The first vote, on the motion to proceed, has been cast.

Those voting in favor of ending debate and moving on to consider a bill none of them have read voted "Y" and are "Villians".

Those voting against ending debate and preventing Amnesty from being shoved down the throat of the American public are "Heroes" and voted "N".

Heroes:

Dole, Enzi, Inhofe, Sessions, Sununu, Roberts, Thomas, Vitter, DeMint, Byrd, Bunning, Crapo, Corker, Sanders, Dorgan, Shelby, Allard, Coburn, Cornyn, Thune, Tester, Baucus, Hutchison.

Villians:

Everybody else.

The final vote: 69 "Yeas"; 23 "Nays".

It took 60 "Y" votes to end debate on the motion to proceed.

Interesting notes:

1) Brownback voted "Y". Either he's going to attempt to "split the difference" by voting "Y" now and against the final bill, or he's decided his long-shot Presidential bid doesnt need the votes of those who oppose amnesty. Good luck with that, Brownback.

2) The only Dems who voted "N": Byrd, Dorgan, Tester.

3) Independent (Socialist) Sanders voted "N". Undoubtedly, the "enforcement" provisions, such as they are, are too onerous for the Vermonter.

4) With only 23 votes against the motion to proceed, opponents of the bill have nowhere near the number they need to sustain filibuster. If there are to be obstacles placed in front of the bill it will require individual senator's utilizing individual rights (such as demanding that the Substitute Amendment containing the actual bill text be read).

5) Vitter put Landslide Landrieu in a tough spot back in LA. She is now on record as having voted in favor of an amnesty bill, even if she votes against it later. Having a GOP senator reminding an increasingly Red State of her position on this will hurt her in the future.

UPDATE: Well, Reid caved to GOP demands for one additional week of deliberation. It's not much of a concession, but it does allow more time for opponents to work the phones and keep the pressure on.

Posted by: Jack M. at 02:15 PM | Comments (142)
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Boo-freakin'-hoo.

I don't have a link, because he just said it on the floor and the transcript isn't up yet.

But, apparently we are supposed to now be pursuaded that voting for am Amnesty bill that no one has read is a good thing, lest we offend the ghost of Senator Domenici's dear, departed mother.

Why giving illegal aliens amnesty is just as American as baseball, illegal-alien motherhood, and apple pie!

Give me a break, Pete.

I tell you what. Give the Senate a chance to actually read the bill, and I'll personally start the effort to rename the section of the probably never to be built Border Fence that will probably never run through New Mexico after your Mom.

I'm generous that way.

More (from Ace): The WashTimes' blog FishWrap runs down the blogs covering this issue.

Posted by: Jack M. at 01:31 PM | Comments (29)
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Oh, so cute. So, so morning news program. So Katie, before she became such a stinking failure.

CADaddy suggests Lola, but I don't get it -- isn't that about a trannie or something?

I'm just going to toss this out because it's about time to watch it again anyway.

More Suggestions... more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:12 PM | Comments (75)
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Dr. Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, talks with Mark Levin about the costs of amnesty.

Take-away: Every low-income citizen added to the population collects, on average, $30,000 per year from the government in services -- schooling, hospitals, Social Security (including supplemental SS for low income people who haven't paid much into the system), Medicaid, etc.

Each low-income citizen pays about $10,000 per year in taxes, total.

Net: Each new low-income citizen added to the population costs the nation around $18,000 per year, to be borne by other taxpayers.

At retirement, it gets worse.

Total cost: $2.5 trillion (with a t) flowing out of Social Security and Medicaid at just about the time the system's already going bankrupt due to the end of the huge wave of Boomer retiring and collecting from the smaller post-Boomer age cohorts.

And it gets worse, of course. As Rector notes near the end of the interview -- and as I have noted myself before -- the list of nations that are less socialist than the US is a short one. Meaning that all of these immigrants, now lawfully voting citizens, will vote according to their conception of what government is supposed to provide to them (which also happens to be in their perceived economic self interest). I.e., they'll vote the nation in a more socialist direction, voting themselves more benefits and more money.

More out of your pocket, in other words. The $20,000 per year per amnestied illegal immigrant is the starting point for what this will cost.

Allah noted in a post that businesses fret about a coming labor shortage -- and that if they're not allowed to in-source cheap labor, they'll out-source their plants to countries with lots of cheap labor.

I'm not sure I see the threat in this -- if businesses are determined to give the jobs to low-skill, low-wage foreign born workers anyway, why should I care they give the jobs to foreign-born workers in this country or in their home country? Either way, the job is not going to anyone who is currently an American.

