It's not surprising that "The war is lost/the surge is lost" hyperpartisan Reid said this. Nor is it, from his point of view at least, all that objectionable. Plainly, he doesn't like Pace, and doesn't think he's done a good job; not really a major thing that he called Pace "incompetent."

What is more surprising -- but only slightly so -- is that it appears that the left-wing bloggers who were on the conference call denied he'd said it, claiming they couldn't remember him saying such a thing or that he simply didn't say it. And they attacked the Politico for claiming he had.

Well, now Reid himself admits he said it.

Were the lefty bloggers simply negligent or were they acting in concert to deny a story they didn't think was especially helpful to the cause?

Let me quote Harry Reid from a few days ago, when reporters dared to ask him about the Democratic Senators who voted to tank the amnesty bill:

"Let's not focus on the Democrats," Reid snapped.

And of course the NYT editorial board complied.

Did Reid or his office contact the lefty bloggers and tell them "let's not focus on that one ill-advised comment of mine" as well?

Delicious: Even after Reid says he said it, the lefties are sticking to their guns and arguing Reid doesn't know what he's saying when he says he said what everyone says he said.

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (9)
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I throw in the question mark because reforming earmarks is an awful lot like killing Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees. Yeah, it's on the ground now, but you just know they're going to do that scary pop-up thing the moment you turn your back.

Which is why I think that anyone who gets Myers, Jason, or earmarks on the ground should not turn one's back, but take that opportunity to grab the machete and decapitate the son of a bitch once and for all. (Not that that stopped Michael Myers, of course...)

At any rate, for now, the monster is collapsed on the floor with a wire hanger stuck in its eye. Republicans, led by Boeher (of "piece of shit" fame, no less), have forced Democrats to honor their pre-election commitments to disclosing earmarks and actually voting on them.

As part of the deal completed after extensive negotiations that ended late today, Republicans agreed to allow two appropriations bills (Homeland Security and Military Quality of Life) – bills that include few or no earmarks – to move forward immediately. All 10 remaining appropriations bills will come to the floor later with their earmarks fully disclosed and subject to challenge by any lawmaker – a key element of the 2006 GOP reforms.

Also a hero here? Jim DeMint, again. No link -- you'll just have to trust me; never got around to linking the source -- but when Democrats were pulling their shit over earmarks, DeMint did something precious -- he introduced Nancy Pelosi's very own pre-election earmark-reform plan as a bill in the Senate, just to embarrass Democrats with it.

That didn't seem to work -- Democrats are shameless -- but still, for a stupid racist anti-Hispanic trogoldyte, he sure seems pretty clever.

Posted by: Ace at 03:30 PM | Comments (5)
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His use of quotes, not mine.

Why do I call him a hyperpartisan leftist America-hater? Not because he indulges in Maureen Dowd style pop-culture-as-window-into-geopolitics vapidity. That's par for the course for our frivolous, juvenile, stupid leftist commentariat.

No, I call him those things because he wrote these words after the 2003 Fall of Baghdad -- confessing he had been praying for more American deaths. This is officially the most-quoted passage on Ace of Spades HQ, and I'm going to keep quoting it every few months until I quit the blog.

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness--ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative--four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world.

So when he claims he has ambiguous feelings about the "war on terror" -- itself a rather disgusting statement -- don't believe him. His is not ambiguous about terrorists; he's actually a fan.

And speaking of the Sopranos -- this will be my last attempt to mention a pop-culture phenomenon that never phenomonized me. Apparently it didn't phenomenonize many of you, either, because these threads don't generate many comments.

But my Mom was a big fan. So, this is for my Mom.

Patterico offers a contrarian take on the Sopranos' conclusion -- he liked it.

No word, though, on whether he detected resonances about the so-called "War on Terror" in the ambiguous conclusion.

Posted by: Ace at 03:10 PM | Comments (20)
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NBC and the WSJ will "have to be dealt with."

64% are against allowing illegal workers to receive an automatic work visa if they pay a fine, and 55% oppose allowing illegal workers apply for permanent residency if they return home to their counties and pay additional fines.

