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Lawrence O'Donnell talks to EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman about the claims that the oil is now "disappearing" from the Gulf of Mexico. There's no way in hell that much oil just goes away. Digby's got more on this here The Good News Is The Poison:

BP seems to have ably headed off the worst of the PR disaster by keeping the worst of the oil more or less off the shoreline. The actual disaster may have been made worse by the use of toxic chemicals. So it's all good.

That's what they want us to believe anyway. We need more Hugh Kaufman's out there to counter this nonsense.

O‘DONNELL: Today is day 100 of the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, and a whistle-blower has come forth from the Environmental Protection Agency, charging the EPA with helping BP to downplay the environmental impact of its supposed cleanup efforts. You will meet him in a moment.

But if the cleanup has been compared to letting the criminal clean up the crime scene—we begin our fourth story tonight with news about the cops.

“The Washington Post” reports that federal agents who call themselves the BP squad are investigating whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton, even before the blowout, lied to regulators, obstructed justice, or faked the test results for their equipment—including the blowout preventer that, needless to say, failed to prevent a blowout. Specifically, sources told “The Post,” investigators are asking whether inspectors at the Minerals Management Agency went easy on the rig and why.

BP, yesterday, revealed that it is now the subject of an investigation by the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, into something—no word yet on exactly whether that is related to the spill.
And while Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says the oil is becoming harder to find, the Natural Resources Defense Council‘s annual report on beaches found no downturn in the number of beach closures or advisories since the spill was capped. The NRDC reports that the number of beach closures and advisories this year, 2,200, is roughly 10 times more than last year. And it predicts that the impact will last for years.

And in a cable news exclusive, that whistle-blower we mentioned joins us now. EPA senior policy analyst, Hugh Kaufman, is a veteran and legend of the agency, having had a hand in Love Canal and the creation of the Superfund and helped expose the EPA cover-up of air quality at ground zero.
Mr. Kaufman, what should we know about the dispersants used in the Gulf that the EPA isn‘t telling us?

KAUFMAN: Well, first of all, the dispersants mixed with the oil and the water is extremely toxic. Sweden has done studies on this. Israel has done studies on this.

And the only real purpose of using so many dispersants with the oil was to cover up the volume of oil that was released from that well. So, that and lying about how much is coming out was a mechanism to help BP save billions of dollars in fines.

O‘DONNELL: Should they have not used dispersants at all?

KAUFMAN: That‘s correct. If they did not use dispersants, they would have been able to get most of that oil off of the surface and would not have endangered all of the fish and ecosystem underneath the water that now will be affected for decades on down the line.

I was listening to some of the, quote, “experts” who are being paid by BP at universities who are saying that the oil has disappeared. It hasn‘t disappeared. It‘s throughout thousands of square miles in the Gulf, mixed with dispersants, and because the temperatures down there are so cold, they‘re going to be around for decades.

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Unfortunately, this is a civil action and the most we can hope for are some SEC fines (which are ludicrously low). Too bad this isn't a criminal case, but at least it's some karmic return for the "Wyly Coyotes," who funded the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry. (They also funded George W. Bush's attacks on John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries.)

Oh, and by the way: The Manhattan district attorney's office referred this case to the SEC in 2005. Wonder what took them so long?

Samuel Wyly and Charles Wyly -- billionaire brothers in Texas who have spent millions funding political campaigns -- committed violations of federal securities laws and fraud by using offshore accounts to secretly trade the shares of public companies whose boards they sat on, reaping more than $550 million in profit, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint filed Thursday.

The politically-active Wylys, who have been generous donors to Republican causes over the years, have faced questions in recent years -- including a Senate probe -- about whether they ran an extensive network of tax shelters.

"The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws," said SEC deputy director of enforcement Lorin L. Reisner. "They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders."

The SEC alleges that the brothers created an elaborate network of accounts and companies in the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands that they used to trade more than $750 million in stock in four public companies they served as board members. The SEC charges that they also committed an insider trading violation concerning one of the companies, earning almost $32 million.

The Wyly's attorney and stockbroker were also charged.

They also own Michaels, the national arts and crafts chain. So we can blame them for scrapbooking, too!

As if Rand Paul's flippant "No one will miss a hill or two" comment wasn't egregious enough, his latest PR effort on behalf of the coal industry is even worse. In an interview with Details magazine, he makes some of the dumbest and most offensive statements I've heard yet about mountaintop removal.

