In week of congressional hearings, Offshore Marine Service Association finds whimsical way to score 'Obamatorium'

WASHINGTON -- This week is chockablock with congressional hearings on the Macondo oil spill and the impact on the local economy and national energy policy of the slowdown in drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The video (see below) blends a hard-hitting narrative with a skillful visual style as a hand drawing with a marker on a white board...

WASHINGTON -- This week is chockablock with congressional hearings on the Macondo oil spill and the impact on the local economy and national energy policy of the slowdown in drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Rusty Costanza, The Times-PicayuneThe Harvey Warhorse II, front left, tows the Noble Frontier Driller to Signal East Shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., Aug. 7, 2010, after a moratorium halted new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The video (see below) blends a hard-hitting narrative with a skillful visual style as a hand drawing with a marker on a white board illustrates in often whimsical fashion the points being made.

"We've got to provide different mediums to get our message our," said Jim Adams, president and CEO of OMSA, which seeks to speak on behalf of the offshore marine transportation service industry and has become very active in the campaign to restore drilling activity in the Gulf.

Adams said the public is hearing two very different versions of what is happening in the Gulf right now -- one from the Obama administration and another from the industry. With their public relations consultants -- Counterpoint Strategies -- OMSA came up with the video with its clever drawings as a way to "keep people listening," while they lay out what have become mostly familiar arguments.

"I found it very compelling," said Adams.

Adams said he has not met or talked to the artist, Glenn Foden, a northern Viriginia political cartoonist with a conservative bent.

According to the website for CNSnews.com, "Foden has been an editorial cartoonist and office curiosity for 25 years and hopes to become computer literate by the end of his career. As of now, he depends upon his wife and twin teen daughters to explain the hard parts to him. As far as politics go, his first and best vote was for Ronald Reagan."

The site also noted that "Glenn hates shining the spotlight on himself, never grants interviews and really looks down on the pretentious people who write about themselves in the third person."

In a more conventional attempt to make their case, Adams will be among the witnesses testifying Thursday morning before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, which is launching a series of hearing on what it is calling"the American energy initiative," beginning with a hearing focusing on oil supplies, gas prices and jobs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Among the other witnesses testifying will be Jim Noe, executive director of the Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition, Marty Massey, chief executive office of the Marine Well Containment Company, Lucian Pugliaresi, president of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, and Joseph Mason, a business professor at Louisiana State University, who has studied the economic impact of the drilling moratorium.

An hour into those hearing, House Natural Resources will convene its own hearing on "harnessing American resources to create jobs and addressing rising gasoline prices: domestic resources and economic impacts."

And, that afternoon, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, will be at a budget hearing before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee.

A day earlier, on Wednesday morning, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will conduct a hearing on the findings of the National Oil Spill Commission, which closed its doors last week. EPW will hear from the commission's co chairs -- former Florida Sen. and Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat, and former EPA Administration Bill Reilly a Republican.

At precisely the same time Wednesday, the House Committee on Natural Resources Committee will convene a hearing on the economic and community impact of the "Obama Administration's de facto moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico." It will hear from, among others, Scott Angelle, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, Lafourche Parish President Charlotte Randolph, Chett Chiasson, executive director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission, and Samuel Giberga, general counsel of Hornbeck Offshore Services.

While most of the arguments about the new regulatory regime over drilling in the Gulf are by now well rehearsed, one new one, about two minutes into the OMSA video, is that, "in one regulation government bureaucrats literally did a 'find-and-replace,' on their word processors to indicate every instance of the word 'should' in the regulations and substituted the word 'must' -- 14,000 times. 'Job well done,' they may have thought, 'that will keep Gulf works idle for a while.'"

The anecdote is at once leavened and strengthened by Foden's humorous depiction of the bureaucrat at work.

BOEMRE did, in fact, replace "should" with "must" in revising the current American Petroleum Institute standards, to make clear that they are requirements and not suggestions. But they have been working with industry to clarify some cases where the substitution was not appropriate.

Said Adams: "The industry should not have been detained for months working out regulatory nonsense."