So what's the benefit of in-sourcing the labor? What, we get to have a factory located on our soil? We're real big on merely hosting work-sites for foreign born laborers now? For what, the prestige of sporting a chicken disassembly plant on our land?

If the work is to be out-sourced, at least the American taxpayer doesn't have to pay the costs associated with maintaining that low-wage worker in very high-cost-of-living America.

I just don't get this whole line of argument. Either give us cheap immigrant legal workers, businesses are saying, or we'll move our plants closer to cheap immigrant legal workers!

That hurts the current American worker how, exactly? If anything, it seems to help him. Costs will be lower in a poor country, so he gets to buy the goods produced at an even cheaper rate, without having to subsidize the business and its subsidy-needing workers at all.

I see how this amnesty is just wonderful for illegal immigrants. For actual Americans, I'm having a hard time seeing the benefit.

Oh, wait: Illegal immigrants will "come out of the shadows." I keep forgetting this scary-important factor. Why, I've spent my whole life praying that the day would arrive when illegal immigrants "came out of the shadows." Very little else matters to me, you know.

I hate shadows.

Rob Bluey exposes the myths regarding this Americans Without Borders bill, although I have a hard time conceding these are "myths" at all, because no one really believes them.

Here's a good one:

4. MYTH: This proposal would not cut in half the amount of fence built by the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

• FACT: This proposal cuts in half the amount of fencing to be built as mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Only one half of the additional fencing authorize by the Secure Fence Act of 2006 must be built before the temporary worker program and Z visa could go into effect.

• FACT: The Secure Fence Act authorized the building of 700 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. This bill provides that a trigger that the federal government has to have “installed at least 200 miles of vehicle barriers, 370 miles of fencing, and 70 ground-based radar and camera towers along the southern land border of the United States, and have deployed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and supporting systems.” (Source: page 1 of the draft bill.) This bill allows for less than half the amount of fencing mandated by the Secure Fence Act before the Z and Y visas are issued.

So let me get this straight. Last year, before the elections, Congress authorized the building of a woefully-inadequate 700 miles of border fence to appease those who wanted border enforcement. Barely even a quarter of the southern border. (Hit 'em where they ain't, as they say in baseball.)

And Bush pushed this as part of his Let Me Pretend I Care About Border Security So I Can Gin Up Support For Amnesty charm offensive.

But, as soon as Congress came back, they refused to appropriate money to actually build the wall whose construction they had authorized. So the inadequate wall was authorized, but not, you know, existant.

Now, in order to throw another sop to those who care about border enforcement, this compromise would mandate that before all the benefits of amnesty flow to illegal workers (thought some would begin flowing immediately, such as immediately granting lawful status in America), Bush, McCain, and Kennedy promise to build slightly over half of the already-inequate fencing they'd already promised they'd build.

I can't wait for their next "compromise" towards the enforcement lobby -- they'll promise to build one-eighth of the fence they already said they'd build.

And who knows -- if we fight them on this, they'll reduce it to sixty-three feet of two-and-half-foot-high fence.

And not even a contiguous sixty-three feet of fence -- just one foot here and one foot there, sprinkled all along the border. Just so they can say "we have fencing all along the border."

As noted city administrator Lando Calrissian said, "This deal keeps getting worse and worse."

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (52)
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Eh. It's good news for the French, I guess, which somehow fails to light my heart with joy.

Campaigning for the French parliamentary elections began on Monday with polls suggesting President Nicolas Sarkozy's party will secure a strong majority for reforms and the left will get a fresh electoral drubbing.

Sarkozy has promised to forge ahead with reforms but the right-winger cannot act until after the June 10 and 17 parliamentary polls when he is expected to call a special summer session to pass his first measures.

The new president appointed leftists to some key positions in the government he unveiled on Friday, a move designed to portray him as an open and inclusive leader and boost the right's support in the looming legislative battle.

I guess that might explain his first offering the FM post to a leftist.

Meanwhile, a previously unheard of terrorist with a nom de guerre suggesting Iraqi heritage (al-Tikrit) is threatening to unleash jihad on France for "voting wrong." (Link fixed.)

Please explain to me why terrorists -- who the left keeps insisting love conservatives, as conservative, strong-against-terrorist leaders are "Osama bin Ladin's chief recruitment officers" -- keep threatening countries that elect conservative leaning men, and agitating in favor of lefties.

