This has become something of a dog-bites-man story, but once again the Obama administration is attempting to appoint somebody folks in Louisiana won’t be happy with.

And once again Sen. David Vitter has a case of the screaming reds about it.

Vitter put out a release this morning about Dr. Rebecca Blank being thrown around as the replacement for Austan Goolsbee as the chair of the president’s Council on Economic Advisers. Blank is the Acting Deputy Secretary at the Commerce Department right now, and Vitter gave her a dose of infamy back in September at a Senate Small Business Committee hearing on Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium.

The moment was captured thanks to YouTube…

The Senator’s statement wasn’t very complimentary of Blank’s prospective nomination…

“The president is apparently going to nominate a senior economic advisor who has testified on record before a Congressional committee in support of a major economic policy decision that wasn’t based on any economic analysis whatsoever,” said Vitter.  “The American economy has been in a slump for a couple of years now, yet the Obama administration continues to put its political agenda in front of sound economics – or in the case of the job-killing moratorium – no economic evidence at all.

“Even a basic analysis would have predicted the major job losses we saw in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast, but the Obama administration imposed the moratorium anyway and Dr. Blank defended it.  I’m very concerned about what this says about her approach to economic policymaking and will continue to closely study her record.”

Prior to her joining the Obama administration, Blank was a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her writings while there show her to be a committed redistributionist of middling status if not a wild-eyed communist.

Oh – and she’s another Chicago academic, having come from Northwestern University.