MICKEY KAUS:

Virtual Fence = Virtual Corruption? Speaker Pelosi’s fallback choice to head the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, voted against building the 700 mile border fence. He prefers a system of video surveillance cameras, apparently. And gee, it seems that his daughter works for a firm that won a government contract to provide such surveillance services! What’s more, according to WaPo’s John Mintz (who broke the story) the firm did a really bad job.

Here’s more from TPM Muckraker.

Perhaps the Alcee Hastings nomination was really just an effort to make Reyes look cleaner by comparison. Is Pelosi that smart?

Kaus adds: “It would be nice to have some Gates-like oversight hearings at which Reyes could be grilled about this video-surveillance debacle. But of course Reyes is the overseer, not the overseen.”