Produced by Eagle Forum, thanking them for working against Amnesty.

I completely stole the video from Kathryn Jean Lopez on the Corner, so after you get done watching please drop by over there and see what's going on.

Otherwise, I'll feel guilty.

For a while.

And then I'll go back to thinking about the Women of Red Eye calendar.

Ace adds: Mike Crapo will vote against cloture. This is one we expected, though.

Posted by: Jack M. at 11:37 AM | Comments (5)
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...and you can get your own spiffy blog if you want one.

It's fun, it's free, and it's sexy!*

* Ignore the usual definition of "sexy." Sexy here means "fun and free."

Bonus! I don't change my blogroll much because I hate playing with templates.

But there's a widget that adds the blogs of all mu.nu (and presumably mee.nu) blogs automatically -- so yes, if you sign up, you get that coveted Ace of Spades HQ blogroll slot!

Posted by: Ace at 11:34 AM | Comments (19)
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Also confirming Captain Ed's source about Hutchinson.

Via Sinistar, blogging at Double-Plus Undead.

Is Pelosi Trying To Kill The Bill? Death by listening?

House Democratic leaders began a series of immigration “listening” sessions Wednesday, but they may not have a bill ready before September — a timetable some backers say could kill the effort...

Lofgren, D-Calif., has yet to unveil a draft bill, House leaders are holding “listening” sessions this week and next with rank-and-file lawmakers rather than committee markups, and Pelosi has set a high bar for House consideration, including evidence of up to 70 Republican votes.

All of that raises doubts both within and outside PelosiÂ’s caucus about the feasibility of a July timeline for House action...

“If it hasn’t passed both houses by the end of July, it is toast,” predicted Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who wrote an immigration bill with Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill.

Democrats insist that Pelosi wants to pass an immigration bill, but Republicans survey the same landscape and see plenty of reasons why the California Democrat might hope it gets buried.

“If Pelosi takes up the Senate bill and moves it further to the left, it will convert our biggest potential liability into a motivating force for our base,” said Florida Rep. Adam H. Putnam, the Republican Conference chairman.

"Listening." Congressional approval at 14%; congressional approval on immigration at 3%.

"Listening" does not appear to be their strong suit.

Posted by: Ace at 11:30 AM | Comments (7)
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On cloture. The important thing.

There's one more. It's working; keep it up.

More good stuff at Hot Air, including another poison pill offered by comprehensive piece of shit supporters which is strongly opposed by Bush.

Kaus has lots of fun things, like McCain now tied with Brownback in Iowa (and trailing Huckabee!), and the sweetest, most delicious Killer Amendment I've ever heard: allow illegals to sue their employers for all payments legally owed to them (minimum wage and especially overtime!), plus treble damages as a little kicker.

Who could be against that, after all? These poor people earned that money; shouldn't they have the right to collect it?

Meanwhile, the lefty Borjas notes that the White House is trumpeting a claim that illegal immigrants add $30 billion per year to the economy -- but is rather quieter about the fact that the exact same economic model used to generate this number also predicts $350 billion in "lost wages" due to wage-depressing effects from illegals bidding wages down. (Note the wages aren't really "lost" so much as they're shifted: $350 billion that employees otherwise would have earned, but now arent, is now $350 billion that employers get to keep for their own selves. There are some pro-business types who might argue that that's a good thing, but something tells me the great swath of American workers won't be entirely jazzed about it.)

As he notes: If you like the model for one purpose, aren't you required to accept that model's other, less politically useful, findings?

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 AM | Comments (23)
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MSNBC highlights the giving of $5000 to a Repubican PAC by an O'Reilly researcher, but fails to note that, even at Fox, most of the journalists giving money give to Democrats.

Here's how one reporter working for a Fox affiliate explained his donation to a Democratic PAC:

"I also believe that the station doesn't own my political views and values. Did I make the contribution? I did. We all have political opinions in this business. A lot of us want to be politically active. But marching in a war protest isn't an option, being a recognizable person, so we give with our checkbook. I don't think that working for a news organization I give up my rights. I interview plenty of people that I don't agree with, but I also ask questions to get the other side. I think it's actually an advantage — in a news organization we have people of many political views. We have healthy debates. I think it's my civic duty to be involved in what matters to me. I think it's ridiculous that anyone who's sitting in front of a camera doesn't have an opinion — come on, we all do. Did I think about that at the time? No, I didn't. Maybe I should have. But I still feel I have a right to my civic duties."

A New Yorker writer likened his donation to defeat Bush as on par with the murder of Adolf Hitler:

"Probably there should be a rule against it," said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine's profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. "But there's a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler — a journalist interviewing him had murdered him — the world would be a better place. I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don't regret it."

