In this weeks faceoff, we explore which of two blonde Sewanee graduates has entered into a union that is worth more to society:

Jennifer Sonfield and John Wolf

The bride works for Ralph Lauren and looks like she works for Ralph Lauren: +3
The groom graduated from Stanford: +2
The groom's father "is the founder and a managing partner of European Property Partners, an investment firm that focuses on the French real estate market": +2
The bride's parents own a furniture store: -1
It's in Hilton Head: +1
The groom is a principal at his real estate firm: +2

TOTAL: 9

Claire Nicoll and Edwin Lescop

Bride is at the ideal marriage age (25): +2
Bride graduated summa cum laude and received a masters in elementary education from Columbia: +6
The groom is studying for his MBA: +2
It's not at an Ivy League school: -1
The couple got married at the church where the brides father is a priest: +2. Man, that's really taking the Scary Father in Law concept to the next level, no?

TOTAL: 11

Our key takeaway? Blond Sewanee graduates are pretty boring. Especially when compared to the drug addicts, who, by the way, are expecting their first child together. Now if you'll excuse me, it's getting a little dusty in here.

[Ed. This is a good shot of Congdon's rack. Enjoy.]

The legendarily secretive Cheney said he was motivated to write a book because he's got lots of wacky stories to tell, stories that even liberals should read so that they could educate their stupid selves.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, the 68-year-old Cheney noted that he had never written a book about his years in government, which dates back to the 1960s.

"I'm persuaded there are a lot of interesting stories that ought to be told," Cheney said. "I want my grandkids, 20 or 30 years from now, to be able to read it and understand what I did, and why I did it."

Cheney said his book will reflect his conservative outlook, but that he has no plans to write "a screed" and sees no reason why liberals shouldn't want to read it, "because it covers some of very interesting and important events in our recent history.

"I would hope it has an appeal to anyone who has an interest in these developments," Cheney said.

Financial details were not disclosed but it is believed that Cheney got an advance of around $2 million. And to think that he didn't even have to start a Tumblr to get it. Or did he?

Cheney Writes a Memoir [Breitbart]
Pic via Mario Piperni

Writes Graham:

Rumsfeld has ascribed much of the negative perception of him and the Bush administration to distorted media coverage. "The intellectual dishonesty on the part of the press is serious," he asserted. He groused about "a strong incentive to be negative and dramatic" that had infused much of the coverage. "It's a formula that works. It gets Pulitzers; it gets promotions; it gets name identification on the front page above the fold."

Part of the formula, Rumsfeld added, involved pillorying him along with Bush and Cheney but sparing Powell and Rice. As an example, he noted accusations that Bush and Cheney had lied about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. "They never say Colin Powell lied," Rumsfeld asserted. "They don't say Condi lied."

Graham also notes that Rumsfeld was so eager to prove that he wasn't the ass everyone thinks he is, that he showed off all sorts of letters from people telling him how great he was, also noting how people treated him like a rock star when he goes out in public.

Rumsfeld wanted to be sure I saw the many letters of praise and kind words he had received following the announcement of his resignation. He had sorted the letters according to source - members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, U.S. military personnel, former associates, friends - and filed them in large, three-ring binders. The correspondence noted Rumsfeld's contributions to the war on terrorism, commended him for his drive to transform the U.S. military, and expressed thanks for his public service.

Such letters seemed to give Rumsfeld some solace amid media commentary that tended to focus on all that had gone wrong - the mistakes made in the Iraq War, the difficult relations with the military chiefs, the tensions with Congress, the quarrels with other NSC members. As low as his popularity was when he left office - Gallup/Harris polls showed him at 34% - Rumsfeld still found that when he dined out at a restaurant or walked along a street, people approached him eager to shake his hand.

Unfortunately, Graham doesn't provide any names of people who wrote letters commending Rumsfeld, but we guess that among them were the names Limbaugh, Bachmann, Cheney and Hannity. Too easy, right?

Donald Rumsfeld in Repose [Time]

Reports the LA Times:

Accused Sept. 11 organizer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA even after undergoing punishing bouts of interrogation, according to documents made public Monday.

Mohammed made the assertion during hearings held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the militant leader was transferred in 2006 after being held at secret CIA sites since his capture in 2003.

"I make up stories," Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA that concerned the location of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"Where is he? I don't know. Then he torture me," Mohammed said. "Then I said, 'Yes, he is in this area.' "

We anxiously await Dick Cheney's comments on this as soon as he finishes sipping that glass of puppy's blood.

Detainee Says He Lied to CIA in Harsh Interrogations [LA Times]

Panetta appears to be the first Obama adminsitration official to publicly voice what some in the media have been occasionally speculating, and what many have speculated in private conversation—That the recent Dick Cheney "Obama is going to get us all killed" media tour leads one to believe that Cheney may be secretly hoping for terrorists to strike again on American soil so that he can run around saying "I told you so."

A few miles from the agency's headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration's emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making "the American people less safe" by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations "is unwise in the extreme," Cheney charged. "It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness."

In January, the Obama Administration banned the "enhanced" techniques that the Bush Administration had approved for the agency, including waterboarding and depriving prisoners of sleep for up to eleven days. Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney's speech with surprising candor. "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue," he told me. "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

The other interesting takeaway from the piece was a passage on Panetta's desire to find new, less brutal interrogation techniques for use in the future.

Panetta is already forging ahead on one important reform: he plans to replace the abusive interrogation program with a legally acceptable, non-coercive alternative. A task force led by the Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann has been advising him on a proposal to create an élite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best C.I.A., F.B.I., and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scientists, linguists, and other scholars. "What I'm pushing for is to establish a facility where we develop a team of interrogators trained in the latest techniques," Panetta said. "That's the one thing I'm worried about, frankly. There just aren't that many people who have the interrogation abilities we're going to need." Heymann describes the effort to create "the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world" as the equivalent of "a NASA-like, man-on-the-moon effort" for human-intelligence gathering. He said that members of his task force have travelled to France, England, Japan, Australia, and Israel, in order to compile comparative information on what interrogators do. "We also went to the best people in the U.S.," he added.

Somewhere in America over the next few days, Dick Cheney's copy of this week's New Yorker will arrive and he'll read Leon Panetta's remarks. Agitated, he'll toss the magazine across the room in disgust, accidentally shattering the glass on a framed photo Mary Cheney and her spouse Heather Poe resting on the mantle. He'll then call out to Lynne to prepare his favorite beverage, and Lynn will oblige by bringing him a highball glass filled with puppy's blood, on the rocks, garnished with two Napfilion olives on a yellow plastic spear, and all will be well once again in Dick Cheney's world.

The Secret History [New Yorker]