I am in town for a week to visit with my family here in Louisiana and am curious to see if there was evidence of the BP tragedy in my hometown. What I do find is very interesting and consistent with a place that lives with the tangible possibility of danger and excitement on a seasonal basis. The two seasons that come to mind are hurricane and Mardi Gras.

The Louisiana legislature just passed, and Bobby Jindal just signed, a law permitting people to carry concealed firearms into churches, synogogues, mosques etc. That must mean there’s an epidemic of god-fearing folks being murdered in their pews, or rugs, or something.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has voted to have its own commission investigate the BP disaster. The Committee finds that necessary, according to Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, because Obama hasn’t appointed a representative from the oil industry to his own commission. The conflict of interest is apparently not obvious to Landrieu.

Rep. Mike Rogers, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s incumbent-retention program, has pinpointed the nine most vulnerable GOP House members up for re-election and wants supporters to focus only on them. All represent districts that carried President Obama in 2008. Here’s a look at the endangered nine.

At yesterday’s House Energy and Commerce committee hearings with the executives of BP, Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) suggested Lamar McKay should commit ritual suicide instead of resigning.

In a press conference on the beach of Grand Isle, Louisiana last week, a BP spokesman claimed that the company’s solution to removing oil from marshes will be to set up boom that will capture oil as the tides come in an out. BP clearly doesn’t begin to know, understand, or care about the realities of the problems created by its oil disaster.

Alabama fishermen used a half-dozen boats to prevent access to the Mississippi Sound in an early morning blockade to protest BP’s unfair hiring practices yesterday. The fishermen, who’ve been idled by the massive ban on fishing in the oiled waters of the Gulf of Mexico, say BP is hiring far more recreational boaters than commercial fishermen in its cleanup efforts.

Last week I told you about my morning spent with Kay and Raleigh Lasseigne, a fisherman husband and his wife who live in Grand Isle, Louisiana. I introduced you to Raleigh earlier today, and you saw their memorial to their oysters in photos on Friday; now let Kay show you herself.

Landrieu says that BP’s liability will be “hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, and BP’s going to pay every penny. When I pressed her on the long-term damage done to fishermen and the community – one person told me that last time oil hit his oyster beds, it was there for 10 years – Landrieu immediately swatted back that number and said “we don’t know.” She says that if a fisherman “made $50,000 last year, BP’s going to write them a check for $50,000.”

But this disaster will last for well more than one year, and likely well beyond a decade.

Sign our petition to the Senate: make BP pay every penny for its destruction of the Gulf.

At least nine fishermen hired by BP to use their boats to help with oil cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico have been hospitalized with serious heath problems, including one who “busted his skull” after collapsing on a dock.

When asked about this clear pattern of illnesses of workers who come in contact BP’s oil and chemical dispersants, BP CEO Tony Hayward callously dismissed the health problems as “food poisoning.”