So much rich, chocolately nuance here I'm having a cocoa flashback.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (31)
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Even though the good people at "Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld" have never seen fit to invite either me or Ace onto the show (probably out of fear that we will either be way too funny, or that we won't leave), I am going to share my latest money-making idea with them. For free. How's that for generosity in the face of constant snubbing?

There should be a "Women of Red Eye" Calendar. Seriously. This has to happen.

I don't care what the sale proceeds go towards. They can go towards treatment for Greg's "Unicorn" fetish. They could go towards Bill Schulz's inevitable gender-reassignment surgery. Or they could even go towards some gay shit, like charity or something.

To further this idea, I am even going to submit my nominees for inclusion in the calendar, to help stimulate, um, discussion.

January: Janice Dean (See..Janice...January...it's thematic!)

February: Tia Williams (One hell of a way to celebrate Valentines Day!)

March: Courtney Friel (March??? Hell, she makes me stand at attention!)

April: Alison Rosen (No April showers are "golden" jokes here..she makes me see rainbows!)

May: Suzanne Sena (because May is my birth month, and Sena is my favorite. That's why!).

June: Rebecca Gomez (The stock market isn't the only thing going up when she's around!)

July: Julia Allison (Julia...July...work with me, people.)

August: Ainsley Earhardt (Because you can't spell August or Earhardt without T and A)

September: Julie Banderas (She hosts "The Big Story"...in my pants!)

October: Kerry Howley (because Libertarians scare me...like Halloween!)

November: Dominica Davis (this selection is Ob-V).

December: Mrs. Gutfeld (in the role of Mrs. Claus...get your mind out of the gutter, you sickos.)

See how awesomely awesome this could be?

Treacher, Levy, I know you guys drop by occasionally.Take this idea and run with it. Run like an angry unicorn!

And if you need to hire someone to make this thing, come together, I'm available.

(Give me a break..the original sentence was "if you need to hire someone to "pull this off", I'm available. But that sounded a little too gay, even for this moronblog.)

Posted by: Jack M. at 10:00 AM | Comments (28)
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Zobgy's secret sauce and all. But like, wow.

Gee, at this point you would almost think that our elected class are catering exclusively to the interests of people other than American citizens or something.

I guess America itself has to be redefined as "the United States of the Blathersphere."

Just Got An Email From Lindsay Graham... He assures me that once this comprehensive piece of shit is properly explained to the American people, that number "will rise to seven or eight percent, easy."

Interactive Poll: I thought this might be the case, but didn't check down far enough to determine it for sure. Stevegg points out it's a Zobgy Interactive poll, which isn't quite the same as a normal random telephone poll.

Nor is it as unreliable as an internet poll, though.

Basically -- this is what I think I know, because I know someone who takes these -- Zogby has recruited a cohort of internet users, who I believe have to answer the typical weighting questions about age, income, sex, party affiliation and so forth, to take frequent polls on a variety of subjects.

I think they're paid some small amount per poll.

It's not quite a random sample.

The group is self-selecting to some extent, and it's restricted (by and large, if not completely) to Internet users. Which is a cohort with its own political leanings right there. What those leanings are I'm not sure, but I doubt the cohort tracks perfectly with the general populace.

Still: Wow.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 PM | Comments (78)
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John Edwards' former official blogmistress. She finds the angles -- the stupid, kneejerk, moronic angles -- that transform otherwise unbloggable stories into comedy gold.

Dave From Texas gamely tried to make the Ponytail Bandit story interesting. Semi-cute chick, robbing banks. Eh. So-so story. He did what he could.

What he was missing was the willingness to stamp any fairly-trivial story with the Metanarrative Cookie-Cutter. Pandagon soars where all but the stupidest angels fear to tread. A kinda dumb throw-away story about a college-aged pony-tailed small-potatoes bank-robber becomes, in Marcotte's co-blogger "Auguste's" deft daft hands, a powerful story of female empowerment and male oppression:

Feminism says: Women can handle crime sprees all by themselves, thank you

...The FBI believes that the “ponytail bandit” must have an accomplice, because she’s a woman, and women can’t handle this kind of thing.

When will The Oppressive Patriarchy finally acknowlege that women are as capable of shit-for-brains petty criminality as men are?!?!

In another story I didn't really care about, Fox and CBS rejected an ad for Trojans condoms. Allah gave a, dare I say, nuanced analysis of the ad and the decision to reject it, which utterly lacked the most important part of a blog post: kneejerk unhinged full-on ballsucking hackitude.

