SCORE ONE FOR ALT-MEDIA: Immigration bill fails. “The bill’s Senate supporters fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to limit debate and clear the way for final passage of the legislation, which critics assailed as offering amnesty to illegal immigrants. The vote was 46 to 53 in favor of limiting the debate.” That’s a big margin.

I think it was the YouTube campaign that made the difference.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus modestly foregoes credit, but observes: “Fifteen Dems (plus Sanders) vote against cloture, making it somewhat difficult for Sen. Reid to achieve what seemed to be his unadvertised dream: A failed bill he could blame on the Republicans.” Plus, why Rupert Murdoch is a loser.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Minute-by-minute coverage of what went on while I was taking the Insta-Daughter to the doctor and the mall.

MORE: Don Surber is glad the bill failed, but also offers praise for legal immigration:

God bless those legal immigrants. they went through the paperwork. They studied hard. Many had to learn a new language. They showed a commitment to a nation that most of us take for granted.

Yes. The anger over the bill was never so much over immigration, as it was over the contempt that many of the political class seemed to display regarding people who — to coin a political phrase — work hard and play by the rules. Those crafting another bill at some point in the future would do well to bear that in mind. [LATER: Prof. Joseph Olson emails: “Congressmen neither work hard nor play by the rules. There is no reason to expect them to respect those who do.” Ouch. But that’s not fair — they do work pretty hard, actually.]

And here’s the Washington Post story on the bill’s failure.

More: “Today’s defeat of the Senate amnesty bill was more than a run-of-the-mill legislative victory, representing as it did a self-organizing public’s defeat of combined force of Big Business, (some of) Big Labor, Big Media, Big Religion, Big Philanthropy, Big Academia, and Big Government.” Wow. Somebody should write a book about this phenomenon.

MORE: On legal immigration, a reader emails:

I’m a professor in California and my wife holds a masters degree in accounting. We’ve already spent thousands getting work permits. We’re now in the process of applying for green cards … they’ve make it so complicated you can’t reasonably do it without legal help, and all up (legal fees plus government filing fees), it’s costing us over $9000 for my wife and I to apply for Green Cards. On July 30th, they’re increasing the filing fees. Currently it’s $940 for me and $740 for my wife. Come August, it’ll cost $2200 for the main applicant and $1725 for the spouse. On top of that, they wouldn’t let me pay tax as a married person until I’d been in the country for 10 months, so not only was there no “tax amnesty” for me, I was in fact paying more taxes than an American in the same position. I find Americans are always shocked when I tell them how much it is costing us. It seems like every few months they make it more difficult for people who want to do it legally.

Tellingly, he asks that I not use his name for fear of retaliation.

STILL MORE: Dean Barnett rounds up winners and losers.

MORE STILL: Reader Christopher Fox is worried: “Great, we dumped the immigration bill. Success! Now we have to watch out for retribution by a vengeful Congress looking to put us in our place. Don’t be surprised when all pretense of border controls are dropped, as the elites decide to show us how bad it can REALLY get if we don’t do it their way.”

That would be amazingly stupid. Which, based on past performance, suggests that it’s hardly out of the question . . . .

THE POLITICO: Hillary’s pollster caught testing attacks.

IN THE MAIL: Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer. Looks very interesting.

MAKING A LIVING off of disaster relief.

FREE SPEECH UPDATE:

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin got his long overdue comeuppance in the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. The court ruled the senator is not above criticism before an election, no matter what law Feingold may author.

And three justices even reminded him that Wisconsin is not Morocco. . . . A key provision of this “reform” is a restriction on political ads just before an election.

Oh, not on the ads of the politicians. Senators can run all the TV ads their fat-cat supporters are willing to buy.

No, the politicians restricted what ads the citizenry may run on TV before an election.

This “campaign reform” is like a drunk “curing” his alcoholism by telling his wife she cannot imbibe.

I hope that there’s a lot of publicity in this vein, as I fear we’re about to see another bipartisan effort by the inhabitants of Incumbistan to shut down criticism.

JUST BACK FROM IRAQ, J.D. JOHANNES HAS A COLUMN ON RICHARD LUGAR: “Is it possible to win a war on the ground, and lose it in Congress?”

UPDATE: “We’ve done it before.”

BY THE WAY, here’s my interview with Mother Jones on blogs, the Netroots, and the 2008 elections.

A MASSIVE PROTEST FOR PRESS FREEDOM in Venezuela.