See, here's what Rand Paul thinks. Seriously.

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Mike Pence repeats the Republican lie that getting rid of the Bush tax cuts is going to raise taxes on small businesses. As our own Jon Perr noted only about 2% are impacted by the return to higher rates for incomes over $250,000:

Lie #1: President Obama will raise taxes on small businesses.

John McCain introduced this fraud along with Joe the Plumber during the 2008 campaign. McCain proclaimed Obama's plan to restore 1990's tax rates for taxpayers making over $250,000 meant "the small businesses that we're talking about would receive an increase in their taxes right now." In February, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) regurgitated the long-debunked talking point:

"I don't think raising taxes is a great idea, and when our good friends on the other side of the aisle say raising the taxes on the wealthy, what they are really talking about is small business."

Of course, they're not talking about small business. As CNN concluded in October, "fewer than 2% of small business owners would pay more under Obama's plan." But in case there was any doubt about the Republicans' deception on the point, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center quickly put it to rest:

Out of 34.7 million filers with business income on Schedules C, E or F, 479,000 filers fall into the top two brackets, according to an analysis of projected 2009 filings by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

The other 34.3 million - or 98.6% - would be unaffected by Obama's proposed rate hike.

Somehow Mike Pence thinks that 2% equals "more than half". So either he's really bad at math, or he's lying. I'm in the camp of the latter.

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Unfogged: The ghouls at Prudential Financial Inc.

The Left Coaster: BP will take $9.9 billion tax credit

Mike Whitney: Trillions for Wall St., zilch for you know who

Buzzfeed: 10 Craziest Michele Bachman quotes. And speaking of crazy talk from Wingnuttia, there's always enough to go around

Open The Echo Chamber: Intellectual ambulance chasing: Mixing climate science and illegal immigration?

Mark Fiore's Animated Cartoon Site: News In A Nutshell

A belated Happy Blogiversary to Batocchio!

Amazing dancing in the rain! Via The Rumpus; h/t Nicole Belle.

Open thread below....

Tonight's song originated from an unfinished outtake off of Bob Dylan's soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah's brilliant movie, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor added verses to the Dylan refrain and included it on the band's eponymous debut, O.C.M.S.. Rock me.

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Fox News' favorite pair of 'Democrats' penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal trashing President Obama and surprise, surprise... Sean Hannity ends up quoting them on his show. Here's more on Cadell and Shoen from Salon's War Room and Media Matters.

Fox Democrats accuse Obama of doing what Fox does--Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen pen a column about how the president is stoking racial tensions:

Official Fox News Democrats-in-residence Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen got together to write one of their op-eds about how the Democrats are Bad and Wrong. As usual, the reasons given for the Badness and Wrongness of Democrats are exactly the same ones named by right-wing talk radio hosts and bloggers and Fox News hosts -- but because the authors of the op-ed are Democrats, it is newsworthy!

[...]

Who are Caddell and Schoen, exactly? And what kind of Democrats are they?

Doug Schoen is pollster grifter Mark Penn's former right-hand man. He wrote a book about how independent Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg should run for president, with Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as his running mate. (His Bloomberg worship is funny, considering that he and Penn proposed doing "market research" for Phillip Morris to help them fight smoking bans in the '90s.) Schoen's 2008 insistence that Hillary could win if she'd just attack Obama a little bit harder makes his bemoaning Obama's supposedly divisive racial politics even more risible.

Pat Caddell is a much more interesting character. He's a brilliant former Democratic strategist for McGovern and Carter who angrily left the party in the late-1980s. He has more or less dedicated his career to trashing Democrats ever since. While he may still actually be a liberal, his intense hatred for the entire Democratic party tends to color his analysis and make him a willing useful idiot for far-right ideologues. (Caddell also used polling to invent the statistical ideal presidential candidate in 1983: "a moderate senator in his early 40's, bold, who breaks with party tradition and wins his generation's vote." While it didn't work with Gary Hart and Joe Biden, maybe he's just mad that he didn't get any credit when it did work.)

But being a professional Democratic Concern Troll makes strange bedfellows. Caddell was one of the minds behind the 1992 Jerry Brown campaign, and he relentlessly trashed Bill Clinton, whom he deeply loathed. Schoen, meanwhile, is only invited to speak about national politics because Hillary Clinton brought in Dick Morris -- who brought in Schoen and Mark Penn -- to advise Clinton in his second term.