Ummmm... aren't those sort of the key provisions of this piece of shit omnibus amensty bill? Aren't those the provisions people have problems with? Aren't those the provisions that dishonestly-worded NYT and LAT polls have claimed were in fact supported by the majority of the public?

We certainly cannot endure in a Republic where legislators -- who were sent to Congress to legislate, legislate, legislate, after all -- are vexxed by MSM pollsters "running the country" by actually asking about public support for key parts of an important, transformational bill.

Kaus again. And he writes, again, that if there's a single poll out there showing support for this bill -- and not some hypothetical bill, with pro-amnesty MSM outfits soft-pedalling and sweetening the actual provisions of the real bill -- he has yet to see it.

Nor has anyone, as far as I know. The MSM's SOP on this has been to studiously avoid asking the most obvious question of all -- Do you support this bill? -- in favor of asking push-poll type questions designed to cobble together some sort of arguably inchoate support for something similar to this bill, though not the actual bill itself.

Let me repeat myself, too: If it's so popular, why is our political class so determined to take a vote long enough from the election that the public will largely have forgotten about it (they hope) before casting votes?

Their words say: It's popular; a majority is in favor, and only an angry, nativist rabble on the radio and internet opposes it.

Their actual deeds say: It's wildly unpopular; we have to get this out of the way as soon as possible just to stop the bleeding, and we definitely have to take care of this long enough before the elections so that we can recover politically from our supposedly-popular vote.

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (17)
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And without irony. Allah's been running this funny p-shop for some time to slap up on Tancredo; I think today he's running it as a genuine, if reluctant, tribute.

Let's give the man his due. After years of tilting at windmills, he finally scored a hit, a very palpable hit, on that damnable wind-blown machine.

49 Democrats voted to cut off federal funding for "sanctuary cities." This sounds an awful lot like an enforcement-first position to me.

But don't be fooled -- only comprehenisve, amnesty-first-enforcement-never legislation is truly popular in America.

All this security-first stuff the talk-show hosts "that need to be dealt with" represents a tiny xenophobic fraction of the "noisy" anti-Hispanic extremes.

A Vote For Cloture Is A Vote For Amnesty

We're not the idiots you think we are.

Posted by: Ace at 01:37 PM | Comments (32)
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I know a lot of people may be surprised he still was DA.

Apparently he sees the writing on the wall:

AP-DukeLacrosseURGENT 06-15 0028
AP-Duke Lacrosse URGENT

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Duke lacrosse prosecutor Mike Nifong says he will resign as district attorney in Durham County, North Carolina.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
APNP-06-15-07 1452CDT

It's a complete reversal, a total vindication for the actual victims, that you usually only see in movies, because, unfortunately, life just usually doesn't work this way.

And it would make a great movie, of course, for that reason. But don't expect Hollywood to actually make a big movie about it -- the victims have the wrong colored skin (even though the chief villain has the right-colored skin, the second-biggest villain has the wrong-colored skin, too).

A minor cable channel will make a quickie, low-budget two-night movie of the week about this -- at best. (And even that hypothetical movie will be sure to include "the other side," the argument that "something must have happened," and of course leave lingering questions about whether "justice was actually done." Can't deviate from the metanarrative too far, after all, even when the metanarrative is at odds with established facts and dramatic power.)

Thanks to Thomas.

KC Johnson Had It Before The Wires: Advantage: the blogosphere!

In a whisper, Nifong is suggesting that it does not serve the cause of justice for Durham for him to remain as DA.

"Whatever mistakes I made in this case are my mistakes"--though not the mistakes of which the Bar has accused him.

"My community has suffered enough." His actions in the case were "honorably intended but had unforeseen consequences.

Apologizes for his actions causing pains to the three families (as he continues to mispronounce the name of the Seligmanns).

Just before this post, Johnson had a post called Nifong Implodes. The thing is, Johnson is live-blogging, and doesn't have time for context. He doesn't explain why Nifong's statements here consittute and "implosion." I trusted he was right -- that whatever Nifong was saying, it was very detrimental to his own cause -- but couldn't myself see why.

