This came across my desk today and reminded me that as fun as election season is, it can be a distraction from some important issues. Let's keep our eyes on the ball, folks.

House Democratic leaders are working to derail a bipartisan bill that would beef up border security, crack down on illegal aliens and employers who hire them, and reject amnesty.

Representatives Brian Bilbray (R-California) and Heath Shuler (D-North Carolina) are seeking an up-or-down vote on their bipartisan Secure America through Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) Act, which has 47 Democrat and 89 Republican co-sponsors. They need the need the signatures of 218 House members on a discharge petition for the vote to occur. The Washington Times reports that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and other House Democratic leaders want to poison the bill by attaching an amnesty amendment to it.

I first wrote about the SAVE Act in November when, to my amazement, freshman congressmen managed to pull together an immigration enforcement bill with support from big-shot congressmen Duncan Hunter, John Murtha, and Tom Tancredo. At that time neither the Republican nor the Democratic leadership were interested in the bill, which would crack down on employers, increase the size of the CBP, and give ICE greater investigative powers.

The bill is part of the "Attrition through Enforcement" movement that has been seeing success in Oklahoma and Arizona. The idea is now making slow progress in Washington, but we need to demonstrate that we expect our Senators to act sooner rather than later. A version of the SAVE Act was introduced in the Senate last year. You can send a fax to your senators through Numbers USA and ask them to support it. I have.

Now, many Republican congressfolk are on board and the House Democratic leadership is getting worried that moderate Democrats (the over-hyped Blue Dogs?) will cross over to get the bill out of committee and onto the House floor. They've introduced a "killer amendment" that would give illegals a 5-year visa and employers immunity from prosecution for using illegal labor. Also, it's possible that the bills will die quiet deaths during the election-year circus. But don't think that the two issues are unrelated:

Bilbray believes the amnesty agenda in Congress is designed to enlarge the Democratic electorate. "You've got Ms. Pelosi and the traditional Democrat groups basically wanting to see this population of 20 million illegals voting for Democrats," he states. "They want to give them residency, citizenship, and register them to vote so they can use this illegal population as a political bloc that's behooving [sic] to them because they're the one who empowered them with the votes."

Pro-enforcement Republicans are on very solid ground when it comes to immigration. In fact, a large portion of registered Democrats disagree with their party leaders. Now would be a great time press home that advantage.

Note: The first link and the quotes in this post are drawn from an article on "OneNewsNow.com", the news service extension of the American Family Association. The AFA is a Christian right group that has taken almost no positions with which I can agree; they are just plain wrong about almost everything. I chose this particular article because it was the only one with that last quote from Congressman Bilbray. Still, I couldn't let it go without mentioning that I in no way approve of the AFA.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:44 AM | Comments (11)
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Blogs and legacy media have been abuzz about the Tony Rezko trial and the potentially negative impact it could have on Obama's chances to become the Democratic nominee. In fact, the Clinton campaign has pretty much staked its chances on the possibility that some as-yet undiscovered piece of information will sink Obama before the convention or at least prove embarrassing enough that superdelegates can assuage their guilt and vote for Clinton.

To me it sounds a little like Clinton is waiting for voters to realize that politicians have crooked friends. I know, I'm shocked, shocked. If it turns out that Obama got a sweetheart deal on some land in exchange for some favors, is it really going to surprise or turn off Democratic voters--especially if there's no proof? (I should mention for the sake of fairness that no one is alleging such an exchange at this time; he had a "bone-headed" land deal in his own words, but there's no evidence of favors or whatever.) And how lasting will that damage be, anyway? After all, Clinton has some land deal issues of her own.

I'm really asking now. What's the deal with this Rezko thing? The hypothetical Democratic voter or superdelegate cares why? Especially compared to scandal-heavy Clinton?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:49 PM | Comments (19)
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This story has me a little puzzled. The EPA locals of the National Treasury Employees Union are "withdrawing from a cooperation agreement" with their bosses at the EPA over policy decisions.

Nineteen union local presidents representing more than 10,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees signed a letter to Administrator Stephen L. Johnson last Friday accusing him of "abuses of our good nature and trust."

