K-Lo reports it but doesn't explain it. Allah guesses at the procedure but I don't think he's got it.

JackM? Can you assist?

UPDATE (Jack M.):Allah's analysis is pretty close to what I understand the effect of Reid's purported manuever to be. Here's how I understand it to work:

Under Senate Rule XV, any Senator can ask that any amendment containing several parts be made subject to division. The person who decides whether the amendment can be divided will be the presiding officer: in this case whatever Democratic Senator is in the chair at the time, or VP Cheney if they think he might be needed to break a tie vote. The Senate as a body can appeal a ruling of "divisibility", but it only needs a majority vote to be upheld.

Because Senator Reid is the Majority Leader, he has procedural powers that trump every other Senator's in that he is privileged for recognition over any other Senator. Basically, it means he gets to go first. So what it sounds like he is going to do is offer the "Grand Compromise" as a Substitute and then make his own motion to divide his amendment into, say, 24 parts. The Dem Senator in the Chair will rule that the amendment is divisable and all of a sudden one amendment becomes 24 seperate amendments.

Why is this important? Because Amendments under division are AUTOMATICALLY considered one right after the other. No other amendments can be considered while the divided amendments are chugging along.

This means that you now have to consider 24 Amendments right off the bat. In a post-cloture environment, you only have 30 hours to consider amendments before a Roll Call Vote on the underlying bill must be held. Even if other Amendments are pending (and would normally be brought up for a vote), once the 30 hours time limit hits, those amendments are washed away as if they never existed.

So, the Net Effect will be that even if say Sessions or Demint filed an amendment, it could not come up any earlier than 25th. Since the clock will be running continuously while the individual divided amendments are being discussed, and even during the roll call votes, this means that not only will anti-Amnesty GOP Senators likely not see their amendments called up, but that DEMOCRATIC "poison pill amendments" (like Dorgan's 5 year guest-worker sunset) won't see the light of day either, unless it is still in the text of the new amendment language that Reid is making divisible.

I never saw this procedure used as a way to fill the Amendment tree or to run out the cloture clock in my time working in the Senate. I think it is an unprecedented use of division by the MAJORITY to do this.

I hope this helps. It's the best I can do on a Saturday evening.

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (6)
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Why I hate them, part nine thousand two hundred and eighty three:

He is, Wunderkraut informs me, a penguin-sucker of the Swedish variety.

Wunderkraut posts an update about his daughter, who was born club-footed and has had to bear casts and surgeries and bar-shoes for almost all of her three year old life. But she's walking now (video!), and what she lacked in the foot department she really made up for in the cuteness category.

Why... did I post this picture, a commenter asks. Well, just because it's funny, and he's a Scandi.

I've linked the reason for my hatred of Scandis above now. I first admitted my hatred of the snow-wops and icebacks here, and found, to my delight, that virtually all of my readers similarly despised the puffin-sucking luge-humping shaved Yetis we know as "Scandinavians."

Wunderkraut corrects and says he's not Swedish, he's German, but that the dirty Scandis love him.

I explain in the comments, echoing Dennis Hopper, that Germans are Scandis, more or less.

You may think that "Mr. Cool Ice" is written there in English. That's not true -- it's actually just German words with false-cognate English equivalents. In the actual German lanaguage, "Mr. Cool Ice" translates to "I haven't had steady employment since Falco recorded Der Kommissar."

Posted by: Ace at 11:54 AM | Comments (37)
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Disingenuously, of course (see update). Little Green Footballs of course also gets all up in Reuters' grill.

Photographers from Reuters and other news organizations were at the house taking pictures when one of HaniyehÂ’s sons decided he wanted a picture of his father on the wall, so he put it up in place of the one of Sheikh Yassin, in mid-photo shoot. We did not censor our shots by, for example, only using the pictures with HaniyehÂ’s photo in them, and we canÂ’t very well stop people from rearranging their homes as they see fit. Indeed, both of those photos went out, side by side, to our photo clients.

No, Reuters can't stop terrorists from arranging scenes to better serve a propagandist point. It can, however, not run such staged photographs -- a possibility which continues to not occur to Reuters, no matter how many times it happens.

Reuters and AP and the rest of the gang ran all of these absurdly-posed pictures of children's toys set against the backdrop of the Hezbollah-Israel war. These were plainly planted for progandistic effect -- Think of the children who now no longer have their treasured Minnie Mouse doll, due to the evil Jew-bombs! -- and partly, I'd guess, for economic reasons. Word went out that AP and Reuters were just queer for stringers'/freelancers' pictures of toys amidst smoldering ruins, and guess what? When word gets out that someone is willing to pay good money for something, suddenly there's a whole lot more of it being produced.

