I am forced into agreeing with the editorial staff of my Local Puppy Trainer in their article: A new push for Gulf drilling. They actually looked at the facts of drilling in the Gulf, and the claims of the proponents to come to the conclusion that this is a really bad idea.

They are libertarians and normally overly pro-business, but they have been through some bad times: the bankruptcy of the syndicate that owned them and the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They were personally looking at the possibility of long-term unemployment if the paper failed.

They did what they were supposed do according to orthodox libertarian doctrine and it failed them miserably. They were in much better financial shape before being bought by the syndicate located in Orange County, California, which followed the standard model of putting profitable companies into debt to buy even more companies.

When you are dependent on advertizing and something like the BP oil spill brings economic activity to a halt just as you were starting to recover from the effects of the global financial meltdown, you really don’t want to hear drilling proponents talking about how ‘safe and worry-free’ drilling in the Gulf of Mexico really is.

The surprising thing for me is that they actually fact-checked the claims about the effects of increased domestic oil production and told people flat out that it has no effect on the cost of gasoline. We have had increased production for several years now, and the price of a gallon of gas it staying just below $4/gallon. The extra oil is being exported, not used in the US. Oil from the Alaskan North Slope has all been exported to Asia, not available for use in the US.

Drilling benefits oil companies, not the US, and certainly not Okaloosa County, Florida.