As of yet that threat shouldn't be taken all that seriously, by the way. The guy could be an internet crank with no real connection to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Like, there's no proof he filled out his Al Qaeda "New Comers" Application Form.

That's not a joke, by the way. They have an application form. Jose Padilla filled it out. Partly, at least. Like a McDonald's application. Pretty much you fill in your name and address and that's it. As if McDonald's really wants to know which post-graduate degrees you may have obtained.

Here are some real questions from the McTerrorism application:

What are your plans after training?

Train and Return ____ Jihad ____ Work within a group: ____

...

List the reasons that led you to fulfill this great duty and come to Afghanistan:

Do you have any advice for your Mujadeen brothers?

Advice? Oh, just try to be a self-starting people person with a good "phone voice." Pretty much that's all you need for success in any business.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (15)
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Seems like big news. Kind of odd I'm only hearing about it now, from a blog.

Is there any way we can get Al Qaeda on record as supporting carbon dioxide production? Seems like the only way to get the MSM's interest.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (5)
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OK..that's probably overstating it. He isn't Fred! after all.

But, if you can, check out C-Span 2 right now. Senator Sessions is doing a great job outlining the flaws in little Johnny McAmnesty's bill.

Update by Slublog - If you're tied to a desk, you can watch or listen to CSPAN-2 here.

Posted by: Jack M. at 09:19 AM | Comments (33)
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Dean Barnett fields questions:

9) So whatÂ’s the political fall-out from all of this?

Oddly enough, the Democrats will skate free for doing something thatÂ’s so contrary to the wishes of their base. ThatÂ’s the benefit of being a party that really only cares about hating its opposition. As Markos Moulitsas has repeatedly pointed out, even the DemocratsÂ’ most enthusiastic supporters arenÂ’t particularly rigid in their ideology, primarily because they donÂ’t have an ideology.

As for the Republicans, even if this bill dies, the scars from this battle will linger. The Republican base at this moment has absolutely no faith in its leaders. The fact that our favorite Senator, John Kyl, mid-wifed this bill is sobering. And I donÂ’t even want to talk about what will happen to the Republican Party if this bill becomes law.

10) Come on – talk about it.

Okay. It will mean nothing less than the end of the party as weÂ’ve come to know it.

11) How about the effect of this on the presidential race?

Well, John McCain is done. ItÂ’s over for him. This is one thumb in the eye that the base will not forget. And the fact that he swooped back into DC to try to shove this bill down CongressÂ’ throat after the Republican base had already manned the barricades wonÂ’t win him any new friends.

The Bush White House continues displaying its mad political skillz by putting out the word that anyone who's against this is a hard-hearted bigot who favors the death penalty for poor brown people just trying to feed their babies.

There's nothing we conservatives enjoy more than being called genocidal racists by a president we voted for.

An article tallies up the Senators who've gone on record and finds that many are on the fence. And -- bonus! -- the bill's big plus, that of drawing "undocumented workers out of the shadows," might not even pay off, as illegal workers may find the fine and other requirements too onerous and may remain, get this, still in the shadows.

On that last point, let me say that the White House is defining this "out of the shadows" business as if that's the critical problem that needs addressing. When all you have is a hammer, define your problem as a nail, even it if isn't. Amnesty won't solve the real problems of uncontrolled illegal immigration -- such as, you know, uncontrolled illegal immigration; indeed, it will exacerbate the real problem by encouraging monkeys-running-amok-in-your-ass gonzo uncontrolled illegal immigration.

So Bush claims the big, big problem we've had all these years is not that we've had tens of millions of illegal immigrants in our country straining public services, ignoring important laws about taxes and auto insurance, and driving down wages for and taking jobs from actual American. No, that's not the problem -- the problem is really that illegal immigrants have been doing all these things in the shadows. Now they'll be straining public services, ignoring important laws, and driving down wages for and taking jobs away from long-time Americans in the sunshine.

And isn't sunshine a good thing? Who doesn't like a nice, healthy bronze tan?

Meanwhile, what Americans have generally considered to be the actual problem gets entirely ignored.

David Frum agrees that Bush's clumsy legacy-building will build a hell of a legacy indeed: the likely permanency of the Republican minority, whether or not this abomination passes or not:

1) The typical (median) American worker has seen his income stagnate under George W. Bush. Immigration is not the only reason for this wage stagnation, but it is certainly one of the reasons. With this immigration bill, the GOP is telling hard-pressed workers: Go look to somebody else to help you.