Of course, once the photo editors grew bored with shots of suspicously dust-free stuffed animals in the wreckage of Jewish bombs, they then explored the possibilities of the Still Life With Tricycle.

Reuters, apparently, takes the position that it can't stop it's foreign stringers and freelancers, many who work in close cooperation with terrorists, either out of solidarity or simple considerations of physical safety, ergo, it must run every single staged photograph they submit.

What choice does it have, after all? To not run such pictures would be to deny the public relevant information staged propaganda which Hezbollah and Hamas want in the Western press. And if the press stands for anything, it's for the proposition that there can be no restrictions whatsoever on staged propaganda which Hezbollah and Hamas want in the Western press.

Absurd, childish, disingenuous, dishonest. What we've come to expect from the MSM, basically.

Still Funny: See-Dub's hilarious "Fauxla."

A Hunkahunka Burnin' Holy Text: I couldn't find this in my own archives (Google hates this site), but did find it at the Jawa Report.

In case anyone was somehow missing the message Hezbollah was putting out about the horrors of the Israeli defensive war against terror missiles, Adnan Haj, King of Fauxtoshops (he photoshopped a picture of Beirut to add in more damage and smoke), submitted this picture to the wires, and of course it went out without question:

Kind of convenient that they arrived on the scene while the Koran was still burning, but hadn't burned quite enough to be no longer identifiable as the Koran. And of course nothing else is on fire; just the Koran. Those damnably clever Jew-bombs at work again.

Reuters says it can't stop this. I say that's a lie; they could easily stop it.

1. Scrutinize pictures that look "too good to be true." As even liberal-leaning Tim Rutten conceded, if something looks too good, it probably is.

2. Inform photographers that pictures appear to have been staged, either by the photographer himself or by media-controlling terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah, will not run on the wires, and will not be paid for.

3. Futher inform photographers that submitting a picture later determined to have been staged, even in a small way, without the photographer' express warning of that fact, will result in the agency no longer purchasing any pictures from that photographer at all, forever, as well as the issuance of a warning about the photographer to all other news services to whom he might attempt to peddle his hoaxes.

Did Mohammad Salim warn Reuters the scene was altered mid-shoot? Well, if he did, then Reuters itself concealed that fact from the world. But I suspect he didn't -- he just made up some cock-and-bull story after the fact.

Which Reuters not only regurgitates uncritically, but implicitly vouches for as the truth.

Is it any wonder these stringers keep getting staged photos past Reuters' supposedly vigilant photoeditors? They've announced a policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell as regards staged propaganda pictures.

Posted by: Ace at 11:30 AM | Comments (12)
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Just going to post two pictures and their captions today.

1.)

Left-wing Israeli activists take part in a demonstration marking Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Middle East War, in Tel Aviv June 9, 2007. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun (ISRAEL)

2.)

Palestinians run as they try to cross to the Israel side at the Erez Crossing, in the northern Gaza Strip, Saturday, June 16, 2007. Dozens of Palestinians converged on the Erez crossing with Israel on Saturday, trying to leave the Gaza Strip following Hamas' takeover. At the same time, hundreds of people looted police positions on the Palestinian side of Erez, and at one point Israeli troops fired in the air to keep the crowd at bay. The looters walked off with furniture and scrap metal. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

There really is nothing else to say.

Posted by: LauraW. at 09:02 AM | Comments (52)
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Why exactly I'm getting hits off the AoSHQ Wikipedia entry, I'm not sure. But I am, and I checked it out.

Apparently my entry was challenged -- probably by lefties -- questioning my "notability." Which, in fairness, I question myself, but then, if Wikepedia can have six thousand articles about the lesbianism of Willow from Buffy, it can have one about this blog.

Anyway, they challenged the entry (which I didn't write, by the way) on the basis that I didn't have enough mentions by "third parties," meaning media. So I tossed the guy I know at Wikipedia the "very smart military blogger" comment from Tony Blankley, and... CNN's new mention.

Thanks, CNN! Whew! Maybe you really are a right-wing media organization, just like Media Matters claims!

That complaint has apparently been withdrawn. Now they're just whining the article requires "clean-up." Next week it'll be "too many commas."

I'm told by the guy I know there that Wikipedia has, of course, its own Digg-style bury-the-conservatives contingent.

But for now, like Navin R. Johnson, I am somebody and will remain so, at least until the lefties get really pissed off.

I wonder if I'm getting hits off it because some lefty blog actually linked it to complain, and in turn those people click on to the actual site. I can't imagine many people are actually just deciding to look up "Ace of Spades HQ" on Wikipedia.

