Um — actually it was 52 votes for. They just fell short of the 60 necessary to cut off debate.

(h/t readers N.E. and A.C.)

It looks like the GOP primary has a front-runner :

In a new AP/Ipsos Poll, 25% of Republican respondents say they are either undecided or would prefer someone other than the current field — more than the vote share of any actual candidates listed in the poll. Compare this to the Democratic side, where only 13% of respondents are undecided or prefer none of the above. In the horse-race numbers, Rudy Giuliani leads the GOP side with 21%, followed by Fred Thompson at 19%, John McCain at 15%, and Mitt Romney at 11%.

A sampling of the email Markos received from Bill O’Reilly’s viewers after Bill O’Reilly — who later in the same broadcast professed complete computer illiteracy — denounced Daily Kos as a “hate site.”

U/R A DIRTY RECTUM LICKING COMMIE SLIME MAGGOT!

BORN FROM KARL MARX’S ROTTING FECES.

Your Evil, Fascist Organization.

Fascist scum like your organization need to be removed and sent to another universe from this one. Evil prevails in your organization, and I hope you will receive the reckoning you deserve when all of you meet your Makers. A gentle riddance to thou in the interim.

You…

…suck beyond belief. Hurry up and die.

I have never seen so much hate

I have never seen so much hate you would embarrassed Nazi’s

Why can’t people like you just make a living, instead of hating everyone else?

Are you all muslims?

I just say fuck you, asshole

Kos

I hope you all die a slow death. Much like you wish on good honest people like T. Snow, the Pope, etc. Liberal Fucks! I hope you choke on the smog & drown in the global warming waters caused by cows. You people are so stupid.

IE: San Fransisco is much better now a days since the liberal invasion 1/2 century ago. Hmmmm: It’s full of disease, poverty, queers(goes with disease…..), and polution. You people can’t keep your backyard clean, but cont. to impose your views on other parts of the country. I’m so sad your still around. I’m sure you’ll die off sooner than later. Much like you morals have. Go eat some grass

Anyone who’s been on or mentioned by one of these shows knows there will be a flood of this sewage in their inbox soon thereafter. O’Reilly certainly knows it as well.

Raids normally took place between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city infamous for its prison, located twenty miles west of the capital, with the Third Brigade, First Armor Division, First Battalion, for one year beginning in April 2003. His descriptions of raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other veterans who served in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit.

“You want to catch them off guard,” Sergeant Bruhns explained. “You want to catch them in their sleep.” About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

“You run in. And if there’s lights, you turn them on–if the lights are working. If not, you’ve got flashlights…. You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that’s outside.

“You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there’s no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

“You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all–anything–anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?’

“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “So what you’ll do is you’ll take his sofa cushions and you’ll dump them. If he has a couch, you’ll turn the couch upside down. You’ll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you’ll throw everything on the floor, and you’ll take his drawers and you’ll dump them…. You’ll open up his closet and you’ll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

“And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

Much more, here. Via.

Arthur Silber contrasts the organized conservative outcry that stopped the immigration bill with progressive fecklessness, especially on Iran:

Over the last few years, I have never heard anything similar on the liberal shows. Never. Not about the Military Commissions Act (see both “‘Thus the World Was Lost’” and “America, Now Without the Revolution”), not about the Roberts, Alito or Gonzales nominations, not about ending the immoral and criminal occupation of Iraq — and not about preventing an attack on Iran.

Not on any of these issues. Never. Nor have I ever seen a similar kind of effort on the liberal and progressive blogs. Never. Every once in a while, the liberal blogs will urge action on perhaps on a single day, maybe two — and then the issue vanishes until some new development (not brought about by the bloggers themselves) might catapult it into public consciousness again. Such tactics are sporadic, severely limited in time and scope, very infrequent, and completely ineffective.

I hesitate to say that the conservatives who worked so hard to defeat the immigration bill are “serious” about their ideas. That word grants them a stature that is entirely undeserved, particularly since the reasons for their opposition are so viciously ignorant. But I will acknowledge that they care about their ideas and that they are committed to them, in a way that it appears liberals and progressives are not.

The rest.

Contest and free download this week; details in the announcements box above. More about the album (and the scratch-n-sniff cover) here.

I see Stephen “Case Closed” Hayes has written a biography of Dick Cheney.

I think the world would be a better place if from now on everyone began referring to Hayes as “W.W. Beauchamp.”

Tom Engelhardt: “Wrong Again! Bush’s Logic and Ours”

Nick Turse: “Planet Pentagon: How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies”

Dahr Jamail: “Iraq on My Mind: Thousands of Stories to Tell — And No One to Listen”

Sam Husseini points out it was twenty years ago today that this peculiar exchange took place during the nationally televised Iran Contra hearings:

REP. BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the “continuity of government” in the event of a major disaster?

SEN. INOUYE: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on that, sir?

REP. BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

SEN. INOUYE: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

Sam goes on to explain how this turned him into a radical.

As noted in the Blogads on either side, I’ve just redesigned the long-neglected shop and added a bunch of new items — all for your shopping convenience, because here at TMW we’re all about the shopping convenience. Go spend some money — it’s fun and easy!

Also, CAKE fans should be sure to check in early next week; we’re going to have a free download from their new album as well as a contest giveaway of same. Details should be up Monday.