Florida panhandle mess

[Jim Baird]

Cancellation was not an option for last week’s visit to the Emerald Coast of Florida’s panhandle west of Pensacola. Yet trepidation loomed large as a backseat passenger all the way there.

The pounding surf drowned our sighs of relief on evening’s arrival at Perdido Key. It didn’t look too bad at first walk’s glance.

At the edges of each wave’s effulgence the receding water left crescent shaped arrays of little brown beads like rat droppings over a caramel corona like every cup of latté leaves near its rim.

Where sandy surfaces leveled out to landward, the deposits were more finely dispersed, except for random blobs of greater size resembling tobacco quid ejected from a sailor’s foul mouth or the fecal leavings of some larger, stranger mammal.

Pieces that attained an age of a tide or two accreted a coating of sand and other sea detritus that gave them a granular and firmer look like Fido’s dog park dropping from the weekend before.

The first morning’s beach chair bask at water’s edge was soon truncated, however, by the cleanup crew’s arrival on big long buses with tinted windows. The work week had begun.

The buses unloaded onto a public access lot a hundred and fifty tee shirt clad workers in teams of greens, oranges, and whites. The shirts said “Qualified Community Responseâ€

[Marc]

I followed the topic for awhile but now I'm too disgusted to bother. Too disgusted with each and every one of the players. It's a lost cause.

Is this your writing Jim? It's very good.

Marc

[Terence McCann]

If you were pissed before Marc....

This was taken from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... tax04.html

When the Deepwater Horizon disaster set off the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the drilling platform was flying the flag of the Marshall Islands. Registering there allowed the rig's owner to significantly reduce its U.S. taxes.

The platform's owner, Transocean, moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, maneuvers that also helped it avoid taxes.

At the same time, BP was reaping sizable tax benefits from leasing the rig. According to a letter sent in June to the Senate Finance Committee, the company used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon, a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.

And we have politicians apologizing to BP.

The rest can be read at the link supplied.

[Jim Baird]

Thanks Marc.

I'm going to polish it and offer it to a cpl of local rags...

JB