Once in a blue moon, the Partisan Hacks are correct: the truth about Social Security, as supplied by Michael Reagan. Some excerpts:

The late Sen. Carl Curtis, R-NE, elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1939, made a careful study of Social Security when it began making payments in 1940. As he told a friend of mine, he tried mightily to get the Roosevelt administration to stop calling the program an old-age insurance program and describe it for what it is: a tax on workers to pay benefits to those no longer working. Had they and his colleagues listened to him we wouldn’t be facing a fiscal catastrophe down the road.

When the government established Social Security, they didn’t plan for most Americans to live long enough to collect the benefits. In 1940, the life expectancy was 63.6 years and the age at which benefits were paid was and is 65. And if you did live that long, you probably wouldn’t have been around much longer to draw money from the system. In other words, they found a new way to collect money from you based on the fiction that that it was yours and you could start collecting it when you reach 65, which they figured most of you would not.

I personally don't agree with his partisan interpretation at the edges that the GOP is actually trying to "save" SS, but for the purpose of this that is irrelevant, look at the meat of the article. What is being done is to -- for alterior reasons, through no intention whatsoever to do the general public any favors -- get people to gradually replace for their purposes SS with the money they siphoned off of it. It's being pursued primarily because the Republicans are in control and measures like this piss off the Democrats, so they want to see what they can ram through, there is really nothing more to it.

Now, depending on how this is done, it could screw up the budget even more. Seeing as how Dubya is trying to do this without making any changes on benefits or how the program is funded, bet on that Could becoming a Will. For that reason, the Dems really desperately need to realize that something is going to be done and get involved, otherwise they'll be steamrolled. Not having a change is not an option.

Notice a pattern here?

I do. Two, in fact:

1) in all these stories of prisoner abuse there's always some sexual angle. Odd, I thought the type of people with such psychological hangups that they'd be fondling detainees were supposed to be screened out in the signup process?

2) there's a clear slant to these reports, virtually always. It's portrayed as if the controversy is that torture is being applied at all, and these detainees automatically have rights the same as or similar to american citizens. Nice gesture, but wrong. The true problem is not whether or not we do these things, but that they are being done indiscriminately -- people are being tortured who we barely even know who they are. It is in that respect that there is an issue; what we should be doing is by default treating detainees as if they're covered by the Geneva Convention until we find out they are not. If we have someone in custody and we find out that they are a member of al-quaeda or a similar group, hell yes we can abuse them, we can do everything up to and including line 'em up and execute them for all it matters. It's about fulfilling that threshhold, which we are not doing now, that is the atrocity.

Remember these next time you see one of these reports.