NOT A DISNEY STORY: A memoir of autism and adoption.

MORE ON MURTHA:

Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) will recuse himself should the House ethics committee review Rep. John Murtha’s (D-Pa.) earmark activities. . . .

Doyle is a longtime ally of Murtha, the dean of the Pennsylvania delegation. They also share some campaign contributors; many lobbying firms that donate heavily to Murtha and whose clients are recipients of millions of dollars in earmarks from him are also among Doyle’s top contributors.

Murtha’s relationship with the two lobbying firms, KSA Consulting and the PMA Group, came into question on Monday following a report about earmarks he obtained for the firms’ clients.

Stay tuned.

THE POLITICO: “The bitter fight over a comprehensive immigration overhaul has pushed President Bush and his fellow Republicans to the brink of divorce — and, for the first time, the opportunities for reconciliation appear severely limited.”

Positive spin: This is so suicidal, Bush must be acting out of conviction!

MEXICAN IMMIGRATION: A problem that will solve itself?

There has been a stunning decline in the fertility rate in Mexico, which means that, in a few years there will not be many teenagers in Mexico looking for work in the United States or anywhere else. If this trend in the fertility rate continues, Mexico will resemble Japan and Italy – rapidly aging populations with too few young workers to support the economy.

Read the whole thing.

PROBLEMS WITH the virtual fence.

MORE ON MOLLOHAN: “A $1 million earmark request by Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) would allow the Interior Department to expand a wilderness area neighboring properties the Congressman owns.”

MOTHER JONES: Running dog of reaction! That’s pretty much Jay Rosen’s take, anyway.

BLOGGING at the Nashville City Paper.

DAVID ADESNIK: Stop paying attention to Michael Moore.

Who?

UPDATE: On the other hand, this is kind of funny:

“There’s an elephant in the room, and it is you,” PETA president Ingrid Newkirk wrote in a letter to Moore.

Maybe his next work will be Downsize Me after all . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair notes that for someone who cares about animals, Ingrid Newkirk seems rather ignorant: “As it happens, elephants are vegetarians.”

READER TOM BROSZ ON THE IPHONE: “Give me a call when they make one you can drop on the sidewalk, carry in your pocket with keys and change, or plop it into a tide pool (done this), without destroying it. Only in recent months have Verizon and others finally started selling “ruggedized” phones. Years overdue, IMO.”

Good point.

A RALPH BAKSHI ENDING to the Harry Potter series? I’d love that, actually, but I imagine a lot of other people wouldn’t.

BRENDAN NYHAN:

The Wall Street Journal editorial board warns that the immigration debate threatens to make the GOP a minority party. They’re right. It splits the Republicans right down the middle, demoralizes the base in advance of 2008, and is prompting a conservative counter-mobilization that could make Latinos a Democratic constituency for years to come.

Ironically, the issue was not pushed to the top of the legislative agenda by Democrats. As John B. Judis points out, Democrats haven’t been able to push through any legislation that splits Republicans and forces a Bush veto (for now, at least, GOP party loyalty is too strong to overcome a filibuster).

Instead, Bush has been doing the Democrats’ work for them.

Yes, this is why it seems so odd to me that they would do this — particularly as it’s also hurting them with supporters they’ll soon need on the war. if Bush loses on the bill, it’s a big loss with lots of collateral damage. If he wins, it may be even worse.

HERE’S A CHRONOLOGY OF attacks on the oil industry in Nigeria. Plus this: “Gunmen have kidnapped the three-year-old son of a lawmaker in southern Nigeria’s Rivers State, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported on Wednesday.”

IT’S NOT PAY FOR PERFORMANCE: “Despite record-low approval ratings, House lawmakers Wednesday voted to accept an approximately $4,400 pay raise that will increase their salaries to almost $170,000. . . . The pay raise would also apply to the vice president – who is president of the Senate – congressional leaders and Supreme Court justices.”

UPDATE: An alternative proposal from Keith Milby: “I propose we pay them say $2,000 multiplied by their average approval rating. So according to the Real Clear Politics average congressional ratings, which is currently 25% that would be approximately $50,000.”

T.V. NETWORKS HIT a new ratings low.

JEFF SESSIONS: Talk radio knows the bill better than we do.

I think Senators should read bills before they vote on them. Yes, I realize this would bring Congress to a near standstill. . . .

MAKING PODCAST ADS more nimble.