Judge Felman's ruling comes with a personal price.

A new twist in the Gulf oil disaster.  Remember when the administration shut down all deep water oil drilling?  A judge has now reversed that decision saying it was too heavy handed.  The court ruled that just because one oil well was flawed, the Obama administration illegally imposed a six-month moratorium on offshore drilling and a halt to 33 exploratory wells going into the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman ruled that this was not sufficient evidence that the other wells were also flawed.

This approach makes sense to me based on those criteria. Since drilling now has however become another politicized issue, this just rings in the start of another lengthy legal battle between the court ruling and the White House, which announced that a swift response can be expected.

Of course the idiots also will be coming out of the woodwork on this one.  There are already those who have pulled tax returns by saying the judge owns stock in oil companies.  My answer to that is, so what.  If he didn’t own stock but still drove a car would that make him a “partner” with big oil?  If that’s the case then I guess we are all to blame. And of course in  a morbid sense we are.

I don’t think we should say that if one plane goes down because of a mechanical failure that all the other planes should be immediately grounded.  If a ship were to break up in heavy seas that does not indicate that all other ships are destined to be doomed.
Gosh, if we were going to use that analogy then what would we do if we were to find one crooked congressman, would that mean all the others are crooked also?  Wait an minute, what just happened here?  Oh well, I guess I need a little more time to ponder this one.

So what if Feldman’s 2008 financial disclosure form, posted online by Judicial Watch , shows that the judge owned stock in Transocean, as well as five other companies that are either directly or indirectly involved in the offshore drilling business. None of the companies were direct parties to the lawsuit seeking to overturn the ban.
An Associated Press investigation found earlier this month that more than half the federal judges in the Gulf districts affected by the BP spill have financial ties to the oil and gas industry.
So in the mean time, I take my hat off to Judge Feldman for his ruling and his courage to find balance in a lose-lose situation.  The Gulf is in enough environmental and economical trouble, we don’t don’t need to be throwing political gas on the fire.