Posted by: Ace at 09:51 PM | Comments (57)
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No, I'm not kidding. Cut through the torturous verbosity of Greewaldese -- which is similar to English, just not as vital or vigorous -- and you basically have Greenwald calling Reynolds a queer.

As he calls most men on the right. Some named -- Jonah Goldberg, Victor Davis Hansen, Joe Lieberman -- and the rest implied.

I know what everyone's thinking. Reynolds and Althouse, who of course joins in, strain mightily not to think it, and by and large they succeed.

Because they don't think that way. Or would like not to, anyway.

Althouse gamely attempts to translate Greenwaldese to English. She discovers a Third Dynasty cartouche allowing her to successfully translate some of the heiroglyphics--

There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession -- the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons -- what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one's "traditional masculine virtues" -- the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions -- themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."

Let's translate that last paragraph from Glennwaldese to plain English: No, you guys are wimps.

Althouse wonders (but not in the obvious context),

Do women not exist in Glenn G's world?

Must... resist... the low road.

Eh, what the hell. Dance with the girl that brung ya and all that. Since it's the low road that Greenwald himself stamps down every day, here it is:

I really think that questioning others' masculinity is a game probably better left to people who haven't had more cock in and out of them than a Tyson Chicken regional distribution center.

I'm sorry, was that not turgid enough for Greenwald? Let me try to translate that for Gleen in his native tongue:

This dynamic of a decidedly effeminate man accusing his rivals of being insufficiently manly, and indeed homoerotically longing to be dominated by men with such virtues, is depressingly pervasive, yet incomparably significant.

Not that I'm saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold.

But let's break down Greenwald:

1: Praising masculine virtues and denigrating the female virtues is a singular element of fascism;

but

2: My political opponents are mincing fairyboys and you shouldn't believe what they write because they're sissified shemales who lust for the protective embrace of big, strong arms to wrap around them and hold them tight.

Let us combine these two:

3: Glenn Greenwald is a closet fascist, like his heroes before him, such as, oh let's just throw out a name here, Roy Cohn.

Integrity is not the same as courage or masculinity of course, but there is some correlation between the virtues.

Glenn Greenwald -- who girlishly posted mash-notes to himself under sockpuppet psuedonyms, lacking the balls to write his self-puffery under his own name, and then, get this, claimed innocence by blaming the posts on his live-in boyfriend/cabana boy -- really ought to be "living quietly" about such issues, as Rick Kaplan suggested of Dan "Memogate" Rather.

Is Instapundit A Homo? Well, I think I met him three times or something, and he never tried to pork me. Given the fact I'm 180 pounds of rompin'-stompin' Clydesdale-clompin' 180 proof sex, I'd say he successfully passed that test.

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 PM | Comments (116)
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Before anyone screams too loud, bear in mind she was preventing Barbara Walters and Joy Behar from discussing sex, and for this much, I give much thanks.

I know what you're saying -- "But what about Elizabeth?" Oh, come on, Elizabeth is a good-girl type and wouldn't have talked about sex, she just would have giggled naughtily.

So really, Rosie did the right thing and threw herself on the grenade. Thanks to her, we never had to hear Joy Behar discuss her CMS (Chronic Mung Syndrome) nor the hourly injections of nearl-lethal-dosage sulfa drugs to keep it from a full-body "Mung Bloom."

Posted by: Ace at 07:24 PM | Comments (26)
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Let me be clear on those quotes: "rightwing blathersphere" comes from the straight-and-objective reporter reporting Chertoff's remarks; there are no actual quotes around it. So, either Chertoff said it but then said "don't quote me on that" and the reporter kept the language but dropped the quotes, or the reporter coined that term himself.

And the second part -- "needs to be dealt with" -- isn't Chertoff's quote; it's Lott's. I'm just referencing this whole establishment idea that sixty-nine percent of the American public consistute a "tiny band of noisy extremists" that need to be "dealt with" so the actual majority of 20% can legislate in peace.

Those caveats aside -- it's nice to see Chertoff acknowledge the "right wing blathersphere" as part of the problem, the "heavy headwind" that must be fought against if the Good Ship Amnesty is to make it safely to port.

It's too bad, though, he didn't acknowlege centrist neoliberal Democrat Mickey Kaus' laudable work in similarly "not wanting what's best for America."

Your Political-Media Establishment

Workin' overtime to advance your interests -- but not your actual wishes. Because you're too fucking stupid to know what's good for you. How about we sweeten the deal with $4.4 billion in free rice pudding? Retards love rice pudding, don't they?

