Hysterical. He claims he thought it was just a "courtesy thing," whatever that means, but he seems to suggest that he thought Countrywide just called him a "VIP" to be nice to him but that this status gave him no special beneifts whatsoever.

Okay. Just like being a Frequent Flier on an airline. You get absolutely no benefits or sky miles or price breaks or special amenities for being a Frequent Flier; you just get to call yourself a Frequent Flier.

It's just so awesome to lord it over everyone that you're a Frequent Flier. That's where all the benefit comes from -- recognition.

Thanks to CJ.

Self-Parody: Roland Martin descends to hitherto unknown depths to spin the Democrats out of this -- Admit It, Wouldn't We All Like to be VIPs?

Why yes, we all would. But we'd also all like to be rich and make "obscene profits" on oil, which has never before been suggested by a liberal as a reason not to tax the rich or tax "obscene profits."

Futhermore, while we'd all like to be Senators and we'd all like super-cheap VIP mortgages, the fact of our wishing doesn't suspend the normal rule preventing Senators from taking anything or any special deal. Remember, under the supposedly tight new ethics rules, a Senator isn't supposed to accept free baseball tickets.

And yet Roland Martin is claiming that just because we'd all like to have people giving us money and gifts and special deals to curry favor with us, we should give Dodd, Conrad, and the rest a break on this.

You know what I'd really like to have done?

I'd really like to have outed the fact that Joe Wilson was a partisan hack put on a sensitive mission by his partisan hack wife with the specific goal of coming back with a partisan hack conclusion to be fed to partisan hack writers like the NYT's Nicholas Kristof.

But I don't think Roland Martin would argue that just because I'd have loved to have done that, that Scooter Libby should never have been investigated or prosecuted.

Or would he?

Stupid fucks. They're not even hiding it anymore. Except to the extent they'll lie to your fucking face if you ask them about it directly.

Thanks to Slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (54)
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Above-the-Article Update: Johnson of Rathergate fame says there's no there there.

He says the pixelation is unremarkable in image compression, and that Hawaiian government workers say the document looks real enough to them.

...

I'm not capable of evaluating the technical case here but to a layman, it seems compelling.

Do I know it's fake? No. Do I think it's fake? Yes. It's suspicious as hell, though it's possible that a real Certification of Live Birth also has these suspicious-looking anomalies.

Whatever the case of course, this doesn't prove that Obama wasn't born in the US (or whatever the theory is as to why his birth certificate is important).

It does, however, seem to establish that:

1) The Kos Kidz learned much from Dan Rather and Bill Burkett, but not enough; they still don't know how to hide their forgeries, but that's not so important, because the Leftist/Media Collective pretends forgeries are real when it's in their interest to do so.

and

2) Obama let this forgery stand because it was politically helpful to him.

I guarantee you that the MSM, which often proclaims blogs have no credibility, believes that this fake settles the issue and thus disobligates them from doing what they strongly wished not to do anyway (that is, ask Obama for his birth certificate).

And of course they all are familiar with Kos and all the big leftwing bloggers. They're big blog readers. They just never read conservative blogs, except when they want to discover an inappropriate comment they can use to discredit the blog as a whole.

They didn't report on this story (which, admittedly, is likely a non-story), but one of the reasons for avoiding reportage was the "fact" that Kos had already "disproven" it.

I don't put much stock in the whole Obama-born-in-Kenya-and-thus-constitutionally-barred-from-seeking-the-presidency theory, but that theory, whatever there is to it, remains viable. The "proof" offered by Kos looks, at least to a layman, fraudulent.

More from Snapped Shot.

What is really needed here is for a Hawaiian to request his own "Certification of Live Birth" from his state government so we can compare, and see, for example, if the certification provided has headline-slugs (which one would expect to be pre-printed, and thus of a different font than than the information printed beneath them) in the same font as the actual personal data.

While I don't expect this line of inquiry to go anywhere, I can't help but noting the MSM, particularly the NYT, published several pieces questioning whether John McCain's birth in Panama (as the son of a warfighter deployed overseas) disbarred him from seeking the presidency.

