Stay classy, BP

With oil quickly replacing water as the main liquid in the Gulf of Mexico, of course you expect failed rig proprietors BP to take extensive steps... to mitigate the damage to their asses from a legal and financial standpoint. Actually stopping that leak? That's in God's hands now. After all, this whole mess was an Act of God. If He wanted the dinosaur blood to stop seeping from the earth, He would have stopped it. Not to mention the fact that if He didn't want it to happen, He wouldn't have exploded the rig or lobbied against stiffer safety regulations. God... what a scamp He is.

No, the time is right for BP to make sure that all the people about to see any body of water or shoreline consumed by murky blackness have already ceded their legal rights to hold BP responsible for the actions for which they are completely responsible.

BP has been offering $5000 payments to residents of coastal Alabama areas, in exchange for essentially giving up their right to sue the oil giant over its deadly Gulf Coast spill, according to the state's attorney general.

AG Troy King last night urged BP to stop the effort, and told Alabamians to be wary. "People need to proceed with caution and understand the ramifications before signing something like that," King said, according to the Alabama press.

A spokesman for BP told a reporter that the waiver clause had now been removed from the contracts, and that the company won't enforce it in contracts that were previously signed.

Sure. You know whenever a large multinational corporation from a powerful industrial concern gets people to sign carefully constructed legal documents in an attempt to protect their corporate asses from any molecule of justice, they always freely say they won't ever try to get people to abide by them in a court and volunteer to make the legally binding agreements weaker. That's standard practice. Especially when your CEO is out there trying to claim that

"It wasn't our accident," he told the Today Show on Monday. Pressed by anchor Meredith Vieira, Hayward claimed: "the drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig. It was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people, their processes."

Yeah, I'm sure BP will live up to their legal and financial obligations. Especially when they openly balk at paying for everything they've done... in front of sitting US Senators.

So thanks to BP for keeping their priorities in line here. Cover your asses first, attempt to weasel out of responsibility and culpability second, worry about stopping that massive oil slick your shoddy practices caused... who knows when, the future is such a far off place.