Preach it!

Today I heard a CBS radio news report about the ban expiring today and felt obligated to set the record straight for benefit of folks in the anti-drilling crowd.

During the CBS radio news report [to which, unfortunately, IÂ’ve been unable to find a link] the reporter spoke with a woman described as a resident of Santa Barbara, Calif., who shared her disdain for the prospect of drilling taking place off the California coast.

Recalling personal memories of a 1969 oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast, the lady in Santa Barbara cited the prospect of another environmental disaster as the primary reason behind her opposition to a resumption of offshore drilling. Secondarily, she cited the threat drilling poses to the pristine beauty of the California coast. Understandably, her concerns are based upon personal experience.

In my estimation, however, both of these arguments are non-starters today, especially when one considers the many ways offshore drilling during the past 40 years. I say, “They’re obsolete” and industry experts agree.

“Surprising to many, offshore oil and natural gas production actually puts less oil and gas into the environment than natural leaks, transportation and shipping,” said Ford Brett, president of OGCI PetroSkills, during a guest appearance on Energy Tomorrow Radio Aug. 28. His company is the world’s largest petroleum technology training organization that trains geologists and engineers on how to find and retrieve oil and natural gas from the ground.

The strong likelihood that most of the offshore drilling platforms will be placed, at a minimum, 12 to 18 miles from shore, renders the other aspect of the “pristine beauty” argument moot. Because of the curvature of the earth, people standing on the California coast — or, for that matter, any other coast — will not be able to see platforms that far out. Even people viewing the ocean from the upper floors of office building along the coast will have a hard time distinguishing the drilling platforms.

That it, in a nutshell; people assume that any new rigs or platforms will be built with technology/engineering/architecture from the 1960s, and will be just as close to shore, and just as likely to spill.

What they don't get is that there is more danger of oil spills from the tankers we use to ship oil than from state-of-the-art installations designed to extract them.

And the next time I hear someone say that this country only has 2-3% of the world's oil reserves (based on obsolete measurement techniques from the 1980s), I'm going to scream.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 08:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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on the glorious history of our economic problems:

h/t: Moe at Red State.

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Hat tips: Darrell, my husband (who was watching it when I woke up this, um, what I mean to say, hold on a minute . . . this afternoon), and The Anchoress, where A the H happened to find it. Oh—and that Dave Burge guy.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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You'll want to make a note of that, Barry.

I know you're a swashbucklin' kind of guy—but personally, I wouldn't fuck with Kissinger.

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. . . is grateful that he insisted that McCain showed up tonight.

Johnny Mac is eating Barry for dinner.

Obama knows nothing about economics, military strategy, reform, or how to control spending.

He does not even seem to realize that Afghanistan is not officially a U.S.-led effort, in the way that Iraq is. Does Obama know that Afghanistan is a U.N. effort, and that this handcuffs the U.S. military to some degree—and that Afghanistan is the closest thing the military world has to an uncrackable nut?

The more AQs we kill in Iraq, the fewer we'll have to take care of Afghanistan (and Pakistan, if it comes to that).

Given the fact that the U.N. has us in handcuffs, we need every advantage we can get when we go to complete the transformation that must occur in Afghanistan.

Which means that we have it wrap things up in Iraq, and we're awfully close to success there.

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If McCain is still working on a bailout, and Obama decides to bail out of D.C. alone, and have a "town hall" meeting,

(1) Does his still have his telepromter, and
(2) what happens when and if the format's already determined, and McCain flies into the venue at the last minute, once it's been decided that it will be a town-hall format, which Obama's been refusing to do all along?

Can you say "sudden death"?

Of course, there's one thing McCain can do that would be even more diabolical: send Palin in to sub for him.

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Eric Odom on An American Carol, which I haven't pimped in, like, an hour:

I want to help the folks behind the movie as much as possible. Unlike most liberal-directed movies coming out of Hollywood, An American Carol is sort of the first of its kind. Sure, there have been other center-right films to hit the market, but most did not have quite the opportunity this one has . . . .