Seems they could assign a single reporter to determine if Barack Obama was, indeed, born in the US.

Update: Slublog did an experiment and used photoshop to put in letters. He didn't get the pixelation strangeness seen in the document.

Slu's experiment:

So photoshop does not necessarily equal pixelation, and pixelation does not necessarily equal photoshop.

Others have suggested this effect could be due to image compression. I get the basic idea of what that is but I don't understand why it should affect the area around letters and not, for example, the basic background of the document. Can anyone explain?

And can anyone explain why it should be this document is only available on the web? Why doesn't Obama make a true paper copy available for inspection?

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (162)
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This one a key foreign policy adviser, though I imagine we'll soon learn that former Undersecretary for Tigger Affairs W. Pooh is merely an "informal" adviser only "tangential" to the campaign.

This despite his critical work for Obama in reducing the proliferation of dual-use Pink Elephant technology.

Update: Superdelegate Piglet received below-market-mortgage-rates from Countrywide, too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (65)
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No, really; this isn't just the Democrats talking down the amount of recoverable oil. It's the actual USGS estimate.

Conservative bloggers, of course, are guilty of pushing this vicious smear.

The "400 billion barrel" figure came from a draft report posted on the internet which 1) has since been debunked and 2) wasn't even talking about what people usually talk about when they talk about the oil capacity of a field (that is, barrels that can actually be recovered with existing technology and at a profit).

Reports circulating on the Internet tell of an oil field spanning parts of western North Dakota and eastern Montana where 400 billion barrels of oil supposedly are just waiting to be tapped. However, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) tells Cybercast News Service that those huge estimates are "a myth."

A USGS report issued in April estimates that there are between 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of oil in what is referred to as "the Bakken Formation" -- well below the 400 billion barrels discussed on the Web, but up from the previous estimate of 151 million barrels made in 1995.

Richard Pollastro, Bakken Formation task leader at the USGS, said the myth stems from a 1999 draft report -- never published -- by a now-deceased USGS employee, Leigh Price. Price estimated that the Bakken Formation holds up to 400 billion barrels of oil. To put that in perspective, Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has about 260 billion barrels of known oil reserves.

Price, however, died in 2000, before his study could be peer-reviewed and published, and the Bakken Formation became the fool's gold of the oil industry.

"Unfortunately, in many instances, we are still trying to explain and defend our assessment versus the inappropriate and irresponsible posting of Dr. Price's 'draft report,'" Pollastro told Cybercast News Service.

According to Jonathon Kolak, a USGS scientist and information specialist, the discrepancy between Price's 1999 estimates and the agency's 2008 findings arises from the fact that Price was trying to assess the "oil generation potential" of the oil found in the pores of rocks and shale in the Bakken field, as well as the total content of how much oil might be pooling up - or "oil in place."

"What Dr. Price was looking at was 'oil generation potential,' and then, from that, trying to make an estimate of 'oil in place,'" said Kolak. "Those terms are very distinct from 'undiscovered technically recoverable resources.'"

Further, if you read on, you'll see the formation actually is already being drilled -- so while we could see more drilling and more oil, the idea that this is some untapped resource is also wrong.

We do have a lot of untapped oil. Not enough to be nearly self-sufficient, but certainly enough to reduce our dependency on foreign oil (and foreign blackmail) and reduce prices substantially. But there is unfortunately no silver bullet lurking under the Dakotas.

Of course we should drill more in Bakken -- the Democrats always claim that any individual site doesn't have enough oil to solve all of our energy problems. Which is a very strange criterion. Goalposts being moved to the next stadium over.

Via Hot Air.

Meanwhile, Dick Morris discusses the "speculation tax" on oil.

It's an informative read, but his conclusions are wrong. He suggests (without quite advocating) that if only speculators were restrained from speculating, oil prices would come down.

That's... sort of true, and that sort of bureaucratic response may be useful. (Increasing margins for speculation up from the piddling 5% currently demanded would reduce a lot of this.)