Under Johnson's leadership EPA has ignored jointly developed principles of scientific integrity "whenever political direction from other federal entities or private sector interests so direct," the unions charged.

Asked for comment, EPA spokesman Jonathan Shradar said only: "As a 27-year career EPA scientist, the administrator values the expertise and advice of his staff and will do so through his time in leadership."

The letter cited the California greenhouse gas waiver denial and several other issues, including mercury emissions from power plants. The Bush administration recently lost a court case for not sufficiently weighing the health impact of its proposal for reducing mercury pollution.

This sounds to me a lot like the EPA union members want to dispense with their appointee bosses completely and run the show themselves. Actually, I have no doubt that's what they want to do. My question: this is permissible how?

Also, when did unions move from employment issues like retirement benefits, back pay, child care, and wages to setting environmental policy for the federal government?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:28 PM | Comments (9)
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I mention this because someone just told me she hated the pop-ups on the comments pages.

There are no pop-ups.

If you're getting pop-ups, you have a virus that's causing them. They're not coming from this site. Run a malware/spyware removal program and get rid of that.

Anyway, just thought I should mention that.

Posted by: Ace at 06:40 PM | Comments (36)
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A smelly vagina joke? Sure, why not. I'm just taking the word back.

To swipe a joke from Dane Cook: You know how bad Gloria Steinem's vagina smells? It smells like she washed her vagina with an even dirtier vagina.

So, this old dried-up whorebag doesn't seem to think much of J-Mac's sacrifice or service to his country. What a shock.

“Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’” Steinem said, to laughter from the audience.

McCain was, in fact, a prisoner of war for around five-and-a-half years, during which time he was tortured repeatedly. Referring to his time in captivity, Steinem said with bewilderment, “I mean, hello? This is supposed to be a qualification to be president? I don’t think so.”

SteinemÂ’s broader argument was that the media and the political world are too admiring of militarism in all its guises.

“I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t even play war games as a kid. It’s a great relief from Bush in his jump suit and from Kerry saluting.”

Just to point out the extraordinarily obvious: Ms. Ms. didn't alert us to her discomfort about John Kerry being "trained to kill" when he was running, nor support Kerry over Bush for having killed fewer people.

But, I mean, God, what the hell did you expect from a nasty lying lefty? Something approaching intellectual consistency?

Remember that the right has been maligned repeatedly for "questioning the patriotism of those who served." And yet I remember the left denigrating the elder Bush's service in World War II -- "How bad a pilot do you have to be to lose four planes? How many other servicemen did George H. W. Bush's incompetence kill?" -- and now again with J-Mac, wondering just how big a fuck-up he had to be to get himself captured by the North Vietnamese.

Hillary, On The Other Hand, Is A Fan: Okay, remember the victory lap I took after my prediction that Hillary would pivot into accepting her fate quietly?

Yeah, I was all sorts of premature on that one.

“I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he’d bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”

Baaa-ZINGggg!

That's my girl. Don't roll over for anyone, Hillary. Especially no man.

Flashback: Steinem in 2004:

As a man [Kerry] who knows what war is like, he has tended to be more restrained in his willingness to wage it.

Thanks to IllTemperedCur, finding a nugget in Hot Air's comments.

Of course, who cares. It's Gloria Fucking Steinem. She is, was, and always will be a joke.

Ms. magazine. Yeah. Now there's a qualification.

You know what? I got in trouble the other day on the Today show. I mentioned that Eve Ensler had asked me to appear in a play called Gloria Steinem.

You just can't say that on TV, you know. They're real squares about the G-word.

Posted by: Ace at 04:31 PM | Comments (86)
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One catch: It's on Mars.

A NASA spacecraft has taken the first-ever image of an avalanche in action near Mars' north pole.

The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the photograph Feb. 19. The image, released today, shows tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down.

The camera was tracking seasonal changes on Mars when it inadvertently caught the avalanche on film.

HiRISE mission scientist Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona was the first person to notice the avalanche when sifting through images.

"It really surprised me," she said. "It's great to see something so dynamic on Mars. A lot of what we see there hasn't changed for millions of years."

And suddenly it's changing, huh?

Now, if you read on, you'll see the scientists have no idea if this is common or uncommon; this happens just to be the first ice/dust landslide they've been lucky enough to see.

