Palin is a bright shiny target rich environment - a new Dan Quayle, a woman Spiro Agnew. But we can't get too distracted. The main target still has to be McCain. Sure, Palin is the latest in a series of bad decisions. But McCain has made a lot of worse ones - supporting the war, opposing renewable energy, opposing Veterans benefits.

So let's continue to give his old classic mistakes the attention they deserve, not ignoring Palin, but not making her our main topic of discussion when reading voters.

Oh and a side note: to the extent we pay attention to Palin, let's concentrate on things we would worry about if she were a man. After all an anti-choice, creationist, Dominionist one term governor in the midst of an undue influence scandal who does not know what a VP does offers plenty to criticize. That she has kids to take care of are no more a knock on her than than being a single father was on Biden during his Senate term. Similarly her having been a Miss America contestant means no more than the fact that at least one U.S. President was once a male model. (I'll leaving googling who it was as an exercise for readers.) I think we've pretty good at avoiding sexism (in her case) so far, but be aware of the traps. The mainstream media will pull some of this stuff - misogyny occasionally outweighing Republican bias. Just because it is directed at one of the bad guys does not mean we need to quote it approvingly.

A lot of argument on whether Michigan and Florida should be counted at above half strength focus on fairness, and whether it is fair that votes not be counted fully vs. fairness to people who paid attention to the universal statements that the votes would not counted elected to skip a beauty contest.

But there is another issue here. I think most people agree that our primary system is far from perfect. Some think it is the best we can get, others think there is are realistic options for improving it. But I don't think anyone would want it to get worse.

Yes if Michigan and Florida don't pay a heavy price for their ignoring Democratic Party rules, at least half their delegates, that is exactly what will happen.

Jerome argues that the primary process should be reformed. I agree, not because the process was unfair to Clinton; it was a system she helped design. But I agree it is a really bad system. It is a product of a series of compromises between reformers and the old guard over the years. It exemplifies the saying that an elephant is a mouse designed by committee.

If you want a new system, you want something will reflect the will of the Democratic voters, while selecting someone who can win in the general election.

We don't get to design systems from scratch, but if we did, I would suggest an all-state caucus system that selects 5% of the delegates, followed by a one day all-state national primary that allocates delegates proportional to the national vote totals. Each candidates delegates would be selected in proportion to that candidates national popular vote, and then sub-allocated by state according to that candidates state totals. So the popular vote would determine 95% of the total number of delegates for a candidate. PR within the caucuses would determine the other 5%.