File this away for remembering when legislative demagoguery gets underway in January on whether gay people should be allowed to be foster or adoptive parents.

Mary Cheney, the vice president’s openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are “ecstatic” about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

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We’re happy for them.

 And speaking of family values, Michael Kinsley’s column in the Post is also worth a read. He rips Bush family values from grandpa down to the twins, but particularly the father for pushing a war without shared sacrifice, even as he uses the sacrifices to further his political aims.

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At first it seemed a brilliant strategy — repellent, but brilliant — to isolate most Americans from the cost of the war in Iraq. It’s starting to seem a lot less so. As the deaths and injuries mount, more and more people are touched by the war — and become understandably resentful of those who are not. Bush, in his speeches, is eloquent about what no one doubts — the sacrifice — but banal about what most people have come to doubt: the purpose.

But no amount of eloquence can overcome the bald contrast between that rhetoric and how his own family lives. His daughters are over 21, and he can’t control them, but that doesn’t let them off the hook. They are now independent moral actors, and their situation requires that they either publicly oppose their father’s war or do something to support it. Is it unfair to expect Jenna and Barbara to shape their lives around their father’s folly? Of course it’s unfair. If this is war, then unfairness comes with the territory.

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