By Dylan Matthews

TAP's Tim Fernholz has an outstanding profile of former IMF economist and administration critic Simon Johnson today. You should really read the whole thing, but this in particular is a critical point:

Unfortunately, Johnson posits, the economic specialty that deals with business cycles and recessions -- short-run macroeconomics -- hasn't yet acquired the tools to assess the influence of political interests on their policy proposals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, finance specialists have.

By Dylan Matthews

Even given what we already know about the Bush administration's distortions about a supposed link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and what we already know about its torture policy, this, via Matt Duss, is absolutely appalling:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.