The Sunshine Empire

Before I get to what I wanted to discuss today, I didn’t realize I missed a milestone. In the same week I passed 6000 tweets I also passed 2000 posts here at The Sunshine Empire. The world is a vastly different place from when I began writing this back in 2007. Since that time we’ve elected a new President and passed landmark stimulus and health care reform in America. The war in Iraq is winding down and the war in Afghanistan is the new hotness. But most importantly we are now the only Sunshine Empire standing now that those worms in Singapore are now on trial. Now standing number one in any search for Sunshine Empire is your reliable friend in The Sunshine State.

The Sunshine State is a beautiful, warm, nightmarish, dangerous place of insanity. The times we live in now produce disasters worthy of big budget blockbusters, but in The Sunshine State we live them. Spacecraft are destroyed approaching our shores, and those shores are now about to be surrounded and engulfed by a giant slick of oil. The BPocalypse approaching also just had to occur during the summer. Here in Florida we had a noticeably colder winter than normal. If BP had spilled hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil during the winter we could have just lit that on fire and used it for warmth. But now the summer of 2010 will be the summer of crude here in Florida. Tourism season would be truly year round.

The turn of events with regards to offshore drilling has been remarkable this year. From Democrats standing against drilling in the mid 2000′s to a Democratic President reversing the ban earlier this year. Now after his bi-partisan move closer to Republicans on drilling, this disaster in the gulf has turned the momentum back in the other direction. Gulf state republican governors are all tip-toeing around their previous zeal for offshore oil drilling as they all look for federal government handouts to help in cleaning up what the unfettered free market is going to dump on them. The matter will be especially fascinating to follow as an issue in the three-way political battle royal that is the Florida senate race. I’m so looking forward to the summer of crude.