Wednesday Roundup: The Pale Visage of Punishment

Saturday is going to be a day of reckoning — the Rules Committee of the DNC is going to meet in Washington, and they will be charged with the task of figuring out what to do about the states that go "rogue" and set their primaries on dates against party rules.

Florida is the primary concern of this meeting, because they intend to hold their primary before February 5th, which was a threshold designated for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. The options available to the DNC for punishment of Florida are both a little weird: they can either get candidates to agree to an embargo on campaigning in that state, or they can strip the offending states of some or all of its delegates. The punishment they choose for Florida — and the line seems to be that Florida will be punished — will no doubt set the precedent for how other states are treated in the future.

A report on the CIA was declassified yesterday, and it does not paint a positive picture of the agency's efforts prior to and leading up to 9/11. In general, it lays a great deal of the blame for problems in detecting and preventing 9/11 before it happened at the feet of the agency's leadership, making the case that agents and directors did not use the powers made available to them sufficiently, and that general bureaucratic problems were allowed to make CIA's gig more difficult than it had to be. Also noted in the report is the inter-departmental "turf war" quality of many intelligence operations in the last several years, in claims that CIA failed to share data in an effective way. If you're interested in how the intelligence community operates at all, this report and the news about it are of interest.

The Associated Press has some depressing statistics about books and reading, but probably no one is reading the report anyways. According to a recent survey, 22% of people identifying themselves as moderates or liberals haven't read a book in the last year. Among conservatives, 34% have failed to crack one open. Also, they find that conservatives desire sloganeering more than liberals. Who knew?

The leaders meeting at the Montebello Summit actually took a few moments to address the rumors of the impending North American superstate during the talks, essentially saying they are silly. Canadian Prime Minister Harper even said that the international road could also be "interplanetary." This will only enrage the conspiracy theorists, guys — nothing gets them going like a direct denial of a program's existence. That obviously means it exists!

How do you feel about the Electoral College? The New York Times thinks it should be abolished, but not in the manner a California Republican is going about it. He wants to do away with winner-take-all and instead distribute the electoral votes to each party based on Congressional districts won. This would create an imbalanced situation giving some 20 votes to the Republican candidate and seriously impugning any Democrat's chance for nationwide victory in the Electoral College. The ongoing fight bears watching.

Finally today, a Republican Bexar County Commissioner is complaining publicly that lots of money was wasted on emergency preparedness for Hurricane Dean, which will apparently now not be destroying south Texas. As much of the money will be reimbursed by federal funds, I'm not sure what the problem is. This seems like politicization after the fact, and I make the argument that, when it comes to disaster preparedness, it is always better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. The argument against spending adequate money on preparedness is like wondering why we need all these firemen since everything isn't always on fire.