But Marcotte's brave enough to go for the jugular of hackdom:

...the issue with this ad is that Fox and CBS rejected the ad and not because it peddles in the same stereotypes that their programming uses. No, they took issue with advertising condoms as being used for what they are used for.

...

Translation: We can accept advertising of sexual devices if they are advertised as benefiting men. But if they insinuate something as crazy as the concept that men should respect womenÂ’s bodies, health, and choices, then theyÂ’re way out of line.

Huh! Who knew that all the other condom ads were "advertised as benefiting men" alone, whereas this one ad showed the condom as actually benefiting women! (Despite, you know, the main thrust of the ad is "Pick up a pack of condoms and that chick just might give up the nookie after all" -- which, you know, seems to me to be advertising condoms as "benefiting men.")

The journalists who write about most bloggers being childish, callow, shallow, navel-gazing barely-educated foaming-at-the-mouths lunatic sub-amatuers do, I concede, have something of a point.

Dave, Allah: You see where you guys went wrong now? You see the right way to frame small-potatoes stories now? Do you now understand that every story, no matter how trivial or how resistant to a bumper-sticker political overlay, can -- nay, must -- be forced into a dogma-reinforcing metanarrative?

Go and do likewise, gentlemen. I'd wish you luck but you wouldn't know what to do with it.

Rewrite: Here's the way to do it.

"Ponytail Bandit"/Vagina Warrior Robs Banks

She has all that time off from the Clinton/Demoncrat Family Medical Leave Act and needs all that money for her forty-three abortions per month, so what do you think this diseased whore is going to do between welfare checks?

12 million illegal immigrants? That's small-time. How the fuck did we let these 160 million genital criminals become citizens? They're taking away jobs from us, good blue-collar penis-person jobs, like penny-ante bank robbery!

Did John F'n' McCain have something to do with this? I bet ya he did.

See? Now it's punchy.

CBS, FoxNew Reject Disgusting Ad Potraying Men As Pigs

In yet another sign of how our culture denigrates men, Trojan ads actually takes the next logical step and shows men as actual pigs bowing to the feet of a supposedly-superior she-sorceror Circe. I haven't been this angry since I read The Tempest in eleventh grade! Well, okay, I never actually read the play, but Circe was statted up as a 14th-level magic-user character in an old Dragon issue, and it sure the hell pissed me off when I read that! Close enough!

Ha-ha charade we men are, I guess! Fuck you, Trojan! FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU!!!111!!!!

It's just not a story without racial or sexual greivance politics, y'see.

They're all out to get us. Any post that doesn't push that central narrative is just plain boring, idiots.

Posted by: Ace at 06:34 PM | Comments (52)
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For what it's worth. I don't know how effective these bans are, given how easy it is to evade them.

But hopefully that's a not-so-fond farewell to Conic/r2000 and his ceaseless spamming of the threads.

This may sound petty, but if Congress is passing other anti-spamming legislation, they really should do something about these assholes. At least empower bloggers to sue them for the fair value of the illegal advertising they post on our blogs.

Thanks to those who alerted me to this jackass.

And r2000,

I know you have a blog, and I know it's hard to get audience. But simply posting dozens of links to your blog every day under various sockpuppet nbames isn't cool. Threads exist for discussion, not for you to hijack as your own personal self-promotion vehicle.

Posted by: Ace at 05:50 PM | Comments (25)
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Straight talk?

[NRO's Mark Krikorian:] Take look at Loophole 18 in Sen. Sessions' list ; it turns out that McCain's amendment only requires that those legalized illegals applying to trade up to regular, permanent immigrant status (a green card) show they've paid taxes on income earned after they were amnestied, i.e., while they had probabtionary status and then the Z visa. There's no back taxes requirement to get the Z visa and obviously none for the initial phase of the amnesty, which has to be granted by the end of the next business day after applying for it. In other words, there is no requirement that illegal aliens pay back taxes to receive amnesty.

[Mickey Kaus:] Meanwhile, McCain has returned to telling voters that under the bill illegals would have to "pay back taxes."

Personally I doubt the importance of this particular issue (when you're talking about costs of $2.3 trillion for millions of new low-income, high-benefits-needing amnestied immigrants, what's the real point of asking them to page back taxes on their meager earnings?) , but it seems my view isn't the prevailing one.

And John McCain is flat-out lying to trick those holding the prevailing view into thinking the bill addresses their concerns.

A list of all Senators, this time: Call, write, kvell.

Don't ask about the bill. Ask about the cloture vote. Let them know we understand that cloture is the critical vote and the vote on the bill itself is perfectly meaningless -- automatic passage -- and that we won't be fooled by yes-on-cloture-no-on-the-bill dodges.

Posted by: Ace at 05:41 PM | Comments (84)
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