Prairie Weather

Remember those pesky superdelegates?

Well, you can forget them now.  Dead and gone.

While the elimination of superdelegates isn’t likely to have any impact in 2012, when the party is all but certain to renominate President Obama, commission members say it will help democratize future presidential primaries. ...Politico

58% of Americans should be waterboarded

Do unto others, etc.

First the good news...

Claims for unemployment benefits have fallen again.  That's the good news.

The bad news is about Pakistan.  Remember when the UN took its employees out of Iraq?  And the move was followed by some of the greatest violence of that war?  Well, now they're taking a quarter of their non-Pakistani employees out of Pakistan.

The decision, which does not apply to the organization’s 2,700 Pakistani employees, will be re-evaluated in three months, the official said. Improvements in the country’s security could shorten the relocation.

The move is the latest sign of Western fears raised by intensified terrorist attacks in recent months throughout the country, including in better-guarded interior areas like the garrison city of Rawalpindi and the capital, Islamabad. ...NYT

Sanity v. feel-good "security"

The fact of the matter is that death by terrorist attack is extremely rare. Benjamin Friedman points to Nate Silver’s calculation that in the last decade of US flights, there was one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown.

Under the circumstances, investing additional resources in defending airplanes is unlikely to be a cost effective investment. It’s also worth underscoring the fact that flying in an airplane is much safer than driving. Insofar as stepped-up security makes flying both more expensive and more annoying, and therefore pushes more people to drive long distances, we’re going to cost lives rather than save them. And at the end of the day, you have to understand that terrorists are not going to weaken America by killing us all a hundred at a time with bombs. They do much more to weaken America by induces us to waste money and strangle our economy.

The last point I would make, raised by DanVerg on Twitter, is that even if airplanes were completely secure you could always kill people by detonating a bomb in some other crowded place. For example, you could blow something up in a crowded airport security line....Matthew Yglesias

So.  If we're talking about bottom lines (and that's the standard by which we measure pretty much everything in the US), wouldn't you rather take one chance in 11 trillion of getting blown up while living a freer, more private and prosperous life?  To judge from the comments at Yglesias's site, some Americans have caught on to the fact that the current Republican party would rather you didn't have a freer, more private and prosperous life.

How 'bout them body scans ooh boy!

The Atlantic's Heather Horn gathers a carryon's-worth of reviews of the body-scan proposal.  She comes up with a doubt here, a wee bit of enthusiasm there. 

I liked bloggers' practical reaction.

TSA, Nudity, and Radiation-- Fantastic  Philadelphia Weekly blogger Joel Mathis isn't convinced, recounting the lack of professionalism of TSA employees even when dealing with a pack of condoms in his suitcase. "Security professionals claim that the virtually-naked images won't be stored," he writes, "but does anybody really want to bet the over-under on how long it takes for some of those images to hit some creepy website somewhere?" He reminds readers that "TSA screeners aren't doctors, who have years of training on how to act professionally and a massive financial incentive to keep their jobs." He thinks abuse of the images "isn't just a possibility--it's a dead-on certainty." Meanwhile, Chickadee at The Agonist remains worried about radiation from the new scans--is it as small a dose as security officials claim?

NCTC failure

The CIA would seem to be at the core of the endless failures in intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies in the US.  But fingers are also being pointed at the National CounterTerrorism Center. 

“N.C.T.C. is supposed to be the nerve center,” said Amy B. Zegart, who studies intelligence at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s the fusion center of all fusion centers. So if something was missed, that’s where the blame is going to go.”

Officials at the counterterrorism center — a small agency in a modern glass building in suburban Virginia — maintained a stoic silence on Wednesday, noting that the review ordered by President Obama was still under way. But those who led the major studies of how the United States government failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks watched the unfolding story of the Christmas Day attack with growing dismay.

“It’s totally frustrating,” said Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the national Sept. 11 commission. “It’s almost like the words being used to describe what went wrong are exactly the same.”

Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint Congressional inquiry into Sept. 11, called the emerging story “eerily similar to the disconnects and missteps we investigated.”

“There seems to have been the same failure to put the pieces of the puzzle together and get them to the right people in time,” Ms. Hill said. ...NYT

A similar story is emerging about the killings at Fort Hood.

...More than seven weeks later, what is left of the Fort Hood tragedy is a community haunted by clues that somehow went unheeded. During a week in which the government has lamented missed signals in the case of an attempted bombing on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, there remain unresolved questions about how so many signals could have passed unnoticed before the Fort Hood shootings. While the Pentagon, the Army and the FBI work to complete investigations of Hasan with findings due next month, his former friends and colleagues sift backward through his biography and search for answers of their own. ...WaPo