2) As complicated as this immigration deal is, it rests on a simple compromise: The Democrats get the amnesty they want - in exchange for the Republicans getting the guest-worker program they want. By identifying the guestworker program as the GOP's highest immigration priority, the deal also identifies the GOP as a party that in the crunch puts employers' interests first.

3) Even before the deal, Democrats entered the 2008 cycle unified and energized; Republicans, divided and demoralized. The president and the senators have now managed to divide and demoralize their party even further.

4) The deal scrambles the 2008 race, in ways deeply unhelpful to the party. The deal has wounded all three of the GOP front-runners: McCain because he is deeply implicated in it; Giuliani because he has tacitly endorsed it; Romney because it has added one more flip-flop to his already too lengthy list of reversals. The deal helps the two undeclared Republicans, Gingrich and Thompson - both of whom, alas, are much less electable on a national ticket than the three declared front-runners.

...

6) As we have seen in both the Harriet Miers fight and the Dubai ports deal, this White House's first instinct when faced with dissent in the ranks is to insult and abuse its strongest supporters. "Sexist"; "elitist"; "registered bigots" were some of the terms cast during the previous fights. Brace yourselves for much, much worse. This is no way to win friends and influence people. And triggering an internecine party conflict on the eve of a difficult and dangerous election is no way to re-elect a damaged incumbent party.

BTW, Frum's prediction was just proven true.

...

The deal will worsen Republican prospects among Hispanic voters. Over the years, the Republicans have done not too badly with Hispanics, typically winning about 35%-40% of the Hispanic vote as compared to under 10% of the black vote.

Republicans have done so well because until now, the highly diverse Hispanic population has not voted as an ethnic bloc. Now we ourselves are forcing that to change. It's as if this Republican president and these Republican senators have said, "Hmm. Can we invent an issue that will teach Cuban-American doctors, Honduran day laborers, and Mexican-American army officers to think of themselves as a unified ethnic group? Can we then provoke a fight that all of them (whatever their diverging practical interests) will treat as a symbol of acceptance in American society? And can we then stage-manage this fight to ensure that two-thirds of our party will have no choice but to fall on the wrong side of it?"

Nice work, guys.

And he makes this point:

Immigration hawk bloggers and broadcasters have been pounding at the Senate immigration deal from the minute it was announced. It was Mickey Kaus who first noticed that illegals will no longer be expected to pay back taxes. The immigration amnesty is now also a tax amnesty.

Hugh Hewitt deciphered the bill's arcane and often deeply misleading structure to discover that it grants immediate legal status to almost all illegals. All the tough talk about enforcement is a cover: It's amnesty first, enforcement later or never.

...

Given time, we will learn much much more. But time is the thing that the bill's proponents are determined to deny. Here is the most important domestic legislation since - what? welfare reform? the Kemp-Roth tax cut? Medicare? - and the country has been given a weekend to think it over. The Senate wants to impose cloture this coming week.

Actually, we don't have that, as the bill isn't finished yet, and will most likely be voted on before it's released publically, or even read by most Senators.

Kaus continues blogging like a Warrior-Poet, as William Wallace would say:

President Bush in an address from the Oval Office a year ago:

I believe that illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay should have to pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law, to pay their taxes, to learn English, and to work in a job for a number of years. People who meet these conditions should be able to apply for citizenship ...

Forget that part about the taxes. The Bush administration actually asked that the provision requiring payment of back taxes be dropped from the bill, and it was taken out. Kennedy had it in! ...

P.S.: White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said:

Determining the past tax liability would have been very difficult and costly and extremely time consuming.

Try that "difficult and time consuming" excuse out on the IRS if you're a U.S. citizen and see how far it gets you. ...

Someone else -- Instapundit, maybe -- suggested that all current US citizens should immediately file for Z Visas in order to get out of any previous tax difficulties. Or even future ones. Who knows what amazing goodies the ultimate bill will contain.

Keep scanning down, lots of good stuff at Kaus. Like, gee willickers, isn't it funny that Bush's favoribility crumbles everytime he pushes this?

Lastly, about that F-You dust-up between Cornyn and McCain. (read down to "What about the substance?") Powerline says that it was all due to Cornyn's insistence on genuine internal enforcement, and and end to the catch-and-release policy. That stuff was in previous versions of various bills, and had always been in the mix of the "compromise," but Ted Kennedy wanted it removed and so he got it removed. At which point McCain started cursing about Senators daring to interfere in the legislative process.

