Way down in Louisiana, a federal judge, Martin L. C. Feldman "issued a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a May 28 order halting all floating offshore drilling project in more than 500 feet of water and preventing the government from issuing new permits for such projects."
Hmmm. It would seem reasonable to me that the government should shut things down until we figure out exactly what happened and why and what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again.
It would seem especially important to know those things when there are 4,000 plus drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, which is now becoming a slimy, gooey, oil slick due to the stupidity and perhaps criminal culpability of BP and Halliburton and other nogoodnik companies that put profits before anything else.
The government plans to appeal the judge's ruling. That also makes a lot of sense.
But, the question arises: Why would a judge do such a thing? Especially now that Lousianians have been praying diligently for some god or other to stop the leak?
Well it turns out that da judge has "massive holdings in energy companies." Think Progress put together a list:
"Like many judges presiding in the Gulf region, Feldman owns lots of energy stocks, including Transocean, Halliburton, and two of BP's largest U.S. private shareholders -- BlackRock (7.2%) and JP Morgan Chase (28.3%)."
It's all spelled out in detail here.
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