Don't forget your Rising Tide T-shirt. You know all proceeds go to keep their keynote speaker out of jail

Today, the organizers of the Rising Tide conference (Saturday, August 28 at Howling Wolf) announced that this year's keynote speaker will be Mother Jones Magazine's Human Rights reporter Mac McClelland. McClelland has been reporting, blogging, and tweeting from the Louisiana Gulf Coast since early May on the BP oil disaster and its effect on the communities there. So she should have a lot of fascinating stuff to talk about at the conference. That is, she will if she can stay out of jail until then.

McClelland spoke recently with Gambit's Alex Woodward about the difficulties of working around the Coast Guard's infamous "65 foot rule"

These safety zones — will it affect the way you report, or has it? Will it limit your coverage?

The day they announced that I was on my way to Florida for a couple days, and I’ll tell you what, the difference between Florida and Louisiana is staggering. They’ll let you do whatever the f—k you want in Florida. The beaches are open because they don’t want to discourage tourism, so anybody has total run of anything they want — you can take pictures, talk to cleanup workers, there’s no cops, it’s not like here where there’s a creepy police state feel. The only thing I reported on site in Florida was they apparently don’t care. I haven’t experienced it yet, but I bet I will soon. In the next couple days I’ll be back in Louisiana. To be honest I haven’t decided what my strategy is yet, it seems to be kind of stupid to say I’m just not going to follow that. How could they arrest me? Could they really? Are they really going to arrest anybody? Part of me wants to be a jerk and kind of call their bluff.

I was thinking the same thing —

Go try and get arrested? And hope to God you can raise enough donations over the Internet to pay your $40,000 fine?

So if you're planning to register for this year's Rising Tide, you may think about kicking in a few extra crabs as a donation to a McClelland legal defense fund. Looks like they'll need about $40,000.