But the main reason future oil prices keep getting bid up to the heavens is that there is nothing, nothing but upward pressures on prices visible on the horizon. If there were a more equitable mix of upward and downward pressures (the latter coming from, say, expanding US production, or something patently insane like that), prices would be restrained.

You can lose a lot speculating. It's just that, at the moment, there's so little risk of prices actually falling that no one is much afraid of the downside.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (52)
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Heh.

This blog's policy is $1000/word, no discounts for extended quotes. There is no requirement that my rate mirror AP's.

So the next time the MSM wants to quote this blog for (as is often the case) purposes of criticism -- look at what crazy right-wingers are saying! -- it's going to cost them.

Further, of course, this license may be revoked at any time by licensor (that would be me), if the licensor determines the licensee is undermining the credibility of this site, any coblogger or commenter on this site, the conservative movement generally, or "the sport of the future," Extreme Hobo Hunting.

And let me say... It's not as if AP has no right to enforce its intellectual property rights, or that I've joined the silly movement claiming such rights don't exist and that "information is free" and all that jazz.

It's that the AP simply refuses to acknowledge any fair-use whatsoever. They insist on payment from word one. So if an AP story calls the Boudemaine decision a "stunning rebuke," and I quote those two words (and only those two words), the AP claims I now owe them $5.00.

Even if those words were actually from another source the AP is itself quoting.

That is preposterous. It's hard to say what "fair use" consists of, but at the very least it consists of a paragraph from a 5-6 paragraph piece, one and a half paragraphs from a 7-9 paragraph piece, two paragraphs from a 10-12 paragraph piece, etc.

The AP has defined the "fair use threshold" as zero. You pay from the very first word. That's not what the law says or has ever said. It's not the law now, and never will be the law.

Even in my digest of the "large earthlike planets story" from yesterday, the AP's jackass "price schedule" demands, I imagine, that I would have to pay for the world "exoplanet" because that appeared in the AP article, despite the fact that, you know, the AP doesn't own that word; it's a term astronomers use.

Two buck fitty, they claim.

Um, no. Fuck you.

(Actually, looking at the "prices" again, it seems they do give you four words free. Um, okay.)

Rachel Lucas looks up Fair Use. Perhaps AP ought to as well.

Again, there's no question that AP has a legitimate right and interest in patrolling the web for wholesale copying-and-pasting of its articles. But attempting to (unlawfully) redefine "fair use" as four words is absurd.

Posted by: Ace at 09:46 AM | Comments (13)
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This morning Giuliani went after Obama and his 9/10 mindset.

“These are not isolated criminal acts,” Giuliani said. “They are a loosely defined conspiracy and an act of war. For Sen. Obama to suggest ’93 is the best example of how to deal with this is a good example of him wanting to go on defense.”

He added, “The real problem with Sen. Obama’s answer is he seems to think the 93 situation was correctly handled. It’s the failure to recognize that you had to go further than.” He said it was treated as “a criminal act” when it should have been treated “as an act of war. We didn’t recognize that even as late as the Cole. …It seems to me Sen. Obama is of that mindset.”

Now the Obama/DNC team responds.

In an e-mail, entitled, “Giuliani v Giuliani: 1993 World Trade Center Bombing Case,” the Obama campaign points out that in 1993, Giuliani said at the time, per the New York Times, March 5, 1994: “Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared that the verdict ‘demonstrates that New Yorkers won't meet violence with violence, but with a far greater weapon -- the law.’”

Also from that day’s Times: “Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he hoped that the verdicts would lessen tensions rather than increase them. ‘It should show that our legal system is the most mature legal system in the history of the world,’ he said, ‘that it works well, that that is the place to seek vindication if you feel your rights have been violated.’”

Yes it would have been helpful had Rudy and lots of people (hello Bill Clinton!) had learned the lessons of the first WTC attack but they didnÂ’t. Does that mean after 9/11 Rudy should have stuck to his law enforcement first stance?

It seems Obama and his people are proud that they, unlike Rudy havenÂ’t changed their position in light of 9/11 which was, um, exactly what Rudy was saying was the problem.