I wrote him to ask why this was an "implosion," but of course he hasn't had time to write back yet.

But I guess there's little doubt now -- Yes, that "Nifong Implodes" headline was quite accurate.

Video: At Hot Air.

As many have speculated (I think KC Johnson did), this may simply be an attempt to head off his disbarrment -- and/or criminal charges -- by "voluntarily" crafting his own punishment for his misdeeds.

Posted by: Ace at 01:03 PM | Comments (14)
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Ah, when the internets were young, I had this argument many a time with liberals. And, I confess, I learned something from them -- an actual fact, a true fact, not just something they were making up. They were (largely) right: I was technically right, but in a more real way wrong.

The argument went like this. I charged, correctly, that a larger ratio (almost all of them, in fact) of Republicans had voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act than Democrats did (a minority in fact).

Liberals had two responses: 1, of course, that was a different time, when Dixiecrats were in power in the south. But, more importantly for the present debate, they countered 2, while many Democrats had voted against the Civil Rights Act itself, most had voted in favor of cloture on debate in the Senate, which was actually the more important vote, because they knew, by voting for cloture, enough Republicans (nearly all of them) and enough progressive-minded Democrats would be enough to guarantee the Civil Rights Act passage.

The real vote, they pressed, was the cloture vote, and many Democrats had voted for that.

This defense is also offered, IIRC, on behalf of Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the bill itself (in a pander to Dixiecrat voters) but who had done the right thing as far as cloture.

From Wikipedia:

Although majorities in both parties voted for the bill, there were notable exceptions. Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona voted against the bill, remarking, "You can't legislate morality." Most Democrats from the Southern states opposed the bill, including Senators Albert Gore Sr. (D-TN), J. William Fulbright (D-AR), and Robert Byrd (D-WV). Goldwater went on to secure his party's nomination for the presidency, and in the ensuing election, Goldwater won only Arizona and five of the Deep South states, two of which had not voted Republican since the disputed presidential election of 1876.

Al Gore's father voted against the bill! we conservatives yelled.

But he voted in favor of cloture, the liberals parried, knowing full well doing so guaranteed its passage.

I mention this not to liken the important Civil Rights Act to the current piece-of-shit under consideration, but simply to note this is a famous case of voting-for-cloture-being-effectively-a-vote-for-the-bill-itself, with the actual vote on the bill being a rather secondary consideration, a vote which may provide some political cover or insulation on the issue, but which, as a substantive matter, is entirely meaningless.

A vote in favor of cloture on amensty-without-security is a vote for the bill itself; it creates a fait accompli. There is no reasonable chance that 50 or more Senators will vote agains the actual bill -- the establishment wants it, and what the establishment wants, the establishment gets.

The only chance of defeating this bill is by requiring a supermarjority of Senators to vote for cloture.

This isn't 1964 anymore. The public is now a bit more informed than it once was, and a bit more canny about cynical procedural maneuverings and disingenuous political posturings.

We know what a vote in favor of cloture means -- and while some Americans may not, we're not going to be keeping secrets on that score. If not everyone knows right now what a vote for cloture means, trust us, the problematic talk-radio hosts and bloggers and blog-readers will let everyone concerned about this issue know the real story -- before Congress has time to "deal with that problem" of an informed citizenry.

Posted by: Ace at 12:58 PM | Comments (8)
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Maybe the Senate isn't where we'll kill this after all.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Comments (14)
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Maybe.

I'll not mention which blogger wrote to which Senator's staff about cloture, as I got to read the exchange, which the staffer may not have known. The blogger accused the Senator of planning to vote for cloture but against the bill, attempting to perpetrate a sham on his voters. The staffer wrote back that there was nothing in the Senator's statements to support such a suspicion and that he had not indicated he would vote for either cloture or the bill itself.

Does that mean this wavering Senator won't vote against cloture? No, he didn't say that, either. But 1) the Senate's office is apparently worried about that charge to offer a fulsome rebuttal against it and 2) his response seems to indicate the Senator in question hasn't yet committed one way or another.

