BP Oil Spill: Mississippi River Water Level Holds Oil Offshore

The Coast Guard's Mary Landry, a rear admiral, is the federal oversight coordinator of the gulf oil cleanup, based in Louisiana.

Landry gives her prognosis report for the cleanup: that the weather has been good, and everyone's efforts continue with the goal of fighting the oil spill as far offshore as possible.

Hers is a strange public relations marriage with BP's Doug Suttles. Both need to make their respective entities look as if neither is shirking its duties. Thus she tends always to sound optimistic and upbeat.

The key, she reports, is to fight the spill as far offshore as possible. Landry's descriptions tend to make the spill sound almost a matter of routine. It is a national incident, not pollution. The cleanup is a situation. As her language becomes more remote, we learn that the spill is taking place in a subsea environment where human presence is impossible. Thus the spill becomes not a matter of uncontrolled pollution but a thorny problem.

In what seems a public relations spin, given Bobby Jindal's description of how badly the coast of Louisiana has been fouled by the spill, Landry reminds us that nonetheless vast areas of shoreline have not seen the landfall of oil. The bulk of the spill, and much of in the form of sheen, is still largely offshore.

And so on towards more technical descriptions: a new Florida command post for the spill, skimming continues, efforts at subsea dispersant injections and plans for controlled burns.

Bobby Jindal was, by contrast, quite blunt

"I want to start off touching on BP's announcement yesterday that they were able to insert a tube into the leak. This is a positive development, but I want to stress that we are nowhere close to the finish line.

"Oil continues to pour into the Gulf and has hit our shores. I want to be clear on this point: This disaster will not be over for Louisiana until our water and our shores are completely clean and our wildlife, our communities, and our coastal industries are one hundred percent restored."