Don't Mess With My Pool.

Yesterday I pointed out that the judge who put a stay on Obama's six month moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in deep water sounded more like an oil company decision then a judges. Turns out the judge in the case owns a substantial amount of stock in oil companies drilling in the Gulf. Now, I'm sure he wasn't influenced by that fact, but then, subconsciously, he almost certainly would have been. Say what you will, things like that do influence human thinking. I know that with my millions invested in clean air and water, I'm influenced when somebody wants to dump foul smelling garbage in my swimming pool. Oh. Wait. I don't have a pool. Well if I did, I wouldn't like it. One of the arguments has been that if the six months moratorium holds, the oil companies will leave the Gulf and never return. Do you know how silly that sounds? Does anyone actually think that the oil companies, who have leases on proven oil fields in the Gulf, are going to permanently abandon them? It's like telling you that if you have a couple of pounds of gold, you can't cash it in for six months, so you throw it away and go to work digging for gold in another state. If you do, let me know where you threw it, because I'm willing to wait. Since the oil industry has no workable plan to correct a problem should one occur, they should be required to wait until they do have a plan that has a realistic chance of working. Of course, that could take forever. Maybe that's what the judge is really afraid of.