I'm so old I remember when the drilling moratorium was "Obama's Katrina"

How'd that go?

As for the rigs running off to less regulated waters: In the 15 months after the moratorium began, only eight of 30 deepwater Gulf rigs actually departed from the region.
Local blogger Clay, who authors the Noladishu site, inspected the circumstances of the eight drillships that left. He found that:

3 were new, 5 were more than 24 years old, and some were more than 30 years old. 20 years is generally a good lifetime for a rig; 30 is sometimes done if prices are favorable and there’s been good maintenance and 10-year overhauls. The new rigs will hurt (the 3 that left were among the best in their respective fleets), but the others were so long in the tooth, you’d almost say good riddance.

So, contrary to the hysteria, most of the deepwater rigs stayed throughout the moratorium. And of those that left for foreign waters, most were well on their way to becoming unsafe rust buckets that would not pass the new safety standards anyway. Instead, they will spend their final years in places like Angola and Egypt, where worker and environmental safety are not quite at the top of the priority list.
Meanwhile, the local offshore rig count has soared past pre-oil spill levels and the Gulf is ”on the verge of its biggest supply surge ever.” Ever! The upswing will continue full-throttle, too, as analysts expect the number of rigs to double by 2017.

As usual with Moseley's columns, there's much much more.  Go read. 

Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal put on his increasingly well worn political pundit hat again to write yet another op-ed in Politico.  This one, like his several before it, is all about the 2016 Presidential race, who might run, and how whoever runs can win.  He begins his chattering on these topics by marveling at all the chatter there is out there.

Who’s running for president in 2016? Who’s up? Who’s down? Those are the questions that have the chattering class in Washington all atwitter, and all over Twitter, these days. All potential candidates have their own lines they use to deflect reporter’s questions about whether or not they will run for president in 2016. The one I like at present is “I don’t know.” I settled on this one because it is the truth, which is not a bad fallback position when all else fails.

Everyone's talking about who might run for President, Jindal observes. Many people ask Bobby Jindal if he will run, according to Bobby Jindal. Bobby Jindal allows that he might!  Also the "atwitter/Twitter" thing may be the sort of wordplay the voters are looking for, in Bobby Jindal's estimation.

But Jindal cautions us against "getting ahead of ourselves." The potential Presidential candidate asserts that "the whole thing is ridiculous," and then goes on to write some more about it. Specifically, he tells us where to look to find the brightest ideas that will spur the conservative renaissance.

In any case, next year’s elections are the ones that matter. I believe the most important election is the next one, not the one after the next one. It’s been my honor over the past year to chair the Republican Governors Association. And for my money, the real action is out in the states, where we have 36 gubernatorial races in 2014.

It’s not that I’m disinterested in the House and Senate elections, but the truth is that the real conservative reform happening today is in the states. And with many strong Republican governors running for re-election, the outlook for four more years of conservative reform is plenty bright. The forecast in the nation’s capital, meanwhile, is a wintery mix—cloudy with a 100 percent chance of debt and taxation, and a sprinkling of incompetence.

Those Republican Governors sure are a bright ray of sunshine cutting through the "wintery mix!" And don't forget, Bobby Jindal is honored to be their king.  He's not sure he's a candidate for President, though. Let's not "get ahead of ourselves."

The first thing candidates (whoever they might be!) will have to think about is their agenda.  You see, because governments are supposed enact policies and it's a good idea to know what those things are going to be before you forge off  all atwitter into the wintery mix with only your chatter to keep you warm.  Jindal suggests the following.

If Obamacare is still the law of the land, there will be the monumental task of repealing the law and replacing it with a conservative, market-based model that works—while undoing the damage it has done to our economy in meantime. The next president will be faced with unweaving the Obama administration’s massive web of unnecessary environmental regulations that are stifling our energy sector and hindering our ability to be energy independent. Passing a balanced-budget amendment, lowering tax rates, fixing future government spending as a percentage of GDP, restoring America’s global reputation—the list goes on and on.

So, according to (possible... It's currently ridiculous to speculate) candidate Jindal, priority one is Repeal Obamacare, priority two is Drill Baby Drill and priority three is Cut Social Security.  Those sure do sound like winning ideas. Just ask any of Jindal's recently advised client candidates. Neil Riser, for example.

Riser focused exclusively on repeal and sided with Gov. Bobby Jindal in rejecting a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would expand Medicaid, largely at federal rather than state expense.

McAllister opposes Obamacare too, but he proposed trying to make the law work; he also called for the state to expand Medicaid, an issue that may well have appealed not only to Democrats but to those who believe that expansion could help a lot of their neighbors in a district where 25 percent of residents live below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The result suggested that simply bashing the Affordable Care Act, as Riser did, is not enough to win elections, even among voters who may agree, and that advocating its improvement is not a path to certain defeat.

Okay well maybe not Neil Riser, for example. Surely any of the other recent Jindal-approved success stories will lend these prescriptions all the credibility they need. 

Surely the part about the "massive web of unnecessary environmental regulations that are stifling our energy sector" really connects with people.  At least voters would not mistake Jindal's commitment to that idea anyway.

A new member appointed by Gov. Bobby Jindal to the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East will ask the authority to suspend its controversial lawsuit demanding that 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies either restore wetlands damaged during their operations or pay for the damages. A competing resolution, submitted by proponents of the lawsuit, asks the authority to reaffirm its original vote approving the contract to hire the Jones, Swanson, Huddell & Garrison law firm and to authorize continued prosecution of the suit.

Lambert "Joe" Hassinger Jr. was appointed by Jindal last month to replace John Barry, after the governor made clear he would not reappoint the historian who had spearheaded the filing of the lawsuit. Jindal contends that the levee agency overstepped its authority in filing the suit and that the action conflicts with the state's coastal restoration and protection master plan.

Hassinger is the sponsor of two lawsuit-related resolutions that are set for debate at the authority's meeting on Thursday.

We simply can't allow our fixation with Louisiana's coastal marshland to endanger our fragile oil and gas industry the way we allowed our brief concern about an ongoing oil spill disaster to kill all those jobs that the moratorium certainly killed.   This is (not yet) candidate Jindal's proposition to the voters.  Will they respond positively?  Find out next month when Politico publishes his follow-up column, "Do you think I will be a good President? If you think so, please check this box. By, Bobby."