One Kicker's Opinion

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Nashville’s Trace Adkins Calls Obama's Oil Moratorium 'Ridiculous'

When CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently asked Louisiana native and former oil rig roughneck Trace Adkins about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Trace didn’t have any problem telling him what he thought. As someone who spent about six years working in the Gulf—riding out hurricanes, dealing with injuries and working to be the best of the best at his job—Trace knows a thing or two about safety and about what the oil moratorium put in place by the Obama administration is doing to his home state of Louisiana and the rest of the region. As reported in Country Kickers, here’s what the man’s man had to say about life on a rig . . . and about the decision to shut down all deepwater drilling in the Gulf. “Safety was always the number one priority for us. We had safety meetings continually. It was just a routine thing.” And, true to his outspoken nature, there’s no holding back as Trace addresses the moratorium, calling the idea “ridiculous . . . a way of life in Louisiana is oil field and that’s why I say, you know shutting down the oil field is like kicking a man when he’s down. I mean you can’t do that to the rest of the people in the state.”—David Scarlett