Jaunted

Florida, meanwhile, is on the exact other side of the debate. They're so distraught that they're changing their entire approach to tourism advertising. Florida's tourism board has dropped their "Coast Is Clear" campaign, apparently because they noticed that their coast is anything but clear. This is annoying to us on a number of levels, most of them having to do with how they just spent weeks screaming about how everyone was lying and about how their beaches weren't going to be affected. They couldn't have maybe seen this coming ahead of time?

We should probably also note that untangling all these politicians' motives isn't straightforward. You could say that Gulf states like Mississippi and Texas have an incentive to minimize the damage, because they want tourists to come to their states and because they benefit economically from oil drilling. Or you could say that they have incentives to inflate the damage, because they want disaster relief and because they'd like to make a Democratic White House look incompetent.

And you could discount Florida entirely, given how sleazy they've been over-hyping the spill's impacts from the beginning. Or you could say that they went all-in on "clean beaches," so if they're giving it up it's because they have to.

So yeah, we don't know.

[Photo: International Bird Rescue Research Center / Wiki Commons]

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