If An American Carol does well on opening weekend, itÂ’s safe to say that other films with a center-right flavor will follow. This movie, with an all-star cast and a powerful set of directors/producers/writers, can score HUGE box office points and send a message to the Hollywood elites.

The problem is that it canÂ’t do this without our help. While the film isnÂ’t really a low-budget film, it certainly needs the help of the grassroots movement to give it a kick-start next week. The movie will open in more than 2,000 theaters on October 3rd, and we need to get anyone and everyone we know to go see it.
"What [you're asking] can I do to get involved?"

Message, message, message.

(1) Word of mouth is our finest tool in this information war, and we need to put it to work like never before.

PLEASE make sure you tell everyone you know about An American Carol and how it opens on October 3rd. (Opening weekend often being a big measurement of a movie's appeal, by studio execs. --ed) Tell all your friends, family, co-workers, online connections, etcÂ… everyone.

(2) Social Networks
IÂ’ve set up a Facebook group that I plan to use over the next eight days to promote and coordinate grassroots efforts to market the movie. Click below to join the Facebook group.

BE SURE TO INVITE YOUR FRIENDS!

Once youÂ’ve joined the group, please check the news section to see if there is an event planned to see the movie in your area. If there is not, create an event and let me know so that I can add it to the news section.

There is also an official Twitter profile that I am told will be used by the PR folks behind An American Carol. Follow An American Carol there (link below).

(3) An American Carol Action Network

Join the social network set up for An American Carol ["the American Carolers"] by clicking below.

This is our chance to help a conservative movie succeed and show Hollywood what Americans want more of. We must work together as a grassroots movement to help get the word out.

An American Carol on Twitter.

An American Carol on Facebook.

Join the American Carolers! Main site for the movie (sound enabled); become part of the effort!

Works for me! Eric and I are both good people to get info from (we're like little kids—expert shoulder-tappers: we just keep tapping until we get answers), as will be the official Twitter account for AAC.

Personally, I welcome questions from both "consumers" (people who are simply anxious to see the film), and other new-media types who want more info.

Rock the (Capitalistic) Vote!

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Tonight, tonight, tonight!

He'll be discussing An American Carol on NBC--they tell me "11:34 Pacific time." That time sounds so precise; we should watch the whole thing.

After all:

• Leno has a Harley;
• his wife was one of the first women to come out against the Taliban's gender apartheid;
• Leno's been joking that if we only started ramping up domestic petroleum production ten years ago, when they told us it wouldn't do any good, because it would take a full decade to reach full capacity . . . we'd have that oil now.

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Turne out everyone's innocent, thank goodness. We know, because they told us that

Rusty doesn't quite see it that way; he probably needs therapy or something.

Sure, the VP of a PR firm could have produced the video on his own, personally paid for the voice talent, got the agency to bill him, asked his multimillionaire President of a well known Democratically connected PR firm of a father to legitimize its false attacks, created multiple sock puppet accounts, and asked his buddies at the PR firm which specializes in "grassroots organization" to spread it around the internet claiming it was from "A Group of Concerned Citizens" --- on company time. It's possible.

It's also possible that I'll get a shot at that Angelina Jolie - Scarlett Johannson thing. This is American damnit, everything is possible!

It's also possible that we have a case of astroturfing, plain and simple. Which, by definition, is a paid political campaign run by parties unknown, who wish to remain unknown, and who wish the whole thing to appear as if it's bottom up and grassroots.

But, who knows? Our investigation was really about getting the MSM off their lazy asses and doing the real digging. But apparently investigative journalism has been reduced to calling a campaign and getting a statement.

I think that's how Woodward and Bernstein did it, right? They called the White House and said, "Hey, Nixon, did you do it? No. Okay. Case closed."

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Let's bite the bullet, and then make sure this doesn't happen again.

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I wonder why they don't get more attention. For instance, there's this doozy.

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The McCain team makes it really easy. They provide the phone numbers, and the script; you can make the calls at your own pace.

