The Gulf's "Little People" Fight Back--Against Obama

H/T FreeRepublic  From Forbes.com

Earlier today, the “little people” of the Gulf coast—those who live and work in coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida and who have come to depend on off-shore drilling for their very survival—won a significant victory in federal court. Who was their legal adversary? The federal government. ...

So the little people decided to fight back. Several owners of small companies who provide a myriad of services to support offshore drilling in the Gulf, including those who ferry people and supplies to offshore oil rigs, went to federal court to enjoin the federal government from enforcing what they saw as an arbitrarily imposed moratorium. Today, they won. Detailing the economic harm to local businesses and employees that the moratorium would cause, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman issued a preliminary injunction against the moratorium, which he described as “generic, indeed punitive”:

Some of the plaintiffs’ contracts have been affected; the Court is persuaded that it is only a matter of time before more business and jobs and livelihoods will be lost. The [federal government] trivialize[s] such losses by characterizing them as merely a small percentage of the drilling rigs affected, but it does not follow that this will somehow reduce the convincing harm suffered.

Perhaps demonstrating that it is even more tone deaf than BP’s chairman, the White House swiftly promised to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.