Caddell and Schoen: the "Democratic" farce continues:

Y'know the shtick, the two Obama-haters lash out at the president and the Left in the pages of the WSJ but do so under the guise of being "Democrats" so readers are supposed to take their cheap shots to heart because it really, really pains Caddell and Schoen to write these nasty things about Obama. Just like it really, really pains them to go on Fox News and trash Obama.

Today's effort by the duo is particularly rancid: Obama constantly divides America by playing the race card. I'll let TNR's Jonathan Chait and Time's Joe Klein do the honors in terms of dismantling Caddell/Schoen's lazy fearmongering...read on...

So an anonymous "senior administration official" says that "most" internet and email providers already turn over this information. (Gee, I wonder why he didn't want to go on the record. And I wonder why the Post allowed it.)

See, here's the problem with these relentless expansions of executive power: I don't actually believe that the Obama administration is interested in putting me under surveillance for criticizing their policies. But they're sure as hell making it a lot easier for a paranoid Republican administration to do it -- not to mention loose cannon FBI agents who simply want to ignore the rules. In a democracy, the way it's supposed to work is, we have laws that will protect us even when the bad guys are in charge:

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

[...] Many Internet service providers have resisted the government's demands to turn over electronic records, arguing that surveillance law as written does not allow them to do so, industry lawyers say. One senior administration government official, who would discuss the proposed change only on condition of anonymity, countered that "most" Internet or e-mail providers do turn over such data.

To critics, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. The proposal is "incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting," said Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel.

Settle in, because it looks like it will be a long hot summer debate about taxing and spending. We're already hearing the old saws from Republicans about how we spend too much, tax cuts don't increase the deficit, and we're saddling our children and grandchildren with enormous, horrible debt that will surely bankrupt them before they're even born.

It isn't like we haven't all heard this before, or like we don't hear it over and over, but this time perhaps we could start by shattering myths. One begging to be shattered is this idea that we must limit spending to a certain percentage of GDP in order to be "fiscally solvent".

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains:

Simply put, aiming to stabilize the budget at the recent historical spending average of 21 percent of GDP might be appropriate for the years ahead if the age distribution of the population remained the same as it was in recent decades; if health care costs grew no faster than the economy; if Medicare had no drug benefit; if we were willing to leave more than 30 million Americans without health coverage; if there were no terrorist threats and hence no need for homeland security spending; if no wounded veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan needed medical care and income support; and if decisions and events over the last decade had not nearly doubled the national debt as a share of GDP. But that’s not the world in which we live, and it’s not the target at which we should aim.

This report hits at the heart of why today's spending debate is such a non-starter: Historically, we have not had revenues that come close to what is needed to maintain public services and programs. (As an aside: the unspoken but clear message is that taxes should NEVER have been cut in the first place)

The historical record shows a persistent mismatch between revenues and the funding needed for public services. Revenues at the 40-year average — a little over 18 percent of GDP — would not have balanced the budget in any of the last 40 years. The only balanced budgets over this period occurred from 1998 through 2001, years in which revenues were markedly above the 40-year average. Revenues in these years were in the 20-to-21-percent-of-GDP range. As a result of this mismatch between revenues and funding needs, the government ran deficits that averaged 2.6 percent of GDP over the past 40 years.

In case that wasn't clear enough, let me make it clearer: Bill Clinton's budget put us on the path to fiscal solvency without cutting services, and George Bush's tax cuts derailed it. To further complicate the picture, the whole "Homeland Security" spending package along with a couple of wars finished the job.

Indeed, the CBPP report confirms this, and urges policymakers to rethink how they approach Federal debt and spending.

The bottom line is that arbitrary numerical targets for federal spending and revenues are misguided. Although history provides useful information and guidance, it should not be a straitjacket. What will be appropriate in 2020, 2030, or 2050 is not necessarily the same as in 1970 or 1980. Budgetary policies, like other policies, must respond to changing circumstances. “As our cause is new,” wrote Abraham Lincoln, “so we must think anew, and act anew.”

And this:

In our view, the aging of the population, the continued importance of Social Security and Medicare, the growth in federal responsibilities in recent years in areas such as homeland security, and rising health care costs justify higher levels of federal spending and revenues over the next 40 years than over the past four decades.

Let the Congress have ears to hear.