Part three of the WaPo series here.

Tim Grieve’s top ten things you should know from the first two parts, here.

I assume most of you have seen the first two articles in the Washington Post’s four-part series on Cheney by now. If not, set aside a little time and read them. Everything you figured was happening was, and then some. Ignore the nonsense about Cheney not really being a shadow president, nosiree — it reads, as others have noted, as something tacked on later by some clumsy editor, and is pretty much disproven by the articles themselves. As Digby notes:

I know that I sound like a character in an Oliver Stone movie, (”one pristine bullet? That dog don’t hunt!” ) but I have never been sanguine about the fact that all the big money boyz and all the power brokers in the GOP traipsed down to Austin to meet that grinning moron and came away thinking he was the right choice to run the most powerful nation on earth. It makes far more sense to me that they wanted to install Cheney from the beginning (remember the energy task force?) and they needed an empty suit with a winning personality to actually run for the office. Maybe it really was a quiet coup, who knows?

And the big surprise: who would have imagined John Ashcroft to be the (conditional) hero of the story, trying to keep some basic shred of the Constitution intact?

And then there’s this:

The vice president’s lawyer advocated what was considered the memo’s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line into torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to “commit torture,” that passage stated, “do not apply” to the commander in chief, because Congress “may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA — including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government has prosecuted as a war crime since at least 1901. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

They have some standards, after all…

Did you know the House of Representatives just voted 411-2 for a resolution which stated “Iran has aggressively pursued a clandestine effort to arm itself with nuclear weapons”? So when Bush bombs Iran in spring, 2008 and we later learn they actually weren’t trying to make nukes, Democrats will (rightfully) hear “But everyone thought they were!”

Arthur Silber has the gruesome details.

Part II of Roger Morris’ fantastic Robert Gates history is up at Tomdispatch.

I particularly like this quote from Archie Roosevelt in the 1960s about the Baathists on the CIA payroll:

“They’re our boys bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can’t be trusted.”

Man, it’s so hard to get trustworthy quislings these days!

BONUS: Archie was the cousin of Kermit Roosevelt, who ran the CIA coup in Iran in 1953. Via All the Shah’s Men, here’s what the British discovered at the time in a psychological study of Iranians:

The ordinary Persian is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable of or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perserverance and energy, but amenable to discipline. Above all he enjoys intrigue and readily turns to prevarication and dishonesty whenever there is a possibility of personal gain. Although an accomplished liar, he does not expect to be believed. They easily acquire a superficial knowledge of technical subjects, deluding themselves into the belief that it is profound.

It’s quite strange the way the countries with all the oil are filled with such awful people. I guess we’ve just been very unlucky.

The new menace sweeping the nation is Lesbian Gangs which force unwitting teenagers into lesbian sex by threatening them with pink 9mm Glocks.

The preceeding sentence was not a satire of Bill O’Reilly, but rather, an accurate summary of the report I just watched.

Atrios thinks he’s got it all figured out when it comes to torture…

We shouldn’t torture. There should be no procedures in place for torture. Everyone should understand this. But if the Joker does in fact have a nuclear bomb ready to go off underneath Gotham, and vigilante crime fighter Batman needs to employ a little force to learn the magic code needed to stop it before the timer counts down to zero, then I imagine that if Batman does in fact manage to stop the destruction of the city that no jury would convict or that a presidential pardon would likely take care of things if they did.

…but let’s not forget what happened the last time the Caped Crusader saved our fair city.

Nothing could be more boring to Tony Snow than the question of how many Iraqi civilians we have killed as a result of our invasion and occupation. His yawn is virtually audible. What could be less relevant than that? It is better if we do not know. We can just keep repeating over and over that we are “killing Al Qaeda” — a “fact” which Michael Gordon and The New York Times will be happy repeatedly to re-inforce — and we can ignore the rest.

What Norman Podhoretz is advocating — blowing Iran into “smithereens” — is criminal and morally twisted for reasons that should require no elaboration. But the far more significant fact is that such advocacy does not relegate him to the fringes. Quite the contrary, the movement of which he is an integral part, on whose behalf he speaks, is well within the political mainstream as depicted by our political press. And it is doubtful that there is anything he (and his comrades) could do or say which would change that.

The whole thing.

… has right wing talk show hosts running scared these days. And this report has them just about apoplectic.

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]

Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.

I’m not holding my breath — the behemoths are well-entrenched — but it’s fun to listen to Hannity and Limbaugh desperately try to explain why “equal time” = “censorship.”

Two In One, originally uploaded by Fixed Image.

My latest article is up at RH RealityCheck: Sent Away: A New Look At Maternity Group Homes. It’s about the new generation of homes for unwed mothers.

The world of maternity group homes is not very well-studied. One of the lesser-known benefits of Roe was the disappearance of the huge institutional maternity homes where pregnant women would go to gestate and secretly hand off their babies for adoption.

Today’s homes run the gamut from secular publicly-funded social services for homeless teenagers, to expensive "tough love" boarding schools, to the back ends of the same crisis pregnancy centers that mislead women about birth control and abortion.

The private religious homes and the boarding schools can be shockingly restrictive and seemingly quite punitive towards their clients. For example, I found that many facilities cut off their clients’ access to visitors and even phone calls for weeks or months at a time. Many will not allow the birth father to be present at the delivery, even if the mother wants him there.

If anyone has had any personal experiences with maternity homes, please leave comments or send email. I’d love to know more.

My article is part of a special RH RC symposium on the Politics of Childbirth.

Also contributing: Amie Newman, Jill Sheffield, Tracy Cooper, Lisa Chin, and Susan Hodges.

This is from a transcript of Frederick Kagan, one of the intellectual architects of the “surge,” being interviewed in a new Frontline documentary:

KAGAN: I think it’s important to mention this — we have really suffered from the fact that the opposition to the war has not been constructive and that there have been many, many opportunities for critics of the war to challenge the administration on the way that it was fighting the war that had been missed as critics through the end of the 2004 presidential campaign focused on whether we should have gone to war or not at all.

As it happens, I also have a transcript from a precocious 2 year-old Freddy Kagan speaking in 1971:

KAGAN: I think it’s important to mention this — we have really suffered from the fact that opposition to me smearing shit all over myself and the walls and everyone else has not been constructive. There have been many, many opportunities for critics to challenge me on the way I’ve been smearing shit on everything, but they have been missed as critics focused on whether I should have started smearing shit on everything at all.

AND: Let no one say the Bush administration hasn’t followed through on his 2001 inaugural address:

America, at its best, is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected…

Our public interest depends on private character…

I will live and lead by these principles…

The first in a three-part series by Roger Morris examining the career of Robert Gates is up now at Tomdispatch. It’s fascinating.

More recent Tomdispatch:

• Michael Klare: “The Pentagon as Global Gas Guzzler”

• Karen J. Greenberg: “Blowback, Detainee-Style”