Mostly Cajun points to an excellent website for ongoing updates to the Gulf Spill:
The Macondo/Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, With Running UpdatesA great mix of technology and political reporting.
UPDATE NO. 45, 5/13/10, 11:10 a.m.: We�ve said before that the reaction to the spill by the media and idiot politicians was likely to make things worse than the spill actually is.
Two easy examples to offer with respect to our assertion:
(1) the damage to the market for Louisiana seafood when that seafood is NOT tainted by the spill. The vast majority of Louisiana�s fisheries are still unaffected by the spill, but a picture of total environmental devastation from Corpus Christi to Key West like the legacy media is pushing will wipe out the ability to market the best seafood in the world regardless of what the truth is.
(2) the pictures of destruction of beaches with oil, which hasn�t happened anywhere yet and can be cleaned without an enormous amount of difficulty (it�s been done again and again), will kill beach tourism on the Gulf Coast for no good reason � particularly in places like Florida, where there is less and less reason to believe the spill will be a factor.
And while BP says it will pay �all legitimate claims,� it is virtually assured that when aggrieved parties make an effort to collect in those two cases, BP is going to fight. And they�ve got a case, because the $450 million the company has already spent in an effort to fight the spill and mitigate its damage is expressly intended to alleviate the harm. If oil doesn�t come to a beach in Florida, BP will argue with good reason that BP shouldn�t pay for folks not wanting to come to that beach. And if BP (or folks BP writes a check to) stops the oil from destroying Louisiana shrimp beds somewhere and that shrimp is plenty good to eat, BP is going to fight a claim of loss from the spill based on what Katie Couric said.
Enter Charlie Crist to crystallize our second example.
The strangely orange Florida governor, of dubious sexuality and even more dubious Senatorial candidacy, declared emergencies in coastal counties all over the state at the outset of the oil spill�s spread and made a big show of �never� allowing offshore drilling in waters off the Sunshine State. Crist used the spill to promote his independent run for the U.S. Senate � shamelessly so � and made national headlines in doing so.
Now Crist wants to shake down BP, even as there is no oil near Florida beaches.