"Not yet committed" is hardly our goal, but it's a start. Let the word go out by phone and fax and even snailmail to our "representatives" that we're hip to the yes-on-cloture-no-on-passage scam, and we won't be fooled. We've read, for example, that many Republican Senators are telling lobbyists they do in fact want the bill to go through, even though they may be worried about voting for it themselves. This passive-aggressive passage of the bill will be seen for what it is. A senator who votes for cloture is voting for the bill, period.

Meanwhile, Trent Lott says "We have to do deal with that problem," and by "that problem," he means not border enforcement but conservative-leaning talk radio "running the country" and daring to question their Senatorial Overlords on the amnesty bill. A shocking statement by a Republican, or an American, for that matter; is he really suggesting that free speech needs to be better controlled so that he and his fellow douchebags can be free to legislate without question?

I don't see how else to read it -- Trent Lott has joined Media Matters Rep. Maurice Hinchley in the campaign to regulate political speech by destroying one of the only media outlets for conservative political views. He's implicitly endorsing the dreaded "equal time" rule -- mandating that half of talk radio hosts endorse his piece of shit bill -- which of course destroys talk radio entirely. It didn't exist before that pernicious rule was repealed, and it won't exist after it's reintroduced.

This breathtaking statement by Lott has even cautious we-suck Eeyore Allah re-evaluating the need for rightroots organizing to "deal with that problem" of Lott, Graham, Hagel & Co.

Kaus, meanwhile, continues to question the absurd claim by the MSM that amnesty without security is popular:

Forty percent (40%) of American voters say that President Bush is doing a good or an excellent job on taxes. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 39% say the same about his handling of the economy.

At the other end of the spectrum, just 15% say he is doing a good or an excellent job on immigration.

If 39% think Bush is doing well on the economy, despite ceasleless confidence-sapping bad-news poor-mouthing from the media, how can it be he only gets a 15% positive rating on immigration despite relentless boosterism from the MSM?

And I ask again: If this bill is so popular, why does everyone keep insisting it must be passed now -- safely far enough from the elections for the public to forget it about before Novemeber 2008? If it's popular, why shouldn't the vote be scheduled right before the elections -- or, better yet, the primaries -- so that the Senators championing this very-popular law can reap the political benefits of passing it?

One more tale out of school: I've been getting, as many bloggers do, updates from the White House's Office for Public Liason. I don't mean to burn them -- I appreciate their tips, though I use hardly any at all -- but I will say that today's amensty-boosting email, titled "What They're Saying...," is simply a digest of pro-amnesty quotes -- from MSM newspaper editorial boards, almost all liberal-leaning, with the exception of the WSJ, itself not just liberal but licentious on this issue. They put the WSJ quote up top, as if they're supposed to have some sway with us.

Pretty sad that the Bush Administration has turned to quoting the NYT and other left-liberal papers as evidence that conservatives ought to support its piece of shit bill. I don't see any quotes from someone I actually trust, like, say, conservative talk-show hosts Laura Ingraham or Michelle Malkin.

Ah, well -- I suppose we'll just "have to deal with that problem" in the next Congress.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (12)
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One of the newly discovered piles of shit, I'm reliably informed, has a fair shot of getting cloture.

According to a Capitol Hill newspaper, police are unable to solve the mystery of the "caca caper."

...

[Roll Call reporter Emily] Heil continues, "On Wednesday afternoon, Capitol Police cordoned off a section of the hallway on the third floor of the Senate side of the Capitol, where at least three piles of the stuff were causing a stench — and a stir. At first, the word circulating among the staff was that a visiting child had fallen ill while in the gallery. But then the prevailing theory was that the foul stuff had come from an adult or group of adults making a yet-to-be-determined political statement."

According to the paper, "Reports also circulated that the yucky stuff had been smeared on seats in the gallery overlooking the chamber floor, and the gallery remained closed hours after the incident was first noted."

I have a theory.

Thanks to Slublog for the p-shop -- that's "Shit Happens, Republicans" in Spanish, he tells me. He did that yesterday; I'm glad I held off.

Posted by: Ace at 11:59 AM | Comments (21)
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