ItÂ’s one thing to have a quick response team but you donÂ’t win any points for responding in a way that makes you look stupid, no matter how quickly you do it.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:15 AM | Comments (19)
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I put little doodads around 'Haiku' because occasionally some smartass shows up in these threads and tells us we're not doing it right.

We know it's not really haiku, OK? It's just a handy form that soothes the savage moron, allowing him to distill his frenzied rants down to a few terse, drool-moistened words.

The spare form gives our observations on pudding a certain resonance.
I'll kick it off with one dedicated to Mr. John McCain:

Untitled

Lie to me again
you fucking FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKING FUCKER AAAAARRRGGGHH
I'm gonna get drunk

Whew.
That might not have been a 5-7-5 format. When this burst blood vessel in my eye clears a bit, I'll have to count syllables and tighten that one up.

Posted by: LauraW at 09:01 AM | Comments (153)
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Uh oh. Senator “Diplomacy Is My Middle Name” can’t seem to get through one phone conversation with a foreign dignitary without either misunderstanding what the guy said or lying about it to the press.

According to Obama the conversation went something like this.

At a press availability in Michigan, I asked Obama if Zebari had expressed any concern to him that his plans to withdrawal U.S. troops as president would undo any security advances.

"No, he did not express that," Obama said. "He did emphasize his belief that we've made real progress and I think was eager to see political accommodations between the factions follow up in the wake of this progress.

Â…And so my sense is that we should be able to execute a withdrawal and set a timeframe - a timetable that continues to allow US forces to support Iraqi forces in going after terrorists, that continues to train the Iraqi police and military as long as we're not training militias that are turning on each other.

Yeah, except ZebariÂ’s version of the story is a little different.

Mr. Zebari said he told Mr. Obama that "Iraq is not an island." In other words, an American withdrawal that destabilized the country would also roil the region around it and embolden U.S. adversaries such as al-Qaeda and Iran. "We have a deadly enemy," Mr. Zebari said. "When he sees that you commit yourself to a certain timetable, he will use this to increase pressure and attacks, to make it look as though he is forcing you out. We have many actors who would love to take advantage of that opportunity." Mr. Zebari says he believes U.S. forces can and should be drawn down. His point is that reductions should be made gradually, as the Iraqi army becomes stronger.

The foreign minister said "my message" to Mr. Obama "was very clear. . . . Really, we are making progress. I hope any actions you will take will not endanger this progress." He said he was reassured by the candidate's response, which caused him to think that Mr. Obama might not differ all that much from Mr. McCain.

Seems what we have here is a failure to communicate. And this is with an ally, a guy who has been foreign minister since the first provincial government was established in 2003. In other words, a pro who has worked and survived in a very dangerous environment and who has a boat load more experience than Obama.

And still Obama manages to muff it.

Yeah, letÂ’s turn this idiot loose in a dangerous world.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:10 AM | Comments (31)
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And now for a small geek interlude.

So yesterday was supposed to be some sort of Download Day for Firefox 3, the new, improved, and allegedly memory-leak-free version of that non-monopoly browser.

Now I'm sure all the back-end improvements are very nice, but anyone who actually downloaded it may have noticed some unpleasant changes to the interface. First, the only good theme -- Pinball -- isn't compatible, and never will be. Second, the change from the address bar to the so-called "awesome bar" is pure application-destroying crap. Whose horrible idea was this?

If you want to return Firefox 3 to something approaching the previous, working address bar functionality, the following steps should help:
(1) Install the oldbar extension.
(2) Go to "about:config" (via the address bar).
(3) Scroll down to "browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped".
(4) Double click to set this to "true".

You can also tweak some of the other browser.urlbar.* preferences, but this is a start.

Posted by: Open Blog at 07:31 AM | Comments (81)
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I think it was mostly the missile and the 30mm rounds.

It's a little slower to develop than some other gun cam videos (about 2 minutes total) but I think it's worth the wait.

Sadly, their Habeas Corpus petition was dismissed because there were too many pieces of the corpus missing.

UPDATE [DinT]: Afghan and NATO forces honor Mullah Ahmedullah's greatest desire that his men "fight to the death" by delivering on that death thing.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:19 AM | Comments (45)
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