McCain's cursing worked -- no longer is there any such provision in the "compromise" at actually catching and deporting the future illegal immigrants in a speedy manner, rather than issuing them "notices to appear" in immigration courts which are almost never actually obeyed. (Indeed, the notices are called "notices to disappear" or "notices to abscond" by folks in the immigration-law community.)

That's all the news I can think of right now.

The pressure must be kept on. Even Senators who are against the bill -- like Jeff Sessions -- are not promising to filibuster it, and a filibuster may be needed. If only to slow the process so that the American public has at least a few months to figure out what the hell this still-being-written bill actually says. Good guys like Sessions have to be pressured to commit to a filibuster, at least for a decent amount of time. We don't want to punch up our allies too much, but simply voting "Nay" on the bill while voting "Yay" for cloture will likely result in this abomination being passed.

The Senate is really the only place this can possibly be stopped. Iron Nancy can do what she wants in the House, and El Presidente Chimphalliburton is going to sign anything that gives him his amnesty legacy.

They're trying to sneak this past us all -- in the shadows, as it turns out -- because they know what a thorough examination of the bill will reveal.

After all, there's so much momentum behind this bill. There are literally hundreds of Americans who support the Bush-McCain-Kennedy compromise.

Posted by: Ace at 09:19 AM | Comments (107)
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With lots of video at Daily Film Dose.

Oldboy's hammer-fight sequence:

Hard-Boiled's hospital shootout:

And of course Serenity's single-hidden-cut introduction to the ship and crew:

Other ones -- real classics, not the guns & robots fare I favor -- at the link.

Meh. I've never gotten the appeal of the long take. The thing is, it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, costing loads of money, and yet it always looks kind of fake and feels slow (you suddenly realize how important editing is to pacing) and it adds nothing at all to a movie from a viewer's perspetive. In fact, it detracts from it, the moment you realize you're watching a long take. It calls attention to movie-making artifice rather than to the story being told.

So, basically, it's crap guys like DePalma do to show off for their friends.

I'm annoyed that that gorgeous long pulling back helicopter shot from the end of Lethal Weapon II isn't on there. Sure, the movie was crap, and the shot was hardly as difficult as a lot of the ones this guy features -- heck, it's just a stupid helicopter pulling back and back and back -- but it's marvelous. Only reason to watch that movie.

They don't have it on YouTube, so the closest I can come is Speed Racer with the "Cheer Down" Harrison song from LW2's closing credits/tracking shot.

So, like, imagine instead of a cartoon, it's film, and instead of the Mach 5, it's the LA docks at sunrise. That's pretty much the shot.

Another big tracking shot he didn't include is the split-screen double-long-take-turning-into-one-scene in the not terribly good Rules of Attraction. It went like this: Follow a guy on the right side of the screen, follow the girl on the left side. A single take for both as they go through their morning routines. The both meet at a message-board in a college building at which point, voila, it stops being split screen and they're both in the same scene together.

They spent a nontrivial fraction the film's budget on that one shot, plus they had to get a lot more money post-production to fix a technical error made during it. They were so proud of the little trick.

Impact on the viewer: Almost nil. You only even begin to appreciate it, from a technical standpoint, watching the commentary (and you only appreciate the difficulty of it because what seemed like it should be easy was expensively botched), but even with some appreciation for it, you can't help asking the obvious questions, "You spent how much money on this one stupid shot? Were you high and/or temporarily retarded when you made this decision?"

Oh, Here It Is: I guess I misremembered. It's only a "long take" before the split screens meld, and it's not a very long take at that.

Posted by: Ace at 08:14 AM | Comments (33)
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Numbers of such staggering dimension as to give Osama bin Ladin before-he-even-takes-it-out orgasms.

Why is the Washington Post so vague about what is meant by "numerous" deaths?

Because the deaths were/are being caused by an environmentlaist beloved by the left, whose crusade against DDT undeniably saved the lives of many birds... and just as undeniably took the lives of a half million or more human children every year.

While Rachel Carson is celebrated as a hero despite such a massive pile of corpses at her feet, the men who led the Green Revolution that saved billions from starvation are either ignored or maligned as mad scientists who upset the fragile ecosystem and diminished the earth's precious "biodiversity."

I'm not sure that you can explain these facts by any other route than the straightforward and obvious one: there are a large number of people on this earth whose politics are neither left nor right but simply anti-human. They advocate human death for little other purpose than death itself.

Gotta restore all that nitrogen back to Mother Gaia's soil by any means necessary. Gaia's Little Handmaidens of Death know those corpses ain't just gonna plant themselves, after all.

Posted by: Ace at 07:12 AM | Comments (40)
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