What a bunch of hypocrites, and they all want their lives back, too, just like the small people, after 63 days of this nonsense which started on the eve of Earth Day.

Yet it may be August before relief wells are in place.

BP consented to a $20 billion escrow fund, but it’s not clear the company even has $20 billion, Fox News Channel suggested.

Under the Clean Water Act, it could owe fines of $4,300 for every barrel spilled, plus royalties for squandered oil.

No wonder they want to lowball spill amounts which could be 2.5 million gallons a day.
While his administration ripped BP CEO Tony Hayward for taking time off from the Gulf Coast oil spill crisis, President Obama fit in a Nationals baseball game against his White Sox June 18, followed by golf June 19 at Andrews Air Force Base.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson had his Vietnam epiphany when he lost Walter Cronkite.

Obama’s comes courtesy of the June 24 Rolling Stone music magazine announcing Jay-Z as the new “King of America.”

I skipped Shawn Carter to read the damning 10-page report containing such nuggets as Obama left so many pro-industry regulators in charge of drilling that Interior staffers dub it “the third Bush term.”

Or that BP’s unread 582-page response plan, cut and pasted from its Arctic plan, was so sloppy it promised to protect walruses in the Gulf.

Yeah, we need another commission considering all the paper already going unread.
Even a partisan like James Carville is apoplectic:

“If FDR had been president, he would have jumped out of his wheelchair and ran to Louisiana … If the Democratic Party is not standing up for 11 workers murdered by a multinational corporation, not to mention tens of thousands of fishermen, then why have one?”

Carville would also fire Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whom Obama praised March 31 as “one of the finest secretaries of Interior we’ve ever had.”

“I’m not anti-drilling,” Carville says. “I just want it to be well-regulated. I’m not anti-flying, either, but I damn sure want planes to be safe.”

Time magazine blames the oil appetites of American drivers as well, since a quarter of U.S. oil production comes from deepwater Gulf wells. There are 23 oil companies drilling in the Gulf.

BP pulled the largest share last year, 24 percent.

How do you make drilling safe, given oil industry influence over regulators?

“Criminal prosecution,” Carville says. “There’s nothing that will make a company safer than watching another CEO in handcuffs.”

The oil and gas industry’s influence was purchased for $174.8 million it spent lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

After nationalizing the auto industry, Obama until May 27 insisted BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic spill and the ongoing failure to plug the leak.

That was the date in the East Room of the White House when he said, “I take responsibility” for his administration’s failure to reform the scandal-ridden Minerals Management Service that Bush-Cheney let regulate itself.

“The buck stops with me,” Obama reiterated the next day on the Louisiana coastline as an unchecked enemy came ashore and blobs of oil assaulted beaches like a 9/11 sequel.

Like the previous administration with al Qaeda, it ignored ample warnings, like a May 2000 environmental assessment report warning that “spill responses may be complicated by the potential for very large magnitude spills.”

Not the only unread report, apparently. The National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan – federal regulations laying out command-and-control responsibilities for cleaning up an oil spill – makes clear an oil company like BP cannot be left in charge of such a serious disaster.
The plan states the government must “direct all federal, state or private actions” to clean up a spill “where a discharge or threat of discharge poses a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United States.”

“The government is required to be in charge,” according to a professor who previously worked as a Justice Department staff attorney.

A marine geophysicist at Columbia University calculated that at a median figure, 55,000 gallons a day gushed into the Gulf – an Exxon Valdez every five days. And BP appears to have unleashed one of the most productive wells.

The “moratorium” the president announced is meaningless in preventing future disasters.
The ban halts exploratory drilling at 33 deepwater operations, shutting down less than 1 percent of total wells.

Production continues at 5,106 wells, including 591 in deep water. The government even allowed BP to continue deep-sea production at its Atlantis rig, capable of extracting 200,000 barrels a day from the seafloor 150 miles from Louisiana in waters 2,000 feet deeper than Deepwater Horizon.

Bush-Cheney for eight years paved the road to catastrophe, but Obama greenlighted BP to drill.

During the Bush years, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Interior agency charged with safeguarding the environment from drilling,  staffers were literally and figuratively in bed with the oil industry, according to Interior inspector general reports.
MMS had little way to assess risk to wildlife because Bush instituted a new policy that scrapped environmental analysis to fast-track permits.

When agency staff weren’t joining industry employees for coke parties or trips to corporate ski chalets, they were having sex with oil company honchos.

They were awarded cash bonuses for pushing through risky offshore leases, auditors were ordered not to investigate shady deals and safety staffers routinely accepted industry gifts.

Oil companies reportedly even filled in their own inspection reports in pencil before tracing over them in pen.

“Oil companies were running MMS during those years,” according to a former auditor.
“Whatever they wanted, they got. Nothing was being enforced across the board at MMS.”
Obama nominated the Stetson-wearing Salazar to be his “new sheriff” and to force the department to “clean up its act.”

For too long, Obama declared, Interior has been “seen as an appendage of commercial interests.”

Salazar took charge in January 2009 and vowed to restore his department’s “respect for scientific integrity.”

Within days, he discarded the Bush administration plan published in the Federal Register literally at midnight on the day Bush left the White House to open 300 million acres in Alaska, the Gulf and up and down both coasts.

But then Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone – an all-time high.

As a senator, Salazar criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster.

Salazar left Bush managers in place, including one who served a cake with “Drill, baby, drill” frosting. Another holdover bureaucrat had been promoted after letting oil companies pocket $53 billion through a loophole.

Salazar’s MMS continued issuing “categorical exclusions” to companies like BP, even when they lacked necessary permits to protect endangered species.

Had MMS followed the law, it would never have granted BP a categorical exclusion, which is applicable only to activities with “no significant effect on the human environment.”

Interior’s own handbook on categorical exclusions bars their issuance for offshore projects in “relatively untested deep water” or “utilizing new or unusual technology.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse points out that the complex task of drilling for oil a mile beneath the ocean surface appears to have received less oversight than is required of average Americans rewiring their homes.

BP is the Forrest Gump of implicated oil companies, present at each of the worst disasters in U.S. history, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez cleanup response.

In March 2006, there was the Alaska pipeline rupture that spilled a quarter of a million gallons of crude into Prudhoe Bay.

BP repeatedly ignored internal warnings about corrosion brought about by “draconian” cost-cutting. That’s who you want regulating itself. EPA recommended $672 million in fines, which the Bush administration let be settled for $20 million. Interior’s own rules require a written manual for complying with environmental rules, yet Salazar’s MMS managers relied on informal “institutional knowledge” passed down from the Bush administration.

“The administration knew that it had this rot in the middle of the process on offshore drilling, yet it empowered an already discredited, disgraced agency to essentially be in charge,” says Rep. Raul Grijalva, who oversees the Interior Department as chair of the House subcommittee on public lands.

So the buck stops far from where people who voted for change expected.

John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby@leaderpub.com.