Late last month, Mississippi state House Speaker Billy McCoy (D) and Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant (R) started a select committee to look into the BP oil spill and would hold hearings this week. McCoy said, “The people of Mississippi deserve to know how this happened and what the future may hold for this most valuable part of our state." However, earlier this week, BP wrote a letter saying it wouldn’t be showing up for the three-day hearings this week. They, after all, are corporate royalty and don't need to respond to the demands of mere elected officials of the state whose oil they're taking and selling to China. In a related issue, I interviewed extensively a charter airplane operator in Louisiana who said that during the first four weeks after the BP Oil explosion a area of Temporary Flight Restriction or TFR extended 30 miles or so around the Deepwater Horizon and has since expanded to cover virtually every place that oil is in the water or hitting wetlands or land. This representative noted that the command center for the crisis - out of which the Coast Guard and other federal agencies are operating - is headquartered in a BP training facility and, until the intervention of Louisiana Senator David Vitter, whenever charter flight operators called for permission to fly into the TFR they were extensively questioned about who they had on board the plane, and if it was the press the right to fly over the area was routinely denied. In the past few days, though, since the administration has moved from a position of helping BP cover up the extent of their crime by spraying dispersants and keeping the press out to a position of actively challenging BP, flights are being allowed into the area with press aboard.