The things you can find #2

Scanning that same "cool stuff" site, I also found a video of a news report about the aftermath of the BP oil blowout by WEAR-TV of Pensacola, Florida.

It's easy to forget that the disaster affected areas far beyond the Mississippi Delta region, that beaches as far away as Florida have been effected. Well, a reporter from the station named Dan Thomas went with a film crew to the Gulf Islands National Seashore along the Florida panhandle.

After noting that the federal government has directed that the workers hired by BP dig no further down than six inches into the sand to look for oil, Thomas said:

We had come out here to the National Park to show you just what exactly is in the sand, lower than 6 inches. We wanted to use the shovel and give you a look but apparently, that's illegal.

They were challenged first by Pat Gonzales, who claimed to be with the Fish and Wildlife Service and insisted -get this - that it's illegal to dig in the sand. After Thomas and his crew moved to a public beach, a site Gonzales proposed, they were confronted by Officer A. Negron of the National Park Service who demanded to see Thomas's "papers" and then told him not only that "you can't dig" in a national park (Thomas: "So no sand castles, none of that, huh?" Negron: "You're right.") but that it's illegal to film there unless you're with the media.

Thomas ended the report with "Apparently the National Parks Service will only allow BP workers to dig...And only down to six inches."

When the NPS was confronted with this, it turned out - surprise, surprise - that (of course) it's not illegal to dig in the sand and the officials had just no idea how the "field staff" got such a crazy idea.

Right. It was just a nutty fluke, a purely innocent misunderstanding that two separate people from two separate government agencies made exactly the same bogus claim to a news crew that was documenting how digging only six inches down was concealing just how much oil there actually was on that beach. Just pure chance and no one higher up had anything to do with it.

That stinks as bad as the oil, especially when the Obama administration has done its level best to drown the oil in happy talk about how it's almost completely "gone" (Gone where?) even as scientists (and reporters) are finding it is still there, at the bottom of the Gulf, on the beaches, in the tidal waters - and especially when that same administration has effectively made itself a partner with BP's continued pumping and drilling in the Gulf by making the corporation's profits from there the collateral for securing the fund for BP's compensation to those damaged by its corporate homicide of 11 workers and corporate devastation of the Gulf coast.

This really does smell.