"Last year, as director of the Congressional Budget Office, Orszag expressed alarm that the agency was "investing a greater share of its assets in risky securities," which he said would make it "more likely to experience a decline in the value of its portfolio during an economic downturn the point at which it is most likely to have to assume responsibility for a larger number of underfunded pension plans."

"However, Charles E.F. Millard, the former agency director who implemented the strategy until the Bush administration departed on Jan. 20, dismissed such concerns. Millard, a former managing director of Lehman Brothers, said flatly that 'the new investment policy is not riskier than the old one.' "

Remember, Bush and his GOP rubber stamps on Capitol Hill wanted to privatize Social Security in the same way.  The people of this country gave a resounding no and managed to at least mitigate this Bushite caused depression from becoming worse than the Great Depression.  

Second, From Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post: "Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture.

"That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.

"Finn and Warrick reported that 'not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms.'

"Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. 

Then he was President George W. Bush's Exhibit A in defense of the "enhanced interrogation" procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.

"But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago -- and as The Post now confirms -- almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.

"Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives.

"All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well.

"Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House's motive."

This crime of torture should insure that Bush and Cheney and other high level member of Dubya's torture team a seat at The Hague for war crimes.

And third,  Scott Horton at Harper's on Dick Cheney's assassination squad.

"In the course of a recent college event, Sy Hersh made waves by talking about a targeted killings program operated by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which he said was being directed out of the White House by Vice President Cheney. Here’s the way he summarized it yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer:

I know for sure… the idea that we have a unit that goes around, without reporting to Congress… and has authority from the President to go into the country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack somebody. … You’ve delegated authority to troops in the field to hit people on the basis of whatever intelligence they think is good.

"Later in the day, CNN interviewed Cheney’s former national security adviser John Hannah. He started his response by saying that Hersh’s account was “certainly not true.” But this denial, it soon became apparent, rested on a semantic quibble. In fact, Hannah confirmed the existence of the targeted killings program:

There’s clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, interagency process… that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to our troops in the field in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.