Last week, our campaign launched a grassroots effort to put you in touch with voters all across the country through our online phone bank.

The polls all show this election is in a dead heat, and we expect the polls to stay close until Election Day. That's why it's so important for you to get involved today. This election will be won by turning out key voters all over the country. You can help the McCain-Palin campaign win by taking 30 minutes out of your evening to make 20 calls for John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Follow this link to make calls: www.JohnMcCain.com/PhoneBank

The Obama-Biden campaign has hired hundreds of paid staff and is spending millions of dollars bombarding undecided voters with advertisements filled with negative, misleading and false information about John McCain and Governor Palin. We need your help to combat this and get the truth out to these voters. You are the most effective surrogate we have in this campaign. By reaching out to undecided voters, one by one, you are taking a crucial step towards our victory.

Today, we are only six weeks away from Election Day and we need your help right now. In such a close election, taking 30 minutes to make 20 calls for John McCain and Governor Palin can make the difference.

Follow this link to make calls: www.JohnMcCain.com/PhoneBank

As always, I appreciate your hard work and dedication to our team!

Sincerely,

Christian Ferry
Deputy Campaign Manager

P.S. John McCain and Governor Palin are ready to lead our country and ready to challenge the status quo. Please do your part to elect the McCain-Palin ticket in November by making calls today through our online phone bank. The work you are doing today will make a big difference on Election Day. Thank you.

By the way, the McCain campaign official website has special resources for undecided voters, and one of their "sub-groups," Citizens for McCain, is specifically geared toward Democrats who are crossing party lines for this election. I was impressed that his acceptance speech at the Convention was critical of the GOP—even in front of thousands of the party faithful—and that he still pitched his ability to cross party lines to get things done.

Furthermore, on the McCain website, one can earn "points" (that silly little gimmick so many websites are engaging in these days to motivate their members) not only by hosting debate-watching parties, phone-banking, inviting friends to join, sending political emails, etc., but also by volunteering for community groups to perform nonpolitical charity work. Including Habitat for Humanity. So Senator McCain is not throwing the Carterian baby out with the bathwater, by any stretch of the imagination.

This election could well be even closer than the 2004 election was, so get busy.

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. . . however he tried in 2005. Kevin Hassett in Bloomberg:

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The financial crisis of the past year has provided a number of surprising twists and turns, and from Bear Stearns Cos. to American International Group Inc., ambiguity has been a big part of the story.

Why did Bear Stearns fail, and how does that relate to AIG? It all seems so complex.

But really, it isn't. Enough cards on this table have been turned over that the story is now clear. The economic history books will describe this episode in simple and understandable terms: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exploded, and many bystanders were injured in the blast, some fatally.

Fannie and Freddie did this by becoming a key enabler of the mortgage crisis. They fueled Wall Street's efforts to securitize subprime loans by becoming the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

In the times that Fannie and Freddie couldn't make the market, they became the market. Over the years, it added up to an enormous obligation. As of last June, Fannie alone owned or guaranteed more than $388 billion in high-risk mortgage investments. Their large presence created an environment within which even mortgage-backed securities assembled by others could find a ready home.

The problem was that the trillions of dollars in play were only low-risk investments if real estate prices continued to rise. Once they began to fall, the entire house of cards came down with them.

Turning Point

Take away Fannie and Freddie, or regulate them more wisely, and it's hard to imagine how these highly liquid markets would ever have emerged. This whole mess would never have happened.

It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.

Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission's chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie's position on the relevant accounting issue was not even ``on the page'' of allowable interpretations.

Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a ``world-class regulator'' that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.

Greenspan's Warning

The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn't be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie ``continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,'' he said. ``We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.''

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Mounds of Materials

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

So: heads, the politicians win; tails, the taxpayers lose.

Via Ace of Spades.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:31 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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It's like this: it appears that John McCain's chief of staff is gay.

Now here is what your average German Shepherd would conclude: "Oh. I thought most prominent members of the Republican Party were homophobic. Guess I was wrong."

