If we had any doubts financial players intend to reinstall the same, corrupt crapshoot that tanked last summer, American International Group at least partially dispels them by continuing to reward its own high-rolling croupiers.

The company - a derivatives-soaked nightmare when it came begging for public rescue last year - is adding some spit of insult to the bargain by seeking a government benediction for this new bonus payout, amounting to almost $2.5 million. That's chickenfeed, of course, compared to previous bonuses. And it's not in the same league as the taxpayer-funded bailout package that saved AIG's bacon a few months ago - almost $144 billion.

Earlier this year, AIG paid more than $160 million in retention bonuses to employees of the unit that wrote those doomed derivative contracts. Many employees returned the money, but the episode sparked a national furor of executive pay that's still simmering.

Yep... that AIG. And all this gall from a flailing company that just may sport zero equity value.

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If there were Michael Jackson-style wristbands fixed to attendees at Robert McNamara's memorial service, they would be emblazoned with names of Americans missing in action in Vietnam.

The one-time Secretary of Defense will be forever remembered as chief architect of that still-haunting conflict. But there was so much more to the man's dark legacy. As Jon Taplin notes this week in TPM:

McNamara had gotten his reputation for a "right-sizing" turnaround at the Ford Motor Company. I am sure that when Jack Kennedy brought him into the Pentagon, he was thinking the same techniques could be applied to the bloated bureaucracy of the Defense Department... Will the tragedy of the Military Industrial Complex bloated influence continue to haunt us and our children for another generation?

McNamara and his generation of post-World War II "systems men" helped install that enormous - and enormously expensive - arrangement between government deep pockets and defense industry employers that President Eisenhower so balefully termed "the military-industrial complex". At one time a seeming necessity, the set-up lashed our country to a highly technological research and development spree that enjoyed its boom years from just before our nation's entry in World War II until the end of the Cold War in Europe in 1991.

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I'm fully aware of how tired this subject has become, but, dammit, I'm plunking down my two cents:

As the old-school GOP's pseudo-sexual den mother fades into obscurity, we speculate endlessly on what sucked away the air 'neath Sarah Palin's wings.

Scandal? Possibly. Although... scandal seems a common and forgivable resume entry for Alaskan politicians. Laziness? Hmm. We know this: She hasn't studied a whole lot besides bow-hunting manuals or practiced much anything other than "Hey, sailor" winks. 

Simplifying the possibilities, though, it just might have been Sarah Palin's own party that turned her out to pasture. She may be under pressure from the GOP to just go away, simply because, to the vast majority of American voters, she symbolizes everything wrong with contemporary American machine politics.

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Next time President Obama leaves home, he should turn off the lights, lock the doors and, for God's sake, make sure Joe Biden's mouth is shut.

While the President was out of town in Russia this weekend, as run-up to the upcoming G-8 summit, the Vice President dropped by ABC's "This Week" yesterday and beat to death with a verbose monkey wrench any sense of calm that may have pervaded the Administration's domestic and foreign policies.

In a welter of contradictory double-talk that at times verged on Sarah-Palinesque rambling, No. 2 managed to undercut a crucial element of public faith invested in Obama's tenure by blurting that the economic meltdown was much more severe than the Administration had anticipated.

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