Hmmm... I orginally assumed "right-wing blathersphere" was a reference to the right-wing blogosphere.

It occurs to me, though, that as obvious as that interpretation might be, he didn't actually mention the blogosphere at all. He may just be referring to talk radio as the "blathersphere."

Eh. Either way, he's a dick.

Posted by: Ace at 05:49 PM | Comments (68)
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I think the last time I got mentioned was for calling Ted Stevens, Republican Senator from Alaska, an idiot.

I'm detecting a pattern. Funny how my posts on, say, the Arizona "9/11 Memorial" that seemed chiefly concerned with memorializing radical Islamist greivances drew not a bit of interest from CNN.

Ah, well. It's always been my contention that the most important function of blogs was to let people know that, despite the official pronouncements from the media and their supposed representatives, their views were actually, in many cases, the majority view, and so they should not act meekly as if they were a small minority doomed to lose but should rather fight like the mainstream representatives of the majority, destined to win, they really are.

That's how the media and political establishment conspire to push unpopular legislation on the public -- by convincing them their views are marginal and could not possibly win, and, in fact, are "extremist" and therefore things to be kept quiet about in secret shame.

What blogs, talk radio, and other non-establishment media are best at is fighting that dishonest meme and thereby letting people know that not only are they not alone, but in fact are part of the true, real mainstream majority opinion. And could, and should in most cases, prevail.

Without some method of national, rapid, widely disseminated messaging, how could millions of people be alerted to the fact that they were in fact the majority and not just a "small group" of "noisy" "extremists" who "don't want what's best for America," as the MSM and Republican leadership itself is telling them?

The most dramatic proof of this: A schoolteacher in France brought down the EU treaty by well-nigh singlehandedly rebutting the French media's and political class's one-sided, enthusiastic coverage of the treaty, offering no contrary opinion... and little hint there was a contrary opinion in France at all. Everyone's in favor of this treaty, they told everyone, so there is no reason whatsoever to even bother showing up to vote against it. Resistance is futile.

But once this schoolteacher pecking away at his blog let out the big secret that the EU constitution was not only a bad treaty, but a wildly unpopular one, people felt more confident about voting their preferences and voted the thing down. Resistance was decidedly not futile -- and all it took was the realization of that to doom a treaty that might otherwise been approved simply due to the asserted futility of opposition.

So thanks to CNN for helping get word of that out: this amensty is not necessary, it is ineffecutal, it is costly, it is bad policy. And no matter what the NYT or LAT claim by dishonestly wording poll questions, the great majority of the American public are strongly against it.

They want you to think it's a fait accompli. If it really were, they wouldn't have to sell it as such. As we all know from 32nd level Monk/Assassin/Paladin of the Golden Moustache Chuck Norris -- a guy who can kick your ass doesn't have to keep telling you he can kick your ass.

He can afford to be quiet about it. Because, see, he can let his feet and elbows do the talking, if it comes to that.

And thanks to JackM. for the tip.

So Little Traffic... You'd think that a mention on Rush Limbaugh, or Red Eye (thanks for that again, Jack), or even CNN.com would get you hits.

Nope. Everyone who can be induced to read blogs already is reading blogs, pretty much.

So it's just me, Andrew, LauraW, Jack, Slublog, and sixteen morons reading this blog, and so it shall be, for all eternity. (And, frankly, the sixteen morons not blogging aren't even reading the blog, they're just trading Yo Mama jokes with each other.)

Posted by: Ace at 04:51 PM | Comments (87)
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Yeah, most of these are dumb. But this?

Greatest American Hero at #8? A funny story about a misfit superhero that included the hilarious Bill Culp as the "scenario"-spinning douchebag FBI agent and the adorable, lucious Connie Sellecca as the fast-talking super-hot piece of ass?

Are you guys all them queerie types or what? Well, obviously you are. But the series co-starred smolderingly-handsome actor Michael Pare as a high school rebel without a cause type (who also rebelled against anything approaching convincing acting, giving him a tantalizing gay-porn vibe), which you mincing sweetboys should appreciate.

He Lost The Instructions For His Power-Suit Come on! That's funny! Imagine the Green Lantern with no earthly idea how to actually work the ring!

Well, okay, the show was never as good as it could have been, or should have been.

But did you wankers watch TV in the 80s? This was like Masterpiece Theater in comparison, for crying out loud.

And... At least the Fall Guy offered us what we'd so long craved -- a Lee Majors sung ballad.

The Fall Guy was a ripoff of the lame Burt Reynolds flick Hooper. This is what I am saying: In the early eighties, TV shows copied bad movies that hadn't even done well at the box office.

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (112)
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