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.

The goodness of their hearts

You know, when Matt Taibbi said that Obama's financial and economic policy had been "hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads", it was hard to believe. I mean they all wear such nice suits and have such large bank accounts. Surely it was hijacked by high-rent shitheads. But to the degree we're squabbling over the level of shitheadedness, we are in agreement: they're shitheads. So that's why it was nice to see Senior White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers make that case so eloquently this weekend.

Summers defended Obama's attempts to persuade banks to increase lending.

"The country did incredible things for the banking industry. Those things had to be done to save the economy, but no major bank would be intact, in a position to pay bonuses, if that extraordinary support had not been provided. The bankers need to recognize that. They need to recognize that they've got obligations to the country after all that's been done for them, and there is a lot more they can do, and President Obama is going to be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country. We were there for them."

Dear sweet fucking baby Jesus, that's the way we're going to get credit flowing, taxpayer funded bonuses curbed, and better regulations and oversight? Obama's going to go jawbone with them and they'll do it out of a sense of duty and obligation because "we were there for them"? A sense of duty wasn't enough for them not to set everyone's money of fire and gamble with the world's financial stability, why would it compel them to act rationally now, especially when "they got theirs..." and we're clearly in the "...so fuck everyone else" phase. "We" are going to be there for them the next time they do this, by which I mean "you" and all your Wall Street buddies in government.

So that's the big plan for trying to make sure that this doesn't happen again: hoping that Wall Street wants to change things out of the goodness of it's heart. Actually, now that I've seen the lengths that our elected betters will go to kill meaningful regulatory reform of Wall Street and the difficulty of getting good legislation through the House and Senate, perhaps wishing that banks and financial giants have a change of heart is the most viable course of action. I guess it's the season for miracles.

President Ray Guy

8,000 Troops to Leave Iraq Next Year

President Bush has accepted the recommendation of his senior civilian and military advisers to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq by 8,000 in the early months of next year.
...
Neither the Marine battalion nor the Army brigade will be replaced, leaving the American combat force in Iraq at 14 brigades. After other support and logistics units are withdrawn under the new orders, the American troop levels in Iraq would drop to about 138,000 by March, still several thousand more than were there in January 2007, when Mr. Bush announced the “surge” that brought the total over 160,000.

And with that Bush just washed his hands of all decision making in Iraq. He's made all the final troop decisions and we are locked in with his plan until the middle of next year. He has successfully held out long enough that the next guy has to take responsibility for his mistake. Expertly played sir, exquisite punting of your responsibilities. Methuselah or the Muslim will have to do the heavy lifting and you can sit in Crawford with a "Who me?" look. Top level Presidenting. Our military presence is still giant and unsustainable, violence levels are still bad by normal standards, all the Iraqi political conflicts are unresolved, there are still unregulated militias operating with impunity, and civilian bombings are a daily occurrence. But that's some other chumps responsibility.

Put your feet up on the big fuckin' desk. You earned it champ.