Still... if this were on earth, what the fuck do you think Al Gore would be saying about it?

Robert, who sent this, wants to know how big the carbon footprint of the Mars Rover is.

And don't forget Viking. The Viking probes used almost as much energy as an office vacuum cleaner. There's no telling what sorts of havoc such energy wastefulness might have wreaked upon Mars' delicate ecosystem.

Posted by: Ace at 03:55 PM | Comments (28)
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Commenter ghengis sent me this earlier today but I've been so busy, busy busy!

WOODINVILLE, Wash. (AP) - Three seven-figure dream homes went up in flames early Monday in a Seattle suburb, apparently set by eco-terrorists who left a sign mocking the builders' claims that the 4,000-plus-square-foot houses were environmentally friendly.
The sign—a sheet marked with spray paint—bore the initials ELF, for Earth Liberation Front, a loose collection of radical environmentalists that has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks since the 1990s.

The sheriff's office estimated that Monday's pre-dawn fires did $7 million in damage to the "Street of Dreams," a row of unoccupied, furnished luxury model homes where tens of thousands of visitors last summer eyed the latest in high-end housing, interior design and landscaping. Three homes were destroyed and two suffered smoke damage.

He also reminded me about the ongoing trial of one of these bozos for the 2001 firebombing of the U. Wash Center for Urban Horticulture, Yo. Her lawyer asked for a mistrial (lawyers do that kind of thing), declaring "It is inconceivable that anybody who is supporting Briana [Water]'s case could have been responsible for this," [atty Robert] Bloom said.

I don't know. I kinda conceived that fairly quickly, but I am not a lawyer.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 02:30 PM | Comments (26)
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You'll be surprised. more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:18 PM | Comments (37)
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Dear Ms. Marsden,

Or may I call you Rachel? You can call me Jack.

It brings me great sadness to read of your recent travails. Certainly a woman of your erudition and charm deserves better than to have the details of your intimate life played out on the innumerable tawdry sites, such as this one, that regrettably proliferate throughout cyberspace. You are an intelligent, vibrant woman, and you do not deserve the public humiliation this story must be causing you.

I applaud your willingness to confront what would otherwise be an embarrassing story head on! (And, no, that is not a reference to the Head On! product that serves as one of the major advertisers on Red Eye w/ some disgusting troll, a show I haven't watched since your lovely presence was deemed no longer necessary). What many will attempt to spin as the narcissistic ravings of a lunatic stalker scorned, can only be defeated if you summon the bravery to fight fire with fire and let the truth be known. I want you to know that I am here for you. Allow me to offer my own strength to yours: together we can restore your good name.

I do not write this letter to you because you look like this:

instead, I write to you because I think it is time that you had a man who was your equal in character, grace, and interpersonal ability. If anything, my history of creating non-existant relationships with prominent news anchorettes via the use of epic poetry illustrates just how strong a match we would be. Though others may scoff, I believe that the fault lies not with you, but with the handful of men who seem to have a habit of filing charges against you. They fail to understand the good thing they have in you. I guess it is true: some never know what they have until it's gone.

I assure you, Rachel, I wil not make that mistake. In this time of trouble let me be your rock. You can be vulnerable around me, I won't tell. And if things don't ultimately work out, I will NEVER embarrass you by breaking up with you through a cold, impersonal, medium such as Wikipedia. Everyone knows the truly classy way is via a text-message anyhow.

So, Rachel, I look forward to the favor of a reply. I want to be the man with whom you find great happiness. The one who completes you. The one who quells those voices in your head, and replaces them with Nature's Prozac, love.

You can reach me at jackmtips -AT- (replace with the symbol) gmail.com should you feel the need for companionship. This is not a rebound, Rachel, this is a put-back.

My warmest regards,

Jack M.

PS: Please don't tell Suzanne Sena. She gets crazy jealous.

Posted by: Jack M. at 02:01 PM | Comments (46)
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Not safe for work but not super-explicit.

Also, however, not really all that great.

These girls are mostly putting up 10-12 Charisma scores, if you know what I'm sayin', and I think you do.

Thanks to US Citizen/Traction Control.

Posted by: Ace at 01:41 PM | Comments (21)
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