"Curiouser and Curiouser"- A View From Inside The Rabbit Hole at T-Ridge

The Los Angeles Times absolutely blew up my news aggregator this morning, but two items in particular are worth mentioning...

The first is about the political "gift that keeps on giving"... you guessed, T-Ridge.

It's been a week so we're probably overdue for another bizarre development in the T-Ridge offshore drilling saga. Well the Assembly, which threw the most recent T-Ridge curveball when it torpedoed the Senate plan to approve offshore drilling at the site, did not disappoint.

Patrick McGreevey reports in the Times today that the Assembly has expunged the T-Ridge vote from the official records, essentially making it disappear.

This is rank politics at its worst, even by T-Ridge standards. In a transparent ploy to protect members from defending a "yes" vote on drilling the Speaker simply pulled out the old legislative eraser and made the entire vote disappear.

This would certainly lend credence to the CalBuzz theory we talked about yesterday that recent poll results showing support for offshore drilling are misleading and that the issue is still a huge political liability for anyone trying to get reelected.

Also in the Times is a pretty level-headed commentary from George Skelton who basically says, "Enough!... Drill the oil and tax it. We need the oil and we need the revenue." (I'm paraphrasing but I think that is on point.)