Instead, it's being presented as "hypocrisy." Because, you see, John McCain is "anti-gay." How do we know he's anti-gay? Because he wants to go slowly on integrating "out" gays into the Armed Forces, and isn't sure that civil unions should be referred to using the word "marriage." (I'm cool with the latter; I disagree strongly with the former; "don't ask, don't tell" has been a disaster. But is there anyone out there who doesn't think we're going to go the way of the British special forces and have full sexual-orientation within the military within 5-10 years?)

So was it hypocritical for Cheney to employ his daughter in the 2004 campaign? Was it hypocritical for Barry Goldwater to maintain good relations with his son, and rail against sexual-orientation in the military back in the 1960s? Is it hypocritical for Steve Schmidt—the architect of McCain's Presidential election this year—to see to it that the Log Cabin Republicans were an officially recognized group this year at the GOP convention, and to meet with them personally? Is it hypocritical for him to speak warmly of his sister and her life partner—and to stress what an important role they play in his life, and the life of his kids?

Is it hypocritical for George W. Bush to have friends who are transgendered? Is it hypocritical for Condi Rice to befriend her colleagues with gender dysphoria issues?

Was it hypocritical for Sarah Palin to leave her church after they started discussing the notion that homosexuality can be "cured"?

I'm sorry, but none of these things strike me as hypocritical. The word I would use is "tolerance."

Except that these people are and were Republicans. So it cannot be "tolerance." It must be "hypocrisy," since leading members of the GOP cannot quite live up to (or rather down to) the cartoonish notions that people carry around in their heads.

Oh, and: here's a portrait of one of our frontrunners for the GOP Presidential nomination:

And some more from "hypocrites" like BoiFromTroy—who is running an ad for Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Republicans Against 8." Hypocrites!

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Maybe I did misjudge him . . .

Obama Promises To Stop America's Shitty Jobs From Going Overseas

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Dan Riehl just ran this extremely authentic-looking video of David Axelrod talking to Ethan Winner of Winner and Associates:

I know I can trust the information contained therein, because there are no production credits on it. With no one taking credit or blame, it seems safe to say that this is an honest representation of just exactly how it all, um, went down last night.

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Robert Stacy is staying on top of the case.

Hey—unlike Family "Winner," the Kernel kid at least made a half-assed attempt to cover his tracks. And he's half Ethan's age or some such.

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Apparently, though, he did it on his own time, with his own money, and out of the goodness of his heart.

He hasn't paid the voiceover actress, yet: apparently, she hasn't yet "invoiced" him. And he didn't identify himself as the producer, because he . . . I dunno. I guess he forgot or something.

No word why his father/CEO or his colleague-in-the-family's PR firm also created You Tube accounts and attempted to promote the video. Nor why it came to the attention of sites like dKos or Jesus' General, where it was openly promoted there as a good "dirty trick" that the Left ought to disseminate as aggressively as possible.

It seems to me that Winner and Associates is the real-life equivalent of the Jodie Foster character in "Inside Man": 100% amoral, completely mercenary, and able to fix just about any problem—for the right price.

So . . . now that they've been outed, on a scheme that might just be violation of FEC rules, can they fix themselves?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:50 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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The second version of the trailer; I kind of like this one:

Opens October 3rd! (I've been told that's the same day that the movie about G.W. Bush comes out.)

Remember: The film's parody site is moovealong.org. I signed up there, too, and got a note from "Michael Malone" saying something along the lines of "I can't believe you signed up for this! Go see An American Carol! Her master's voice . . . )

The official site is here, and you can join the "American Carolers" to help spread the word, network with other supporters of the effort—and even earn "points" by spreading the word in various ways. Those who earn the most points can win prizes such as autographed movie posters, and the Brass Ring—a private screening of the movie for you and your friends.

(As usual, other bloggers are encouraged to get in touch with me, so I can forward any extra goodies that come my way from their new media outreach branch.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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and then there's Chicago.

Know the difference.

h/t: Insty.

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