When U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson chose former Allstate Chairman Edward M. Liddy to head American International Group Inc. after the government’s bailout of the insurance giant, he was turning to an old buddy he knew he could trust.

One name on Barack Obama’s short list of vice-presidential candidates that is generating lots of buzz is Ret. Gen. James L. Jones.

By the time Donald Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary in 2006, even members of his own party thought he had overstayed his welcome after nearly six years heading the Defense Department and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld is back, promoting an idea that got him into hot water when he ran the Defense Department.

In his first major speech since departing the Bush administration in 2006, Rumsfeld pushed for a new propaganda agency to combat the anti-U.S. rhetoric emanating from Muslim countries and to burnish the American image abroad. He said the U.S. needs an agency bigger and better than the old United States Information Agency, the Cold War-era operation that was absorbed into the State Department.

Sue Payton, the senior acquisition official in the Air Force, is an unlikely military reformer. She has spent a career in the defense industry and recently completed a long stint under former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne swore her in 17 months ago as the service’s top weapons buyer, he said her charge was to infuse “integrity and transparency” into the acquisition process after a procurement scandal.

The life of a whistleblower is hardly the glamorous stuff of Hollywood. Often it’s a life spent looking over one’s shoulder, hoping for small victories while withstanding reprisals.

What’s so unusual about the plight of Ken Pedeleose, an industrial engineer and whistleblower at the Defense Contract Management Agency, is that he scored a big victory last month from a federal mediation panel in a little-noticed ruling by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

I. Lewis Libby Jr., convicted of perjury in the CIA leak case, appreciates better than most the importance of muckety.

His 30-month prison sentence was commuted yesterday by President Bush, who said he believed the term was excessive. Bush’s action was hailed by conservatives, who had organized a defense fund called the Libby Legal Defense Trust. Likely presidential candidate Fred Thompson was among the fundraisers.