David Deyen at FireDogLake is torn over Obama’s deepwater drilling moratorium:

Apparently how it goes is you can announce a moratorium, have the courts nullify it, and then go ahead and announce a new moratorium. I’m concerned about what that says about checks and balances, and where the line gets drawn.

Hurray!  A liberal concerned about a violation of checks and balances when a Democrat is in office. Will wonders never cease? I’ll go ahead and answer that yes, they will cease, because Deyen quickly ovecomes his concerns about the President ignoring the court’s order to allow drilling again by giving the old, tired arguments about “corruption” and “profits over lives”:

However, the stay on the moratorium was a fantastically corrupt ruling, one that put the value of corporate profits over human lives, and if it can be vacated, it should.

Even if the judge, Martin Feldman, who heard this case was acting in his own self-interest, due to his stocks – and I’m not sure that’s been determined yet, as we don’t know how his portfolio was configured – the ruling was a sound one:

“The blanket moratorium, with no parameters, seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger,” wrote Judge Feldman, a 1983 appointee of President Ronald Reagan.

Unlike what Dreyen wants us to believe, this is not about profits (well, ultimately it always is, but it’s not the primary reason here).  It’s about jobs.  This moratorium is putting people out of work, at a time we hardly need more people out of work.

As for the argument about “profits over lives,” Feldman is right when he says that you cannot punish all companies just because BP decided to cut corners and endanger lives. Unless the government has some proof that the other operations are unsafe, it doesn’t make sense to paint them all with the same brush. If the government can prove it, then I might be moved to support their side. But it if doesn’t, the need for good paying jobs must prevail over governmental paternalism.

I’m saying nothing really original here, but I think the graphic below will reinforce the argument that the economy does not need to see more job loss right now (h/t Hot Air). The graphic is the number of discouraged workers, or those who are not even bothering to look for a job because they’ve given up hope. Banning those 33 drilling operations will likely add hundreds of more to the numbers shown.

Deyen says that he’s “A little torn about how I feel about this.”  Well, he can check out the chart below and see if that helps him decide whose side he’s on: the government’s or the workers’.