Torture hearing today in the Senate featuring testimony from former FBI agent Ali Soufan and former State Department counselor Phillip Zelikow. That and the day’s other news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Follow our running coverage of today’s Zelikow torture hearing at TPMmuckraker.com.

Scenes from last night’s White House poetry reading.

TPM Reader BH chimes in on Dick …

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Dick Cheney’s refusal to go quietly into the night, but what I am finding most interesting is his complete emergence from the shadows. This is a guy who made an entire career as the ultimate evil puppet-master, always behind the scenes and always in control. What strikes me as so out of character is his apparent inability to keep his mouth shut when he no longer has his hands on the strings. While I despise him for what he did to our country’s image and his shredding of The Constitution, I have always had a begrudging respect for what I thought was his phenomenal discipline and long term ability to keep the goal (however evil) in front of his public ego. Now I am finding him to be an ever more paranoid, disturbed, and pathetic man and I am truly shocked that those on the inside let him run the show for so long. I would ask how we let this megalomaniac do so much damage, but he wasn’t actually a megalomaniac – that requires a delusion of power. We really did allow him to have this much power. Is there any wonder that this country has so many problems right now or that an entire political party is in disarray?

Harry Reid says he doesn’t have the votes (yet) to get Dawn Johnsen confirmed as head of the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel.

GOP (Club for Growth) senate candidate Pat Toomey says his ‘freedom tent’ was plenty big enough for a party. Arlen Specter just didn’t believe in freedom.

Marcy Wheeler, aka Emptywheel at Firedoglake.com, has won a Sidney Hillman Award in the blog category. You can check out the citation here — scroll down toward the bottom of the page.

Many people are clearly and understandably incensed by Vice President Cheney’s on-going media campaign advocating state-sponsored torture and his making what appear to be all sorts of false claims about how effective his torture policies were. But though it’s maddening and offensive, I’m more on the side of being heartened or at least glad to see the exposure he’s getting — not so much because it’s politically damaging to the Republicans, which is probably true, but because he’s (as is his puppet daughter) showing and can’t help but show more and more about who he is.

That’s also one of the things that would be so healthy — and if I can be allowed some guilty pleasure, entertaining — about a full and detailed airing of all of Cheney’s role.

Cheney’s conceit is that he’s tough enough, perhaps best to say, icy enough to make the trip to what he calls ‘the dark side’ to protect America. But the picture emerging even from his own comments is very different. It’s of a small and paranoid man, a half-comic character off the pages of mid-20th century anti-totalitarian fiction, with a seemingly inordinate protectiveness for torture practices that seem to have been only marginally effective at best. And yet here he is with the classified memo he keeps in a special folder in his desk making the case for his torture policies. Here he is at another moment metaphorically tightening the screws on this or that detainee trying to get confessions about the fairytale al Qaida-Iraq link, though it’s worth wondering whether he’s really sure it’s there or is open to getting false confessions that can then be leaked to this or that journo at the Washington Times or, sad to say, The New York Times.

You start to get the sense that just as Cheney committed his historic goof of launching off into Iraq while forgetting about dealing with al Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan he was doing something similar getting all wrapped up in the tough guy porn of torture that he remained ignorant of or just plain ignored the actual nuts and bolts of taking down or disabling terrorist organizations.

So by all means let him keep talking. As TPM Reader BH notes, he seems unable to maintain his famed self-discipline and indifference to public opinion as his own sorry record dribbles into the public record. The more that comes out about him, the more pathetic he seems. Paranoia, serial poor judgment, inability to distinguish desires from facts and an almost adolescent inability not to get drawn into the thrill of the ‘dark side’.

Fun new argument from Lindsey Graham: these torture methods have lasted from the middle ages because they work.

Sen. Graham cites debunked and retracted ABC News story while browbeating witness about the effectiveness of waterboarding.