Here’s a quick list of Republicans who’ve called President Obama’s escrow account a betrayal of American principles and otherwise defended BP from Obama tyranny.

Now, having said that I think Republicans will rue the day they took BP’s side so vigorously against President Obama’s efforts to set up this escrow account, I would be remiss not to note my longstanding nausea at much of what goes on at this and so many other congressional hearings where members of Congress grandstand against the guy or gal sitting in the dock over the obvious and shameful wrongness of their actions, even though the member of Congress in question often wasn’t even familiar with the topic at hand until a few days before or just as often was voting more or less in support of whatever shamefully wrong action they’re talking about until something went wrong.

Okay, I’ve said it.

Needless to say, this doesn’t apply in this case to the members of Congress who’ve been longtime critics of the oil industry and the lax regulatory environment under which it’s operated.

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), ranking member of the House Energy committee, where BP’s CEO is testifying today, just said: “It is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown.”

Barton’s in an incredibly safe district. And it’s not like more than a handful of House Republicans have anything to worry about this Fall. But I’m certain we’re going to hear these quotes again and again on the campaign trail this fall in other more middle of the road districts. In addition to the above, Barton also apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for what he had been put through yesterday by the president. Read More

Live congressional testimony from BP CEO Tony Hayward. Watch.

Plus, you can follow all the day’s developments at our Gulf Oil Spill Wire.

Jon Stewart chronicles the promises from the last eight Presidents to wean us off our dependence on foreign sources of energy. Watch.

As I noted on Tuesday, Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle has made a series of statements over the course of this year suggesting that if things don’t change soon voters will take up armed violence against the government. It’s classic dog whistle politics: ‘I’m not saying it should happen, just saying what might or will happen if people don’t shape up and support my kind of politics’ — a clear message to supporters to a reasonable amount of deniability for everyone else. In other words, Angle’s not threatening the rest of us, it’s more like she’s selflessly putting herself forward as a way to head off the coming storm.

Now the Las Vegas Sun took a look at this today. And they asked Angle spokesman Jerry Stacy to explain just what precisely she meant. I would have expected Stacy to characterize Angle’s rhetoric as in some way metaphoric. But he didn’t. He simply stressed that she’s not “advocating for a revolution.” But in the Sun’s paraphrase, he “didn’t back away from Angle’s comments that trouble could be brewing.”

Normally, I tend to discount when one candidate’s supporters act badly. After all, you can’t control or be responsible for all your reporters. But with this kind of rhetoric, is it really a surprise that some of Angle’s supporters have been making threats to the right-wing third party candidate they believe could hand Reid a victory over Angle?

It looks like Senate nominee Sharron Angle (R-NV) found her conservative law-and-order side in conflict with her libertarian side when it came to the PATRIOT Act. She marked undecided on a candidate questionnaire in 2004 that asked whether she supported the act.

Ne’er-do-well Senate nominee Alvin Greene (D-SC): “I am … the best person to be TIME magazine’s Man of the Year.”

BP is trading substantially higher this morning in London, about 7% higher .

An amazing little story out of Florida. Former Rep. and now Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum (R) was the de facto Republican nominee for Governor this year. That was until far-right former health care exec Rick Scott got done trying to kill Health Care Reform (he was the one running all the ads as ‘Conservatives for Patients Rights’) and decided to hop into the race and spend a ton of his own money to get the nomination for himself. Suddenly, McCollum looks like he just might lose the whole thing.

Those who remember McCollum as a House impeachment manager or the guy who spent a ton of taxpayer money retaining George Rekers for his expertise on the evils of homosexuality probably won’t be too broken up about it. But McCollum may be the more reasonable of the two candidates. And Dems may prefer running against a guy whose company had to pay a massive settlement for overcharging Medicare and Medicaid.

Here’s a press release BP put out today with their version of what was agreed to in the $20 billion escrow fund … Read More